His reactionary politics and the spectacular nature of his death had so profoundly impacted Japanese society that images associated with the event were never publicly shown.In the months prior to the November incident, he enlisted Kishin Shinoyama to create a photographic, radical work of fiction, a photo essay on the death of the Japanese "everyman." In images often suffused with militarism and eroticism, a parade of men, including a sailor, a construction worker, a fisherman, and a soldier, are shown meeting grisly, dramatic ends.Published for the very first time, these stylized images of men dying alone serve as prologues to the real-world culmination of Mishima's pursuit of total art. Locked in a performance with one inescapable end, Mishima offered his own body as its final act.With texts by Mishima and his closest intimates and first-person reminiscences of his final moments, this book promises to be an unprecedented interrogation on the nature of performance and the role of artist as actor, provocateur, and revolutionary.

    As a reporter he covered domestic development and overseas wars, while also marrying a traditional geisha, eventually becoming a playwright and author. In addition to a number of well-received plays, he also penned more than fifty horror stories over a roughly ten-year period starting in the mid-1920s. Just prior to this period, the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 destroyed almost everything in Tokyo that remained from the Edo era, and Japanese horror itself was transitioning from the traditional uncanny stories to more modern horror structures.While many of Kidō’s stories are retellings of tales from China and other nations, he also drew on a diverse range of traditions, including the heritage of Edo-era storytellers such as Ueda Akinari and Asai Ryōi, to produce a dazzling array of work covering the entire spectrum from time-honored ghost tropes to modern horror. The majority of his stories were collected in four volumes: Seiadō kidan (1926), Kindai iyō hen (1926), Iyō hen (1933), and Kaijū (1936).Kidō remains popular for his elegant, low-key style, subtly introducing the “other” into the background, and raising the specter of the uncanny indirectly and often indistinctly. His fiction spans an enormous range of material, much of it dealing with the uncanny, and as a pioneer in the field his work formed the foundation for the new generation of Japanese authors emerging in post-Restoration literature.This selection presents a dozen of his best stories: pieces which remain in print almost a century later, and continue to enchant readers—and writers—today. Finally, English-reading audiences can enjoy his strange visions as well.Contents The Kiso Traveler (木曽の旅人) The Green Frog God (青蛙神) Tone Crossing (利根の渡) The Monkey’s Eyes (猿の眼) The Snake Spirit (蛇精) The Clear-Water Well (清水の井) Crabs (蟹) The One-Legged Woman (一本足の女) Here Lies a Flute (笛塚) The Shadow-Stepping Game (影を踏まれた女) The White-Haired Demon (白髪鬼) The Man Cursed by an Eel (鰻に呪われた男)

    This brief poem on emptiness has exerted immense influence throughout Asia since the seventh century and is woven into the fabric of daily life. Yet even though it rivals the teachings of Laozi and Confucius in importance, this ancient Buddhist scripture remains barely known in the West. During the many years he has spent living in Japan, Alex Kerr has been on a quest after the secrets of the Heart Sutra. Travelling from Japan, Korea, and China, to India, Mongolia, Tibet and Vietnam, this book brings together Buddhist teaching, talks with friends and mentors, and acute cultural insights to probe the universe of thought contained within this short but intense philosophical work.'Marvellous ... a life's work ... a brilliant literary form, weaving reflections of the sutra with those on Alex's own magical mystery tour' Alexandra Munroe, Asian Art scholar and curator

    One of CLAMP’s most ambitious works — part AKIRA, part Metropolis — CLOVER features nearly 500 pages of manga.Su was born into a bleak future, where the military keeps tight control over the few children born with magical abilities — known as “Clovers.” The Clovers are forcibly tattooed with a symbol that indicates their potential power, and Su is the only four-leaf Clover in the world. Kept locked away in isolation her whole life, Su longs to find happiness in the outside world. An agent named Kazuhiko appears to help grant Su’s wish, but he soon realizes that there is more to the mysterious girl than meets the eye…CLAMP’s most daring science-fiction work, CLOVER’s art-deco cyberpunk aesthetic is just as fresh and exciting today as it was twenty years ago. Featuring the entire story in a newly-revised translation; remastered art and lettering; a striking cover; and over 20 pages of color art, this is a great collectible for CLAMP fans, and the perfect way to get to know CLOVER for the first time.

    

    

    The present work focuses on the years in which bourgeois culture first emerged in Japan, telling the story of the rising commoner arts of Kamigata, or the “Upper Regions” of Kyoto and Osaka, which harkened back to Japan’s middle ages even as they rebelled against and competed with that earlier era. Both cities prided themselves on being models and trendsetters in all cultural matters, whether arts, crafts, books, or food. The volume also shows how elements of popular arts that germinated during this period ripened into the full-blown consumer culture of the late-Edo period. The tendency to imagine Japan’s modernity as a creation of Western influence since the mid-nineteenth century is still strong, particularly outside Japan studies. A Kamigata Anthology challenges such assumptions by illustrating the flourishing phenomenon of Japan’s movement into its own modernity through a selection of the best examples from the period, including popular genres such as haikai poetry, handmade picture scrolls, travel guidebooks, kabuki and joruri plays, prose narratives of contemporary life, and jokes told by professional entertainers. Well illustrated with prints from popular books of the time and hand scrolls and standing screens containing poems and commentaries, the entertaining and vibrant translations put a spotlight on texts currently unavailable in English.

    At once grotesque and vertiginous, this later collection interweaves mythologies, language, sexuality and place into a genre-busting narrative of what it is to be a migrant.

    As long as you didn't mind the thing that came down from the woods at night...A video remembered by all, yet nobody could agree on the details. Did it ever really exist, or was something else going on?Bankai: Baffling Japanese Internet Mysteries delves into 26 horrifying, mind-bending, and often downright befuddling mysteries that sprang to life on the Japanese internet. From terrifying real-time experiences to long lost memories, urban legends in the making to real life crimes, these mysteries have confused, amused, and terrified for years. Think you've heard it all? You haven't seen anything yet.Hit that Buy Now button and dig into a brand new set of mysteries you've never seen before.

    Before the dropping of the atomic bombs, conventional bombing had killed approximately 400,000 Germans and 330,00 Japanese, the vast majority civilians. Fully 83,000 British, Commonwealth, and American airmen lost their lives, all but some 3,000 over Germany.Two-thirds of Germans who died under the bombs did so in 1944 and 1945, and in the last year of the war cities with little military were obliterated. In Japan, American bombers destroyed all but three major Japanese cities, and the people in them, after March 1945. These raids occurred, in other words, when Allied victory was assured and when precision bombing techniques were far more advanced than they were earlier in the war.Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan asks why. Based on extensive archival sources, interviews with bombing survivors, airmen, and published first-hand accounts, the book looks at the bombing campaign from an avowedly human perspective - Allied, German and Japanese. It recreates the experience of living through the death of a city. It presents the complex personalities of the senior airmen, and explores why bombing campaigns that seem so excessive seventy-five years later seemed reasonable, to many, at the time. It explains why those campaigns became so murderous so late in the war. And it asks, with the full benefits of time's fullness, whether it was all worth it.