Genre: Fiction
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The thief
The Thief is a seasoned pickpocket. Anonymous in his tailored suit, he weaves in and out of Tokyo crowds, stealing wallets from strangers so smoothly sometimes he doesn’t even remember the snatch. Most people are just a blur to him, nameless faces from whom he chooses his victims. He has no family, no friends, no…
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Points and Lines
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A wild sheep chase
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Two novels : Seventeen, J
Two views of a world whose traditional values have been blown away: Seventeen, the story of a lonely boy who turns to a right-wing group for self-esteem, and J, the story of a spoiled young drifter son of a Japanese executive.
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Grotesque
In the wake of the brutal murders of two Tokyo prostitutes, Yuriko and Kazue, Yuriko’s older sister describes the three women’s education at a prestigious girls’ high school, where a strict societal conventions determine the courses of their lives.
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Nowaki
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Schoolgirl
The novella that first propelled Dazai into the literary elite of post-war Japan. Essentially the start of Dazai’s career, Schoolgirl gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language. Now it illuminates the prevalent social structures of a lost time, as well as the struggle of the individual against them–a theme that occupied Dazai’s…
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Snow country
With the brushstroke suggestiveness and astonishing grasp of motive that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata tells a story of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan, the snowiest region on earth. It is there, at an isolated mountain hotspring, that the wealthy sophisticate Shimamura meets the geisha Komako,…
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Thirst for love
A woman’s obsessive love for an 18-year-old youth destroys her.
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Naomi
Chronicles the obsessive love of Joji, an engineer in his thirties, for a fifteen-year-old bar hostess who reminds him of Mary Pickford.