Genre: Biography/Memoir
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Awesome nightfall : the life, times, and poetry of Saigyo
This book captures the power of Saigyo’s poetry and this previously overlooked poet’s keen insight into the social and political world of medieval Japan.
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Undercurrents : episodes from a life on the edge
Assembles 40 episodes that represent the times the author felt most alive, involving his two passions: sailing and scuba diving.
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Letters of four seasons
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Sky above, great wind : the life and poetry of Zen Master Ryokan
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Notebook of a ten square rush-mat sized world : a fugitive essay written in the year 1212
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As I crossed a bridge of dreams : recollections of a woman in eleventh-century Japan
A Lady-in-waiting at a Heian court in medieval Japan records her personal feelings and reactions to social standards. Its shy and vulnerable author found happiness neither in her work at court nor with her family, and projected into her writing veiled longings that are both timeless and poignant.
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The Sarashina diary
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The gossamer years : the diary of a noblewoman of Heian Japan
Kagero Nikki, translated here as The Gossamer Years, belongs to the same period as the celebrated Tale of Genji. This frank autobiography diary reveals two tempestuous decades of the author’s unhappy marriage and her growing indignation at rival wives and mistresses. To impetuous to be satisfied as a subsidiary wife, this beautiful noblewoman of the […]
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Twelve views from the distance
From one of the foremost poets in contemporary Japan comes this entrancing memoir that traces a boy’s childhood and its intersection with the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. Originally published in 1970, this translation is the first available in English.
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Persona : a biography of Yukio Mishima
A critical biography of a modern Japanese literary giant, whose brilliant career ended in a spectacular ritual suicide.