japanese literature

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Genre: Fiction

  • Shinjuku shark

    Tokyo detective Samejima is so methodical and unrelenting in hunting criminals and thugs that he is known as the Shinjuku Shark. Feared by the yakuza (Japanese mob), he’s reckless and a loner. But when a serial killer targets the city’s officers with a mysterious weapon, Samejima begins investigating illegal arms dealers and gun traffickers who…

  • Journey beyond Samarkand.

  • Early modern Japanese literature : an anthology, 1600-1900, abridged

    This unique anthology is the first representative collection of Japanese literature from one of the most creative periods in Japanese culture, known variously as the Edo or the Tokugawa. It includes a wide range of fiction, poetry, and drama, and also essays, literary criticism, folk stories, and other noncanonical works with a number of new…

  • Sayonara, gangsters

    Somewhere in a future time and place, people have no names. Lovers find this inconvenient, so they begin naming each other. The two main characters settle on the following names: the woman is the Nakajima Miyuki Song Book, and the man, who teaches at a poetry school, is Sayonara, Gangsters. Their cat, who prefers milk-and-vodka…

  • Good luck, Yukikaze

    A sequel to Yukikaze. The alien JAM have been at war with humanity for over thirty years…

  • The blade of the courtesans

    A young samurai by the name of Seichiro Matsunaga, trained in swordfighting by non other than the legendary samurai Musashi Miyamoto, finds himself in Yoshiwara (the pleasure quarters of old Tokyo), per Miyamoto’s dying wishes. In Yoshiwara, Seichiro finds himself defending its denizens against what may be spies from the Yagyu Clan, including one young…

  • The glass slipper and other stories

    In addition to “The Glass Slipper,” this collection contains eight other stories held together by a common thread of self-perception. Yasuoka writes from the belief that the self has such depths that at times it can appear to be illusory. Set against the chaotic backdrop of the era running from before World War II to…

  • The shadow of a blue cat : a novel

    Businessman Yuki Yajima is fifty-one years old. He and his wife, Asako, are the parents of two daughters: Ryo, seventeen, and Yuka, an infant of only two months. Asking himself why he’s allowed himself to become a father again at his age, Yuki begins to remember his uncle, who died quite young–younger, indeed, than Yuki…

  • Yukikaze

    More than thirty years ago, a hyper-dimensional passageway suddenly appeared over the continent of Antarctica. Fighters from the mysterious alien force known as the JAM poured through the passage, the first wave an attempted terrestrial invasion. Their ferocity was unquestionable, their aim unknown. Humanity, united by a common enemy, managed to repel the invaders, chasing…

  • Translucent tree

    When divorced single mother Chigiri Yamazaki is called on to care for her dying father, the last thing she expects to find is true love with someone from her past.