Here is the perfect introduction to contemporary Japanese fiction. Featuring many stories appearing in English for the first time, this collection, with parallel translations, offers students at all levels the opportunity to enjoy a wide range of contemporary literature without having to constantly consult a dictionary. Richly diverse in themes and styles, the stories are by well-known writers-like Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto-as well as by emerging voices. Complete with notes, these selections make excellent reading in either language.

    The spellbinding world of Hiromi Kawakami; the hair-raising horror of Otsuichi; the haunting, poignant prose of Banana Yoshimoto; even the poetic word-play of Yoko Tawada whatever a readers taste, he or she is sure to find something of interest and value in this book, suitable for students at the intermediate level and above. As in real Japanese novels, the text on each page runs from top to bottom and from right to left. Each double-page spread features translations of all the difficult passages. In the back of the book, moreover, is a built-in Japanese-English learners dictionary and a notes section covering issues of nuance, usage, grammar and culture that come up in each story. Best of all, the books comes with a free audio CD containing narrations of the stories, performed by a professional voice actress.

    An FBI agent falls in love with a robot built for a suicide mission. A young woman unintentionally cheats on her husband when she is transformed, nightly, into a deer. Two strangers become lovers and find themselves somehow responsible for the resurrection of a dog. A woman tries to start her life anew after the loss of a child but cannot help riddling that new life with lies. Thirteen pregnant teenagers develop a strange relationship with the Founding Fathers of American history. A lonely woman’s fertility treatments become the stuff of science fiction.Magic intrudes. Technology betrays and disappoints. Infidelities lead us beyond the usual conflict. Our bodies change, reproduce, decay, and surprise. With her characteristic unguarded gaze and offbeat humor, Hunt has conjured stories that urge an understanding of youth and mortality, magnification and loss, and hold out the hope that we can know one another more deeply or at least stand side by side to observe the mystery of the world.

    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...

    Despite her hopes for a quieter, less hectic life, she finds she can't escape her involvement in the city's creative, intellectual and political circles.Oriku finds herself the subject of unanticipated attention, because along with her passion for music, theater and storytelling, she offers her own invaluable talents: a vibrant appreciation of life, an unparalleled gift for hospitality, and the maturity and sensitivity necessary to instruct young people in the all-important arts of love. Her independent thinking and love of Tokyo's traditions offer a unique perspective on the surprising complexity and contradictions of the Japanese culture of the era.Now available in English for the first time, Japan's beloved Mistress Oriku is filled with clear-eyed nostalgia for the vanished—and entirely captivating—world of old Tokyo."They say the pleasures you taste first in middle age are like rain that starts later in the day."

    As Yuki descends deeper and deeper into her own psyche, she catches glimpses of her true nature.A brisk, bristling story of survivor's guilt, treacherous sex, and unexpected redemption, Outlet opens the door to a spiritual dimension that is both new and age-old. The climax is mind-blowing.

    . . In these pages, you will find the lives of all of us” (Japan Times).Sexually explicit and searingly honest, So We Look to the Sky is a novel told in five linked stories that begin with an affair between a student and a woman ten years his senior, who picks him up for cosplay sex at a comics convention. Their scandalous liaison, which the woman's husband makes public by posting secretly taped video online, frames all of the stories, but each explores a different aspect of the life passages and hardships ordinary people face. A teenager experimenting with sex and then, perhaps, experiencing love and loss; a young, anime-obsessed wife bullied by her mother-in-law to produce the child she and her husband cannot conceive; a high-school girl, spurned by the student, realizing that being cute and fertile is all others expect of her; the student's best friend, who lives in the projects and is left alone to support and care for his voracious senile grandmother; and the student's mother, a divorced single parent and midwife, who guides women bringing new life into this world and must rescue her son, crushed by the twin blows of public humiliation and loss, from giving up on his own.          Narrating each story in the distinctive voice of its protagonist, Misumi Kubo weaves themes including the female body, the roles women are assigned by society, and the bullying and social pressures that leave young people feeling burdened and helpless into a profoundly original novel that lingers in the mind for its affirmation of the raw, unquellable force of life.

    Alone in his apartment, he reads stories aloud to the point he has them memorized. Sometimes he fantasizes that he wrote them. Sometimes, when they’re his very favorite stories, he’ll fantasize about reading them in front of an audience and taking credit for them. The audience in these fantasies always loves him and gives him the respect he deserves.David Sedaris didn’t write the stories in Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules . But he did read them. And he liked them enough to hand pick them for this collection of short fiction. Featuring such notable writers as Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean Thompson, and Tobias Wolff, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules includes some of the most influential and talented short story writers, contemporary and classic.Perfect for fans who suffer from Sedaris fever, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules will tide them over and provide relief.2 hrs 56 mins

    This collection shows the qualities that make Japanese literature among the world's finest.Including "Under Reconstruction," considered to be the first modern Japanese short story, this book presents the short stories of Japan as among the world's most satisfying.Edited by Ivan Morris, a recognized authority on Japanese literature, Modern Japanese Stories: An Anthology is a volume of the highest quality and fidelity.

    In these ten bracingly transgressive tales, all her gifts of characterisation and observation are fully engaged, ushering concealed horrors into the light. Childhood cruelty is played out behind the bushes in 'Comma'; nurses clash in 'Harley Street' over something more than professional differences; and in the title story, staying in for the plumber turns into an ambiguous and potentially deadly waiting game.Whether set in a claustrophobic Saudi Arabian flat or on a precarious mountain road on a Greek island, these stories share an insight into the darkest recesses of the spirit. Displaying all of Mantel's unmistakable style and wit, they reveal a great writer at the peak of her powers.

    Arranged Marriage, her first collection of stories, spent five weeks on the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list and garnered critical acclaim that would have been extraordinary for even a more established author.For the young girls and women brought to life in these stories, the possibility of change, of starting anew, is both as terrifying and filled with promise as the ocean that separates them from their homes in India. From the story of a young bride whose fairy-tale vision of California is shattered when her husband is murdered and she must face the future on her own, to a proud middle-aged divorced woman determined to succeed in San Francisco, Divakaruni's award-winning poetry fuses here with prose for the first time to create eleven devastating portraits of women on the verge of an unforgettable transformation.

    The discover that upon mating, both the male and female of the species died. The professors try to clone the winged mice without success, so they breed the remaining pair in captivity, noting the procedure, which includes a vibration of the creatures' wings, what appeared to be kissing, and the shedding of tears--composed of the same substance as their blood--until their eventual death.

    1008 at the height of the Heian period, Lady Sarashina (as she is known) probably wrote most of her work towards the end of her life, long after the events described. Thwarted and saddened by the real world with all its deaths and partings and frustrations, Lady Sarashina protected herself by a barrier of fantasy and so escaped from harsh reality into a rosier more congenial realm. She presents her vision of the world in beautiful prose, the sentences flowing along smoothly so that we feel we are watching a magnificent scroll being slowly unrolled.'It is like seeing a garden at night in which certain parts are lit up so brightly that we can distinguish each blade of grass, each minute insect, each nuance of colour, while the rest of the garden and the tidal wave that threatens it remain in darkness'--Ivan Morris

    Some are "Momotaro, "The Son of a Peach", "The Jellyfish and the Monkey", "The Mirror of Matsuyama", "The Bamboo Cutter and the Moon Child", "The Stones of Five Colors and the Empress Jokwa."

    Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction—the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these things to one another—Mieko Kanai creates a reality where nothing is certain, and where a little boy going out to run errands for his mother might find that he’s an adult, and his mother long dead, at the end of a single train ride. Using precise language to describe dreamlike plots owing as much to Kafka and Barthelme as to Kenzaburō Ōe and the long tradition of the Japanese folktale of the macabre, The Word Book is an unforgettable voyage to absurd, hilarious, and terrifying locales, and is the English-language debut for one of the greatest and most interesting Japanese writers working today.