Book Subject Tag: Social life and customs
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Convenience Store Woman
Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated…
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Lady Joker, Volume Two
This second half of Lady Joker, by Kaoru Takamura, the Grand Dame of Japanese crime fiction, concludes the breathtaking saga introduced in Volume I.Inspired by the real-life Glico-Morinaga kidnapping, an unsolved case that terrorized Japan for two years, Lady Joker reimagines the circumstances of this watershed episode in modern Japanese history and brings into riveting focus the lives…
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Lady Joker, Volume One
Tokyo, 1995. Five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on horses. They have little in common except a deep disaffection with their lives, but together they represent the social struggles and griefs of post-War Japan: a poorly socialized genius stuck working as a welder; a demoted detective with a chip on his…
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Woman on the other shore
This compelling novel, widely acclaimed for its perceptive portrayal of the everyday lives and struggles of Japanese women, struck a deep chord with readers throughout Japan. In 2005 it won the prestigious Naoki Prize, awarded semiannually for the best work of popular fiction by an established writer. Sayoko, a thirty-five-year-old homemaker with a three-year-old child,…
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Still life and other stories
This is a collection of delicate tales which reveal the flow of life in the modern Japanese family, the accidental pleasures and the unexplained misfortune.
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The temple of the wild geese ; and Bamboo dolls of Echizen : two novellas
Two elaborate tales written in the early 1960s by the Japanese author Tsutomu Mizukami (1919-2004) explore volcanic oedipal urges lurking just below the surface of unlikely love triangles. In The Temple of the Wild Geese, set at a Zen Buddhist monastery in the mountains, Jinen, an unhappy, disfigured and lonely orphaned novice, develops a filial…
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Lou-lan and other stories
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The hunting gun
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Kingyo : the artistry of Japanese goldfish
This book is a highly unique art book that reveals goldfish both as an element of Japanese culture and as an influential design motif over the last 500 years.
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The pillow book of Sei Shonagon : the diary of a courtesan in tenth century Japan
Japan in the 10th century stood physically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world. Inside this bubble, a subtle and beautiful world was in operation, and its inhabitants were tied to the moment, having no interest in the future and disdain for the past. In a small diary, a young courtesan of the…