japanese literature

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Genre: Fiction

  • A spring like any other : a novel

    Takashi Tsuji is the pseudonym for Seiji Tsutsumi, poet and novelist. This novel offers a look at an affluent Japanese family in disarray.

  • The tale of Saigyo

  • Beyond the blossoming fields

    As a young girl from a wealthy family, Ginko Ogino seems set for a conventional life in the male-dominated society of nineteenth-century Japan. But when she contracts gonorrhea from her husband, she suffers the disgrace of divorce. Forced to bear the humiliation of being treated by male doctors, she resolves to become a doctor herself…

  • The tale of Matsura : Fujiwara Teika’s experiment in fiction

    Complete translation of a Japanese courtly tale from the 12th century, with extensive annotation, introduction, critical essay, and appendixes.

  • Shot by both sides : a novel

    Standing on a Tokyo bridge waiting for a friend, Akaki, a middle-aged Japanese man, indulges in reminiscences that recall his arrival in Tokyo twenty years earlier, his childhood in northern Korea under Japanese rule, and the impact of the trauma of war.

  • Tun-huang : a novel

    More than a thousand years ago, an extraordinary trove of early Buddhist sutras and other scriptures was secreted away in caves near the Silk Road city of Tun-huang. But who hid this magnificent treasure and why? In Tun-huang, the great modern Japanese novelist Yasushi Inoue tells the story of Chao Hsing-te, a young Chinese man…

  • The lord of the sands of time

    Sixty-two years after human life on Earth was annihilated by rampaging alien invaders, the enigmatic Messenger O is sent back in time with a mission to unite humanity of past eras–during the Second World War and ancient Japan, and even back to the dawn of the species itself–to defeat the invasion before it begins. However,…

  • March was made of yarn : reflections on the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown

    On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake occurred off the northeastern coast of Japan, triggering a 50-foot tsunami that crushed everything in its path—highways, airports, villages, trains, and buses—leaving death and destruction behind, and causing a major radiation leak from five nuclear plants. Here eighteen writers give us their trenchant observations and emotional responses to…

  • The budding tree : six stories of love in Edo

    In the latter half of the Edo period, the warrior caste was finding itself pushed out of the top echelons of Japanese society & repeated famines swept the countryside. Against this backdrop, a small number of women built themselves independent lives. The stories in this book recount the conditions in which these women lived.

  • Wind and waves : a novel