Two of its poems were removed on order of the Ministry of the Interior for “disturbing social customs.” Along with the entirety of Howling, this volume includes all of Blue Cat, Hagiwara's second major collection, together with Cat Town, a prose-poem novella, and a substantial selection of verse from the rest of his books, giving readers the full breadth and depth of this pioneering poet's extraordinary work.

    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.

    Any villains who got in his way were made to pay - often with their blood. But when his son died of a drugs overdose, the old-school mobster swore revenge on the new generation of Liverpool-based heroin and cocaine dealers. Against all odds, he turned undercover informant. The first gangster to fall foul of Grimes' change of heart was Curtis Warren, aka 'Cocky', the wealthiest and most successful criminal in British history. Grimes infiltrated his cocaine cartel and led Customs to the largest narcotics seizure on record, putting Warren in the dock in the drugs trial of the twentieth century. After turning his attention to heroin baron John Haase, Grimes rose to become the boss of the villain's notoriously bloodthirsty 'security firm' - a professional gang of racketeers addicted to cocaine, explosive violence and non-stop criminality. But as his net began to tighten, Grimes was confronted with the ultimate dilemma. He discovered his second son was now a rising star in the drugs business. The life-or-death question was: should he shop him or not?Powder Wars also reveals the secrets behind one of the most controversial episodes in British judicial history - how former Home Secretary Michael Howard was duped into granting John Haase a Royal Pardon.Today, Paul Grimes has a £100,000 contract on his head and is a real-life dead man walking. Powder Wars is a riveting account of modern gangsters told in brutal detail.

    murder." Private Investigator Callie Justice wants nothing to do with a client who she suspects is lying right to her face, but when that lie turns deadly, Callie is compelled to do what she does best ... seek justice. It should be easy, since the victim practically predicted her own death and all the clues point to one person ... or do they? Aided by her hunky robotic housekeeper who spends most of his time avoiding his household duties and her elderly amateur sleuth neighbors, Callie soon finds herself navigating a sea of lies in a twisty plot where no one can be trusted.

    They showed that “the modern”need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest.A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen,and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

    Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan is a bewitching look into a world that few Westerners saw in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a world that still endures in many ways in spite of the changes that have taken place during the modernization of Japan.

    Named a CBC Books Spring Reading List Title, a Shelf Life Books Book of the Month, a Toronto Life and Nikkei Voice summer read recommendation, and one of Daily Hive's 10 Essential Reads to Celebrate Asian Canadian Writers. On the eve of the new millennium, in a city in southern Japan that progress has forgotten, sixteen-year-old Anna Obata looks to the stars for solace. An outcast at school, and left to fend for herself and care for her increasingly senile grandfather at home, Anna copes with her loneliness by searching the night sky for answers. But everything changes the evening the Low Earth Orbit satellite (LEO for short) returns her gaze and sees her as no one else has before. After Leo is called down to Earth, he embarks on an extraordinary journey to understand his own humanity as well as the fragile mind of the young woman who called him into being. As Anna withdraws further into her own mysterious plans, he will be forced to question the limits of his devotion and the lengths he will go to protect her. Full of surprising imaginative leaps and yet grounded by a profound understanding of the human heart, Satellite Love is a brilliant and deeply moving meditation on loneliness, faith, and the yearning for meaning and connection. It is an unforgettable story about the indomitable power of the imagination and the mind's ability to heal itself, no matter the cost, no matter the odds.

    Written in 1965, this prize-winning work of historical fiction presents an alternative account of an imperial love affair narrated in the eleventh-century romance A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari). Both stories are set in the Heian court of the emperor Ichijo (980-1011) and tell of the ill-fated love between the emperor and his first consort, Teishi, and of the political rivalries that threaten to divide them. While the earlier work can be viewed largely as a panegyric to the all-powerful regent Fujiwara no Michinaga, Enchi's account emphasizes Teishi's nobility and devotion to the emperor and celebrates her moral victory over the regent, who conspired to divert the emperor's attentions toward his own daughter, Shoshi.The narrative of A Tale of False Fortunes is built around a fictitious historical document, which is so well crafted that it was at first believed to be an actual document of the Heian period. Throughout Enchi's innovation and skill are evident as she alternates between modern and classical Japanese, interjecting her own commentary and extracts from A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, to impress upon the reader the authenticity of the tale presented within the novel.

    The Crimson Labyrinth is a wicked satire on extremist reality TV in the tradition of The Running Man-if that indeed is what it is. Welcome to THE MARS LABYRINTH where things aren't what they seem. Welcome to the world of Kishi, where the plot is as gnarly as the humor is twisted.When an unemployed former math major wakes up one day, he wonders if he's somehow ended up on the red planet. The good-looking young woman with aid-she says her name is Ai and that she draws erotic comics for a living-seems to have no clue either as to their whereabouts. Their only leads are cryptic instructions beamed to a portable device. Has the game begun?There is no reset button, no saving and no continue-make the wrong move and it's really GAME OVER. In the cruel world of THE MARS LABYRINTH, mercy and compassion are only for the weak or the very, very strong. The stakes are nothing less than your life-and apparently a lot of money.If you're a fan of Lost or Battle Royale, don't miss this one.

    Decades later, the children of the survivors find themselves unable to conceive, with complex and expensive fertility treatment the only option. Some can afford it, but for everyone else, there is the In Vitro Lottery.Kate Adams never really wanted a family, so when her numbers come up for treatment at the clinic, she gives her winning ticket to her sister, Emily. Then tragedy strikes, and Kate is sent on a collision course with the clinic head Victor Pearson, and the Government, in her quest for answers.When Kate's investigation reveals devastating truths about her sister, she is drawn towards the pressure group IVFree and begins to question everything she believes in. Together, they formulate a plan to get answers and to uncover the real purpose behind the Lottery. When the fate of Humanity is at stake, who really controls the future, and what will they do to protect it?New Apple Summer e-Book Awards 2016 winner in SciFi / Dystopia

    Once seen as a thousand years of warfare, religious infighting, and cultural stagnation, they are now understood to be the vital connection between the past and the present. Along with the battles that helped shape the modern world are a rich heritage of architecture, arts, and literature, of empire and its dissolution. It was the era of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, the Black Death and the fall of Constantinople. It is a landscape both familiar and foreign, dark and foreboding at times, but also filled with the promise and potential of the future.

    . . 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.

    However, true fans of the genre know that for decades, Japan has been turning out some of the most innovative stories ever published. Unfortunately, those that make it into English are often difficult to find. The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories, brings together the most outstanding short stories of this body of literature.Included here are thirteen stories, by both the "big three" of Japanese science fiction, Shinichi Hoshi, Ryo Hanmura, and Sako Komatsu and by the likes of Kobo Abe and Morio Kita, writers of mainstream fiction who occasionally delve into sci-fi.

    Their bond forms instantly.Upon their first meeting, after Makino’s concert in Tokyo, they begin a conversation that will go on for years, with long spells of silence broken by powerful moments of connection. She’s drawn by Makino’s tender music and his sensitivity, and he is intrigued by Yoko’s refinement and intellect. But neither knows enough about love to see it blooming nor has the confidence to make the first move. Will their connection endure, weaving them back together like instruments in a symphony, or will fate lead them apart?Blending the harmonies of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes and the sensuality of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, At the End of the Matinee is an enchanting and thought-provoking love story.

    But nothing could have prepared him for the heartache he feels when he falls hopelessly in love with a Japanese girl named Sakurai. Immersed in their shared love for classical music and foreign movies, the two gradually grow closer and closer.One night, after being hit by personal tragedy, Sugihara reveals to Sakurai that he is not Japanese—as his name might indicate.Torn between a chance at self-discovery that he’s ready to seize and the prejudices of others that he can’t control, Sugihara must decide who he wants to be and where he wants to go next. Will Sakurai be able to confront her own bias and accompany him on his journey?