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Genre: Fiction

  • Breaking into Japanese literature : seven modern classics in parallel text

    This is a graded reader for Japanese literature. There are 7 stories, 4 by Soseki and 3 by Akutagawa, representing 3 different reading levels. In each case the story is presented in Japanese and English with a running dictionary of terms used.

  • Japanese tales of mystery & imagination

  • Death sentences

    A young poet, Who May, pens one disturbing poem after another until he creates a poem that can kill, which sparks a “magic poem plague” when copies are mailed to all of his friends.

  • Domesday

    The Dome. It happens in an instant. Like a thunderclap it appears over the modern Japanese utopia. In one short moment the high-rise paradise is transformed into a gruesome hell. For those few who survive the initial onslaught of mysterious angels spawned by the Dome’s walls, life becomes a constant struggle in a purgatory with…

  • 69 : sixty-nine

    A year in the life of a high school student in 1960s Japan.

  • Kafka on the shore

    This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for…

  • The Silent Cry

    Two brothers, Takashi and Mitsu, return from Tokyo to the village of their childhood. The selling of their family home leads them to a confrontation with their family history. Their attempt to escape the influence of the city ends in failure as they realize that its tentacles extend to everything in the countryside, including their…

  • And Then

    And Then, ranked as one of Soseki Natsume’s most insightful and stirring novels, tells the story of Daisuke, a young Japanese man struggling with his personal purpose and identity, as well as the changing social landscape of Meiji-era Japan. As Japan enters the 20th century, ancient customs give way to western ideals, creating a perfect…

  • Light and darkness; an unfinished novel.

  • Dazai Osamu, selected stories and sketches