Arthur Golden

Shelf wear no moisture exposure clean print 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Texas

A Novel

National best seller, Japan's most celebrated geisha, confessions novel.

Memoirs of a Geisha  1

ec046e79-7391-4c32-80ed-068142530d9b-1

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New York





Named one of New York Public Library's & Bank Street's Best Books of the Year!

The Farewell meets Erin Entrada Kelly's Blackbird Fly in this empowering middle grade memoir from debut author Waka T. Brown, who takes readers on a journey to 1980s Japan, where she was sent as a child to reconnect to her family's roots.

When twelve-year-old Waka's parents suspect she can't understand the basic Japanese they speak to her, they make a drastic decision to send her to Tokyo to live for several months with her strict grandmother. Forced to say goodbye to her friends and what would have been her summer vacation, Waka is plucked from her straight-A-student life in rural Kansas and flown across the globe, where she faces the culture shock of a lifetime.

In Japan, Waka struggles with reading and writing in kanji, doesn't quite mesh with her complicated and distant Obaasama, and gets made fun of by the students in her Japanese public-school classes. Even though this is the country her parents came from, Waka has never felt more like an outsider.

If she's always been the "smart Japanese girl" in America but is now the "dumb foreigner" in Japan, where is home...and who will Waka be when she finds it

While I Was Away

b7acc101-58f1-4d63-8f96-2fac5df1ca9c-1

Ivan Morris

Sei Shônagon

Penguin Classics; Ex-library copy with typical internal stamps/markings; suspect binding; beaten-up vintage copy, not pretty

New Jersey

This is a book of observations and musings recorded by Sei Shōnagon during her time as court lady to Empress Consort Teishi in 990s and early 11th century in Heian, Japan. The book was completed in the year 1002. In it she included lists of personal thoughts, court events, poetry and opinions on her contemporaries.

The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon

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#paperback #fiction #juvenilefiction #ya #youngadult #WWII #Pearlharbor #japan #internmentcamps

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Under the Blood-Red Sun

Memoirs of a Geisha

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Alabama

Anna and the French Kiss meets Before Sunrise in this smart and swoony debut. Sophia has seven days left in Tokyo before she moves back to the States. Seven Days to say good-bye to the electric city, her wild best friend, and the boy she's harbored a semi-secret crush on for years. Seven perfect days....Until Jamie Foster-Collins moves back to Japan and ruins everything. Jamie and Sophia have a history of heartbreak, and the last thing Sophia wants is for him to steal her leaving thunder with his stupid arriving thunder. Yet as the week counts down, the relationships she thought were stable begin to explode around her. And Jamie is the one who helps her pick up the pieces. Sophia is forced to admit she may have misjudged Jamie, but can their seven short days of Tokyo adventures end in anything but good-bye?

Seven Days of You

3136747f-4f77-4002-9dd0-3ee9f3d0553d-1

William Gibson

Arizona

"The best novel William Gibson has ever written about the world we're entering daily. Neuromancer made Gibson famous; Idoru cements that fame."--The Washington Post Book World

21st century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Neon rain. Light everywhere blowing under any door you might try to close. Where the New Buildings, the largest in the world, erect themselves unaided, their slow rippling movements like the contractions of a sea-creature...

Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is an intuitive fisher for patterns of information, the "signature" an individual creates simply by going about the business of living. But Laney knows how to sift for the dangerous bits. Which makes him useful--to certain people.
 
Chia McKenzie is here on a rescue mission. She's fourteen. Her idol is the singer Rez, of the band Lo/Rez. When the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club decided that he might be in trouble in Tokyo, they sent Chia to check it out.
 
Rei Toei is the idoru--the beautiful, entirely virtual media star adored by all Japan. Rez has declared that he will marry her. This is the rumor that has brought Chia to Tokyo. True or not, the idoru and the powerful interests surrounding her are enough to put all their lives in danger...

Idoru

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Ohio

"Captivating, minutely imagined . . . a novel that refuses to stay shut" ("Newsweek"), "Memoirs of a Geisha" is now released in a movie tie-in edition.

Jun Lennon

Bad Luck is out to crash Nittle Grasper's concert with a brand-new song. Can Shuichi steal the thunder from Ryuichi, or has Bad Luck's streak finally run out? Full color. Rated for older teens.

Gravitation

9892cae1-f0eb-4430-b506-75c836e46467-1

Sarah Bird

Pennsylvania

A Seattle Times Best Book of the Year

In her most ambitious, moving, and provocative novel to date, Sarah Bird makes a stunning departure. Above the East China Sea tells the entwined stories of two teenaged girls, an American and an Okinawan, whose lives are connected across seventy years by the shared experience of profound loss, the enduring strength of an ancient culture, and the redeeming power of family love.

Luz James, a contemporary U.S. Air Force brat, lives with her strictly-by-the-rules sergeant mother at Kadena Air Base in Okianawa. Luz's older sister, her best friend and emotional center, has just been killed in the Afghan war. Unmoored by her sister's death and a lifetime of constant moving from base to base, Luz turns for the comfort her service-hardened mother cannot offer to the "Smokinawans," the "waste cases," who gather to get high every night in a deserted cove. When even pills, one-hitters, Cuervo Gold, and a growing crush on Jake Furusato aren't enough to soften the unbearable edge, the desolate girl contemplates taking her own life.

In 1945, Tamiko Kokuba, along with two hundred of her classmates, is plucked out of her elite girls' high school and trained to work in the Imperial Army's horrific cave hospitals. With defeat certain, Tamiko finds herself squeezed between the occupying Japanese and the invading Americans. She believes she has lost her entire family, as well as the island paradise she so loved, and, like Luz, she aches with a desire to be reunited with her beloved sister.

On an island where the spirits of the dead are part of life and your entire clan waits for you in the afterworld, suicide offers Tamiko the promise of peace. As Luz tracks down the story of her own Okinawan grandmother, she discovers that, if she surrenders to the most unbrat impulse and allows herself to connect completely with a place and its people, the ancestral spirits will save not only Tamiko but her as well.

Propelled by a riveting narrative and set at the very epicenter of the headline-grabbing clash now emerging between the great powers, Above the East China Sea is at once a remarkable chronicle of how war shapes the lives of conquerors as well as the conquered and a deeply moving account of family, friendship, and love that transcends time.

Above the East China Sea

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check out my other listings for more manga!

Delaware

Kafka wants to clean up kaiju, but not literally! Will a sudden metamorphosis stand in the way of his dream? With the highest kaiju-emergence rates in the world, Japan is no stranger to attack by deadly monsters. Enter the Japan Defense Force, a military organization tasked with the neutralization of kaiju. Kafka Hibino, a kaiju corpse cleanup man, has always dreamed of joining the force and wants another shot at achieving his childhood dream of eliminating the kaiju. But how can he expect to fight kaiju when he suddenly becomes one himself?! Kafka hopes to one day keep his pact with his childhood friend Mina to join the Japan Defense Force. But while she’s out neutralizing kaiju as Third Division captain, Kafka is stuck cleaning up the aftermath of her battles. Now, thanks to a sudden eligibility rule change, Kafka has one more shot at realizing his dream. There’s just one problem—he’s suddenly turned into a kaiju! And even worse, he’s made the Defense Force’s neutralization list under the code name Kaiju No. 8.

Kaiju No. 8, Vol. 1

4f997237-c3bd-40a6-a427-d4be5e4f83db-1

#hardcover #fiction #ya #youngadult #rachelcohn #romance #japan #tokyo #contemporary #teen 

Ex-library 

"I'm here to take you to live with your father. In Tokyo, Japan! Happy birthday!" In the Land of the Rising Sun, where high culture meets high kitsch, and fashion and technology are at the forefront of the First World's future, the foreign-born teen elite attend ICS-the International Collegiate School of Tokyo. Their accents are fluid. Their homes are ridiculously posh. Their sports games often involve a (private) plane trip to another country. They miss school because of jet lag and visa issues. When they get in trouble, they seek diplomatic immunity. Enter foster-kid-out-of-water Elle Zoellner, who, on her sixteenth birthday discovers that her long-lost father, Kenji Takahari, is actually a Japanese hotel mogul and wants her to come live with him. Um, yes, please! Elle jets off first class from Washington D.C. to Tokyo, which seems like a dream come true. Until she meets her enigmatic father, her way-too-fab aunt, and her hyper-critical grandmother, who seems to wish Elle didn't exist. In an effort to please her new family, Elle falls in with the Ex-Brats, a troupe of uber-cool international kids who spend money like it's air. But when she starts to crush on a boy named Ryuu, who's frozen out by the Brats and despised by her new family, her already tenuous living situation just might implode. My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life is about learning what it is to be a family, and finding the inner strength to be yourself, even in the most extreme circumstances.

My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life

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Illinois

"Each chapter of this enrapturing novel is elegantly brief and charged with barely contained emotion." --New York Times Book Review

A gripping debut set in modern-day Tokyo and inspired by a true crime, for readers of Everything I Never Told You and The Perfect Nanny, What's Left of Me Is Yours charts a young woman's search for the truth about her mother's life--and her murder.

In Japan, a covert industry has grown up around the "wakaresaseya" (literally "breaker-upper"), a person hired by one spouse to seduce the other in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings. When Satō hires Kaitarō, a wakaresaseya agent, to have an affair with his wife, Rina, he assumes it will be an easy case. But Satō has never truly understood Rina or her desires and Kaitarō's job is to do exactly that--until he does it too well. While Rina remains ignorant of the circumstances that brought them together, she and Kaitarō fall in a desperate, singular love, setting in motion a series of violent acts that will forever haunt her daughter's life.

Told from alternating points of view and across the breathtaking landscapes of Japan, Stephanie Scott exquisitely renders the affair and its intricate repercussions. As Rina's daughter, Sumiko, fills in the gaps of her mother's story and her own memory, Scott probes the thorny psychological and moral grounds of the actions we take in the name of love, asking where we draw the line between passion and possession.

What's Left of Me Is Yours

38e01fac-98d1-4b69-8649-a566935a6233-1

Pages and spine are perfect. Classic shelf yellowing. 

The "memoirs" of one of Japan's most celebrated geishas describes how, in 1929, as a little girl, she is sold into slavery, her efforts to learn the arts of the geisha, the impact of World War II, and her struggle to reinvent herself to win the man she loves. Reissue. (A Columbia Pictures film, directed by Rob Marshall, releasing Winter 2005, starring Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh, Koji Yakusho, & Gong Li) (Historical Fiction)

Gail Tsukiyama

Spine is uncreased, puncture on back cover in the bottom left corner, some scuffing of cover along spine.

Oregon

Shortly before World War II, a Chinese man, sent to Japan to recover from tuberculosis, meets a lovely Japanese girl and four older residents, in a story of passion and sacrifice

The Samurai's Garden

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New Hampshire

Hachiko Waits

This is a vintage book published in the 1960s. There is minor creasing/marks on the cover. Please look at the pictures! 

California

To The Nineteenth Century

Anthology of Japanese Literature

Virginia

Shame in the Blood, or Shinobugawa, is considered one of the finest contemporary love stories in all of modern Japanese literature. The narrator, a young college student, has had two brothers disappear, two sisters lost to suicide, and his third sister is physically disabled. He is determined not only to survive but to thrive in spite of tormented thoughts that his family's blood is cursed.

Told as six interlocked and layered stories, the novel builds and deepens as the particulars of everyday life provide a moving, beautiful testimony to the love and power of youth and commitment. The whole story is tinged with melancholic sadness often associated with Japanese literature, where the feeling of love itself is "a little death."

First published in Japan, Shame in the Blood sold more than a million copies, was made into a film directed by Obayashi Nobuhiko, and won the Akutagawa Prize for Literature, launching the Tetsuo Miura's career. Working in the great tradition of Japanese novelists from Soseki to Kawabata, from Mishima to Abe, Miura takes his place as one of the greatest living Japanese writers.

Shame in the Blood

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Missouri

A story told from five different points of view chronicles the experiences of Japanese Americans caught up in the nightmare of the World War II internment camps.

When the Emperor Was Divine

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Kyousuke Motomi

Georgia

A New York Times' bestseller with a romantic storyline that is unique, funny and touching.

After orphan Teru Kurebayashi loses her beloved older brother, she finds solace in the messages she exchanges with DAISY, an enigmatic figure who can only be reached through the cell phone her brother left her. Meanwhile, mysterious Tasuku Kurosaki always seems to be around whenever Teru needs help... Could DAISY be a lot closer than Teru thinks?

When Teru mistakenly tells Kurosaki to disappear from her life, she gets consumed by guilt because he actually vanishes. In order to get him back, she'll have to uncover his past relationship with her brother along with the exact details of his crime... 

Dengeki Daisy, Vol. 8

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Kylie Lee Baker

"Sharp and seductive...a fantasy with teeth." --Julie C. Dao, author of Forest of a Thousand Lanterns A girl of two worlds, accepted by none... A half Reaper, half Shinigami soul collector seeks her destiny in this haunting and compulsively readable dark fantasy set in 1890s Japan. Death is her destiny. Half British Reaper, half Japanese Shinigami, Ren Scarborough has been collecting souls in the London streets for centuries. Expected to obey the harsh hierarchy of the Reapers who despise her, Ren conceals her emotions and avoids her tormentors as best she can. When her failure to control her Shinigami abilities drives Ren out of London, she flees to Japan to seek the acceptance she's never gotten from her fellow Reapers. Accompanied by her younger brother, the only being on earth to care for her, Ren enters the Japanese underworld to serve the Goddess of Death...only to learn that here, too, she must prove herself worthy. Determined to earn respect, Ren accepts an impossible task--find and eliminate three dangerous Yokai demons--and learns how far she'll go to claim her place at Death's side.

The Keeper of Night

bc2a26d7-1ab7-4e61-bfc1-7c3bb22dd099

Ruth Ozeki

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Massachusetts

A novelist on a remote island in the Pacific is linked to a bullied and depressed Tokyo teenager after discovering a Hello Kitty lunchbox that washed ashore.

A Tale for the Time Being

7623efa8-48a9-41e0-bb28-f8a5b38689bf-1

Andromeda Romano-Lax

Florida

2029: In Japan, a historically mono-cultural nation, childbirth rates are at a critical low and the elderly are living increasingly long lives. This population crisis has precipitated a mass immigration of foreign medical workers from all over Asia - as well as the development of refined artificial intelligence to step in where humans fall short. Plum Rains elegantly broaches such important contemporary conversations as immigration, the intersection of labour and technology, the ecological fate of our planet and the future of its children.

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Arthur Golden

Memoirs of a Geisha 1

Waka T. Brown

While I Was Away

Ivan Morris; Sei Shônagon

The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon

Graham Salisbury

Under the Blood-Red Sun

Arthur Golden

Memoirs of a Geisha

Cecilia Vinesse

Seven Days of You

William Gibson

Idoru

Arthur Golden

Memoirs of a Geisha

Jun Lennon

Gravitation

Sarah Bird

Above the East China Sea

Naoya Matsumoto

Kaiju No. 8, Vol. 1

Rachel Cohn

My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life

Stephanie Scott

What's Left of Me Is Yours

Arthur Golden

Memoirs of a Geisha

Gail Tsukiyama

The Samurai's Garden

Leslie Newman

Hachiko Waits

Various

Anthology of Japanese Literature

Tetsuo Miura; Andrew Driver (Translator)

Shame in the Blood

Julie Otsuka

When the Emperor Was Divine

Kyousuke Motomi

Dengeki Daisy, Vol. 8

Kylie Lee Baker

The Keeper of Night

Ruth Ozeki

A Tale for the Time Being

Andromeda Romano-Lax

Plum Rains (Advance Uncopyedited Edition)

Arthur Golden

Memoirs of a Geisha