Shiokari Pass


Ayako Miura - 1968
    The hero of this novel is the young and idealistic Nobuo Nagano, who finds himself forced to make a heart-rending decision, when he must choose between his childhood sweetheart, Fujiko, and his newly found Christian faith. Set in Hokkaido at the turn of the nineteenth century, when for the first time Western culture and ideas were beginning to challenge Japan's long-held traditions, Shiokari Pass takes an intriguing look at Japanese life and thought of a hundred years ago. Filled with drama and featuring a spectacular climax amidst the snows of Hokkaido, the book was a bestseller in Japanese and a successful motion picture as well. Based on the life of a high-ranking railway employee who was revered for his humanitarian deeds, Shiokari Pass offers a revealing glimpse of the long, hard road traveled by Japanese Christians.

Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary, Vol. 1


Alexander Schmidt - 1874
    The lifetime work of Professor Alexander Schmidt of Königsberg, this book has long been the indispensable companion for every person seriously interested in Shakespeare, Renaissance poetry and prose of any sort, or English literature. It is really two important books in one.Schmidt’s set contains every single word that Shakespeare used, not simply words that have changed their meaning since the seventeenth century, but every word in all the accepted plays and the poems. Covering both quartos and folios, it carefully distinguishes between shades of meaning for each word and provides exact definitions, plus governing phrases and locations, down to the numbered line of the Cambridge edition of Shakespeare. There is no other word dictionary comparable to this work.Even more useful to the general reader, however, is the incredible wealth of exact quotations. Arranged under the words of the quotation itself (hence no need to consult confusing subject classifications) are more than 50,000 exact quotations. Each is precisely located, so that you can easily refer back to the plays or poems themselves, if you wish context.Other features helpful to the scholar are appendixes on basic grammatical observations, a glossary of provincialisms, a list of words and sentences taken from foreign languages, a list of words that form the latter part of word-combinations. This third edition features a supplement with new findings.

Remote Control


Kōtarō Isaka - 2007
    Two years ago he achieved brief notoriety for rescuing a local actress from a robbery attempt while making a delivery to her apartment. Now he is back in the spotlight - this time as the main suspect in the assassination of a newly elected prime minster who had come to Sendai for a hometown victory parade. Set in a near-future Japan modeled on the United States, Remote Control follows Aoyagi on a forty-eight-hour chase, in a dramatic retelling of the Kennedy killing with Aoyagi in the role of a framed Lee Harvey Oswald. A massive manhunt is underway. As Aoyagi runs, he must negotiate trigger-happy law enforcement and Security Pods set up throughout the city to monitor cell-phone and email transmissions and keep a photo record of street traffic. Can he discover why he has been set up and who is responsible? Can he find the real assassin and prove to the world his innocence - amidst media pronouncements of his guilt - before the conspirators take him out? Isaka's style and worldview are such that he is often compared to Haruki Murakami; but he defies an easy label as a writer, with a voice, a sense of humor, and an imagination that are truly unique. Now, with this excellent translation by Stephen Snyder, readers everywhere can enjoy one of Japan's finest literary talents. Winner of the Shugoro Yamamoto Prize and the Japan Booksellers' Prize No. 1 in Japan's 2009 "This Mystery is Amazing " rankings

The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanshichi: Detective Stories of Old Edo


Kidō Okamoto - 1937
    . . . So reminisces old Hanshichi in a story from one of Japan's most beloved works of popular literature, Hanshichi torimonocho. Told through the eyes of a street-smart detective, Okamoto Kido's best-known work inaugurated the historical detective genre in Japan, spawning stage, radio, movie, and television adaptations as well as countless imitations. This selection of fourteen stories, translated into English for the first time, provides a fascinating glimpse of life in feudal Edo (later Tokyo) and rare insight into the development of the fledgling Japanese crime novel.Once viewed as an exclusively modern genre derivative of Western fiction, crime fiction and its place in the Japanese popular imagination were forever changed by Kido's unsung Sherlock Holmes. These stories--still widely read today--are crucial to our understanding of modern Japan and its aspirations toward a literature that steps outside the shadow of the West to stand on its own.

Seascape With Sharks and Dancer


Don Nigro - 1985
    The play is set in a beach bungalow. The young man who lives there has pulled a lost young woman from the ocean. Soon, she finds herself trapped in his life and torn between her need to come to rest somewhere and her certainty that all human relationships turn eventually into nightmares. The struggle between his tolerant and gently ironic approach to life and her strategy of suspicion and attack becomes a kind of war about love and creation which neither can afford to lose. This is an offbeat, wonderful love story. Note: The play contains a wealth of excellent monologue and scene material.

As Bees in Honey Drown


Douglas Carter Beane - 1998
    Book annotation not available for this title.

The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World


Laura Imai Messina - 2020
    Yui struggles to continue on, alone with her pain. Then, one day she hears about a man who has an old disused telephone booth in his garden. There, those who have lost loved ones find the strength to speak to them and begin to come to terms with their grief. As news of the phone booth spreads, people travel to it from miles around. Soon Yui makes her own pilgrimage to the phone booth, too. But once there she cannot bring herself to speak into the receiver. Instead she finds Takeshi, a bereaved husband whose own daughter has stopped talking in the wake of her mother’s death. Simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming, The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World is the signpost pointing to the healing that can come after.

The Son


Florian Zeller - 2018
    Believe me. I don't know what's happened, but something has. He's changed. He . . . And I'm wondering if . . . To be absolutely honest with you . . . I'm even wondering if . . . Nicolas, just two years ago a smiling boy, is going through a difficult phase after his parents' divorce. He's listless, skipping classes, lying. He believes moving in with his father and his new family may help. And a different school, a fresh start. When he doesn't feel comfortable there, when he senses he isn't wanted, he decides that going back to his mother's may be the answer. But at some point, options are going to dry up. And then what?I'm telling you. I don't understand what's happening to me. Florian Zeller's The Son forms the final part in a trilogy with The Mother and The Father, all of which are translated by Christopher Hampton. The Son premieres at the Kiln Theatre, London, in February 2019.

The Travelling Cat Chronicles


Hiro Arikawa - 2012
    He is not sure where he's going or why, but it means that he gets to sit in the front seat of a silver van with his beloved owner, Satoru. Side by side, they cruise around Japan through the changing seasons, visiting Satoru's old friends. He meets Yoshimine, the brusque and unsentimental farmer for whom cats are just ratters; Sugi and Chikako, the warm-hearted couple who run a pet-friendly B&B; and Kosuke, the mournful husband whose cat-loving wife has just left him. There's even a very special dog who forces Nana to reassess his disdain for the canine species. But what is the purpose of this road trip? And why is everyone so interested in Nana? Nana does not know and Satoru won't say. But when Nana finally works it out, his small heart will break...

The Sugar Syndrome


Lucy Prebble - 2003
    She's just 17, hates her parents, skives college and prefers life in the chatrooms. What she's looking for is someone honest and direct. Instead she finds Tim, a man twice her age, who thinks she is 11 and a boy.What seems at first to be a case of crossed wires, ends up as an unlikely, and unsettling friendship between the two, which culminates in a shocking, and morally challenging revelation.

In the Heart of America and Other Plays


Naomi Wallace - 2000
    Her characters suffer and survive against the enormous weight of the times with a dignity that inspires. Her work challenges the audience and reader to reexamine the conflicts and meaning of our everyday lives through her singular, poetic imagery and language.Includes: One Flea SpareIn the Heart of AmericaSlaughter CityThe War BoysThe Trestle at Pope's Creek

Man Equals Man: And the Elephant Calf


Bertolt Brecht - 1926
    Using Kiplingesque imagery, Brecht explores personality as something that can be dismantled and reassembled like a machine, in a parable that the critic Walter Kerr credited with a "curious foreshadowing of the art of brainwashing." This edition also includes The Elephant Calf, which was originally part of the main play. This translation by Gerhard Nellhaus (and by Brecht himself, who made his own English version of the first scene) has been equipped by the editors, John Willett and Ralph Manheim, with Brecht's own notes and relevant texts as well as with an extensive editorial commentary on the genesis and variant versions of the play.

A Man


Keiichirō Hirano - 2018
    With a midlife crisis looming, Kido’s life is upended by the reemergence of a former client, Rié Takemoto. She wants Kido to investigate a dead man—her recently deceased husband, Daisuké. Upon his death she discovered that he’d been living a lie. His name, his past, his entire identity belonged to someone else, a total stranger. The investigation draws Kido into two intriguing mysteries: finding out who Rié’s husband really was and discovering more about the man he pretended to be. Soon, with each new revelation, Kido will come to share the obsession with—and the lure of—erasing one life to create a new one.In A Man, winner of Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Prize for Literature, Keiichiro Hirano explores the search for identity, the ambiguity of memory, the legacies with which we live and die, and the reconciliation of who you hoped to be with who you’ve actually become.

Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction: An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories


Holly ThompsonLeza Lowitz - 2012
    Authors from Japan and around the world have contributed works of fiction set in or related to Japan. Young adult English-language readers will be able to connect with their Japanese counterparts through stories of contemporary Japanese teens, ninja and yokai teens, folklore teens, mixed-heritage teens, and non-Japanese teens who call Japan home. Tales of friendship, mystery, love, ghosts, magic, science fiction, and history will propel readers to Japan past and present and to Japanese universes abroad.Portions of the proceeds of Tomo will be donated to the Japanese non-profit, HOPE FOR TOMORROW, to support ongoing relief efforts for teens in Japan.Contents:Shocks and tremors: Lost by Andrew FukudaShuya's commute by Liza DalbyHalf life by Deni Y BéchardKazoku by Tak ToyoshimaAftershocks by Ann Tashi SlaterFriends and enemies: Bad day for baseball by Graham SalisburyHalf a heart by Mariko NagaiThe bridge to Lillooet by Trevor KewBlue shells by Naoko Awa, translated by Toshiya KameiBorne by the wind by Charles De WolfGhosts and spirits: The ghost who came to breakfast by Alan GratzHouse of trust by Sachiko Kashiwaba, translated by Avery Fischer UdagawaStaring at the Haiku by John Paul CattonKodama by Debbie Ridpath OhiWhere the silver droplets fall by transcribed and translated from Ainu into Japanese by Yukie Chiri, translated and illustrated by Deborah DavidsonPowers and feats: Yamada-san's toaster by Kelly LuceJet black and the ninja wind by Leza Lowitz and Shogo OketaniHachiro by Ryusuke Saito, translated by Sako IkegamiThe lost property office by Marji NapperAnton and Kiyoshime by Fumio Takano, translated by Hart LarrabeeTalents and curses: Love right on the yesterday by Wendy Nelson TokunagaThe dragon and the poet by Kenji Miyazawa, translated by Misa Dikengil LindbergJust wan-derful by Louise George KittakaIchinichi on the Yamanote by Claire DawnA song for Benzaiten by Catherine Rose torresInsiders and outsiders: Fleecy clouds by Arie Nashiya, translated by Juliet Winters CarpenterThe zodiac tree by Thersa MatsuuraOne by Sarah OgawaLove letter by Megumi Fujino, translated by Lynne E. RiggsSigns by Kaitlin StainbrookWings on the wind by Yuichi Kimura, translated by Alexander O. SmithFamilies and connections: The law of gravity by Yuko Katakawa, translated by Deborah IwabuchiThe mountain drum by Chloë DalbyPaper lanterns by Jennifer Fumiko CahillI hate Harajuku girls by Katrina Toshiko Grigg-SaitoPeace on earth by Suzanne Kamata

Dealer's Choice


Patrick Marber - 1995
    It won the 1995 Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy and, the Writers' Guild for Best West End Play."An exceptionally accomplished first play . . . though I know nothing about poker, I testify to the compulsive grip this play exerts and to the accumulation of meanings it ignites in your head."—Financial Times"Patrick Marber's enthralling close-up of the demons which drive compulsive gamblers is among the finest new plays in many a year."—Daily Mail