readers will be able to experience the phenomenon that became the inspiration for a blockbuster movie, a hit TV show, and a popular manga. A national sensation that touched over three million readers, Kyoichi Katayama brought innocent love and romance to the forefront of Japan's ultra-hip mass market. Affectionately known as "Sekachu" in Japan, Katayama's novel depects a sweet high school romance between an average guy and a popular girl. But tragedy ensues when the girl falls ill with leukemia. A bittersweet tale of young love, enduring devotion, and heartbreaking loss, socrates in Love is a story to cherish and nurture.

    Centering her story around the fictional family of Ling Tan, Buck recreates the heart wrenching devastation that war inflicted on these gentle innocent people. Ling Tan and his family were simple farmers living in peaceful isolation. Western technology, and likewise the machinery of war, were unknown in these outlying regions of China. And even though literacy was on the rise among the younger generations, the alarming reports of foreign aggression went largely ignored. For the peasants, the transition from one political ruler to another was virtually inconsequential; life revolved around their farms and their villages. Patriotism was not the concept of loving and defending a country; their land was their country. But as the invasion moves inland and the roads are jammed with survivors fleeing west, Ling Tan and his neighbors are forced to face the harsh realities of war. "Days passed and with the rulers gone the people held themselves the more steadfast knowing that they and they alone were left to stand against the enemy and upon each man himself now depended what would happen. So it had happened again and again in other times, for rulers anywhere are always the first to fly, and the people must stay behind to be steadfast.

    Both entertaining and incisive, SHOGUN is a stunningly dramatic re-creation of a very different world.Starting with his shipwreck on this most alien of shores, the novel charts Blackthorne's rise from the status of reviled foreigner up to the heights of trusted advisor and eventually, Samurai. All as civil war looms over the fragile country.

    A retired doctor, for example, is forced to confront the horrific moral consequences of his wartime actions. An elderly woman subjects herself to an interview, gradually revealing a fifty-year old murder and its shattering aftermath. And in the last days of a doomed war, a prodigal son who enlisted against his parents' wishes survives the American invasion of his island outpost, only to be asked for a sacrifice more daunting than any he imagined.

    I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.Plagued by a maddening anxiety, the terrible disconnect between his own concept of happiness and the joy of the rest of the world, Yozo Oba plays the clown in his dissolute life, holding up a mask for those around him as he spirals ever downward, locked arm-in-arm with death.Osamu Dazai’s immortal—and supposedly autobiographical—work of Japanese literature, is perfectly adapted here into a manga by Junji Ito. The imagery wrenches open the text of the novel one line at a time to sublimate Yozo’s mental landscape into something even more delicate and grotesque. This is the ultimate in art by Ito, proof that nothing can surpass the terror of the human psyche.

    It is the story of Yuasa Jōji, a famous artist who returns to Japan after many years in Paris. Once back in Tokyo, he receives love letters from a fervent young woman who begs him to meet her--importunings that start him on a bizarre round of romantic adventures.Writing here at the height of her powers, one of Japan's foremost women writers explores both the folly and the inevitability of human passion, leading the reader to a startling revelation of how lives can be destroyed by the compulsions of love.

    Chikamatsu is thought to have written the first major tragedies about the common man. This edition of four of his most important plays includes three popular domestic dramas and one history play. Chikamatsu's domestic dramas are accurate reflections of Japanese society at the time: his characters are samurai, farmers, merchants, and prostitutes who speak colloquially, and who people the shops, streets, teahouses, and brothels that constituted their daily environment. The heroes and heroines of these plays gain their tragic stature from their conflicts with society. "The Love Suicides at Sonezaki" and "The Love Suicides at Amijima" became so popular that they actually initiated a vogue for love suicides, both in life and onstage. Donald Keene's translation of the original text is presented here with an introduction and a new preface to aid readers in their comprehension and enjoyment of the plays.PrefaceIntroductionThe Love Suicides at Sonezaki (Sonezaki Shinju)The Battles of Coxinga (Kokusenya Kassen)The Uprooted Pine (Nebiki No Kadomatsu)The Love Suicides at Amijima (Shinju ten no Amijima)Appendix 1: A Note on Prostitution in Chikamatsu's PlaysApendix 2: Contemporary Puppet Performances of Chikamatsu's PlaysBibliography

    Setsuko and Naomi, classmates and friends living in a bombed-out city, sort through their individual beliefs: "two girls, seventeen and fifteen at their next birthday, and though their real lives had yet to begin they were talking like old folk lost in reminiscences. Or perhaps this was their old age, for the hour of their death was near, as they well knew." Everyone close to Setsuko is dead as a result of the war, yet she believes in the war unquestioningly and writes letters to soldiers on the front urging them to fight to the finish. Naomi's father is imprisoned because of his anti-war beliefs and she struggles to find justification for war. Over the course of the novel, through flashbacks that occur within sentences or paragraphs, the horrors of the war are brought painfully to life and each young woman questions her own stand. Who is more patriotic? What are the rules of war when it is in your front yard? Shizuko Go, herself a survivor of the bombing of Yokohama, has written a devastating and important novel. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith

    Arguably the central genre of Japanese literature, the 31-syllable lyric made up the great majority of Japanese poetry from the ninth to the nineteenth century and was the inspiration for such poetry as haiku and renga. Tanka has begun to attract considerable attention in North America in recent years. Modern Japanese Tanka is the first comprehensive collection available in English.Tanka retains the aesthetic sensibilities that circumscribe Japanese culture, but just as Japan has changed during this tumultuous century, tanka has undergone equally radical shifts. Responding to artistic and social movements of the West, tanka has incorporated influences ranging from Marxism to Avant-Garde.Modern Japanese Tanka includes four hundred poems by twenty of Japan's most renowned poets who have made major contributions to the hisotry of tanka in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With his graceful, eloquent translations, Makoto Ueda captures the distinct voices of these individual poets, providing biographical sketches of each as well as transliterating Japanese text below each poem. His introduction gives an excellent overview of the development of tanka in the last one hundred years.Tracing the contemporary tanka tradition from Yosana Tekkan in the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth-century poetry of such writers as Taware Machi, Modern Japanese Tankselegantly conveys an authentic sense of Japanese lyric to a Western audience.

    After two centuries of isolation, Japan has been forced to open its doors to the West, igniting a clash of cultures and generations. And as foreign ships threaten to rain destruction on the Shogun’s castle in Edo, a small group of American missionaries has chosen this time to spread the word of their God. Among them, Emily Gibson, a woman seeking redemption from a tormented past, and Matthew Stark, a cold-eyed killer with one more death on his mind. Neither realizes that their future in Japan has already been foreseen. For a young nobleman, Lord Genji, has dreamt that his life will be saved by an outsider in the New Year. Widely reviled as a dilettante, Lord Genji has one weapon with which to inspire awe. In his family, one in every generation is said to have the gift of prophecy. And what Lord Genji sees has struck fear in many around him. As the Shogun’s secret police chief plots Genji’s death--and the utter destruction of his entire clan--the young and untried lord must prove that he is more than the handsome womanizer of legend, famed lover of Edo’s most celebrated geisha, Lady Heiko, and that his prophetic powers are no mere fairy tale. Forced to escape from Edo and flee to his ancestral stronghold, the spectacular Cloud of Sparrows Castle, Genji joins his fate with Emily and Stark, unaware of the dark forces that drive them. Together with Genji’s uncle, Lord Shigeru, a legendary swordsman knee-deep in the blood of his own kin, and the enigmatic Lady Heiko, the unlikely band embarks on a harrowing journey through a landscape bristling with danger--to prepare for a final battle.Here, on a snowscape stained with blood, horror will mix with wonder, secrets will unravel, and love will duel with vengeance--as East and West, flesh and spirit, past and future, collide in ways no one--least of all Genji--could have imagined.

    As he starts digging deeper and deeper into the mystery of her sudden reappearance, he discovers a secret that is somehow linked to the past...and the future. Is it possible to experience first love for a second time? Without question, the answer is yes!

    But soon after her arrival, Mary falls into an adulterous affair with a young Japanese nobleman, scandalizing the British community. Casting her out of the European community, her compatriots tear her away from her small daughter. A woman abandoned and alone, Mary learns to survive over forty tumultuous years in Asia, including two world wars and the cataclysmic Tokyo earthquake of 1923.A bestseller in England, this bittersweet story of love and betrayal in the Far East is the source of the Masterpiece Theatre miniseries.

    But after three divorces, she ran away to make a life for herself in one of the largest cities in the world: Edo.In the book we experience the drama and excitement of Edo just prior to the arrival of American Commodore Perry’s fleet, which transformed Japan. During this pivotal moment in Japanese history, Tsuneno bounces from tenement to tenement, marries a masterless samurai, and eventually enters the service of a famous city magistrate. Tsuneno’s life provides a window into 19th-century Japanese culture—and a rare view of an extraordinary woman who sacrificed her family and her reputation to make a new life for herself, in defiance of social conventions.

    Tsuyoshi Manase learned his first geology lesson from a dying soldier in a cave at the end of World War II. The soldier, a corporal, is skeletal, his eyes swarming with maggots, but his voice is low and steady, as he tells Manase of how a small pebble contains the Earth's history in its ephemeral matter. When the war ends, Manase returns home and opens a bookstore. He marries, and becomes the father of two sons. But what consoles him the most is the collecting of stones, and he enjoys his quiet life. That is until horrible violence visits his family and Manase must face his past in order to survive the nightmares of the present. A darkly compelling tale of one man's struggle against his own memories, The Stones Cry Out is a formidable debut novel from an international writer with an unusually penetrating voice.

    Beginning with Adams’s startling letter to the East India Company in 1611—more than a decade after he’d arrived in Japan—Samurai William chronicles the first foray by the Westinto that mysterious closed-off land. Drawing upon the journals and letters of Adams as well as the other Englishmen who came looking for him, Samurai William presents a unique glimpse of Japan before it once again closed itself off from the worldfor another two hundred years.