Keiichiro Hirano

Juliet Winters Carpenter

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Kentucky

"Previously published as Matinee no owarini in the Minichi Newspaper in 2015 originally and a book published by Mainichi Shinbun Publishing Inc. in Japan in 2016. A paperback version was published by Bungeishunju in 2019"--Copyright page.

At the End of the Matinee

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The most famous work of Japanese literature and the world’s first novel-written a thousand years ago and one of the enduring classics of world literature. 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Indiana

The Tale of Genji

Natsuko Imamura

Lucy North

Florida

A Novel

"A taut and compelling depiction of loneliness and obsession." --Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train
 
"[It] will keep you firmly in its grip." --Oyinkan Braithwaite, bestselling author of My Sister, the Serial Killer
 
"The love child of Eugene Ionesco and Patricia Highsmith." --Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get in Trouble
 
A bestselling, prizewinning novel by one of Japan's most acclaimed young writers, for fans of Convenience Store Woman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, and the movies Parasite and Rear Window

I think what I'm trying to say is that I've been wanting to become friends with the Woman in the Purple Skirt for a very long time...

Almost every afternoon, the Woman in the Purple Skirt sits on the same park bench, where she eats a cream bun while the local children make a game of trying to get her attention. Unbeknownst to her, she is being watched--by the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who is always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes, what she eats, whom she speaks to.

From a distance, the Woman in the Purple Skirt looks like a schoolgirl, but there are age spots on her face, and her hair is dry and stiff. She is single, she lives in a small apartment, and she is short on money--just like the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who lures her to a job as a housekeeper at a hotel, where she too is a housekeeper. Soon, the Woman in the Purple Skirt is having an affair with the boss and all eyes are on her. But no one knows or cares about the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. That's the difference between her and the Woman in the Purple Skirt.

Studiously deadpan and chillingly voyeuristic, and with the off-kilter appeal of the novels of Ottessa Moshfegh, The Woman in the Purple Skirt explores envy, loneliness, power dynamics, and the vulnerability of unmarried women in a taut, suspenseful narrative about the sometimes desperate desire to be seen.

The Woman in the Purple Skirt

ceba93c7-7928-4807-b243-18fd48015d95-1

Jun Ishikawa

William J. Tyler

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Oregon

The four stories and novella translated in this volume represent the best short fiction by Ishikawa Jun (1899-1987), one of the most important modernist writers to appear on the Japanese literary stage during the years before and after World War II. Throughout his career, Ishikawa resisted the tide of popular opinion to address issues of political and artistic significance and thereby paved the way for a generation of Japanese internationalists and experimentalists, including Abe Kobo and Oe Kenzaburo. Highly acclaimed and respected in Japan, Ishikawa remains little known in the West-in part because of the tendency of Western critics and readers of Japanese literature to focus on writers concerned with aesthetic issues. Combining a strong interest in politics with a brilliant use of modernist techniques, Ishikawa's work defies easy categorization. Banned in 1938, "Mars' Song" has been called the finest example of anti-war fiction written during Japan's march to war in China and the Pacific. In it Ishikawa denounces the chorus of jingoism that swept Japan, and via a metafictional tale within a tale, he warns against the suicidal destruction to which complicity in warmongering will lead. The allegorical "Moon Gems," written in the spring of 1945, further explores the tenuous position of the writer moving against the current in a country not only still at war but very near defeat. In "The Legend of Gold" and "The Jesus of the Ruins," both from 1946, Japan has been reduced to a charred wasteland yet Ishikawa envisions destruction as fertile ground for rebirth and resurrection. Finally, the semi-surrealistic novella The Raptor plumbs the meanings and possibilities of peace in the post-Occupation era. William Tyler's eminently readable translations are faithfully expressive of stylistic and tonal nuances in the original works. In a perceptive introduction and the critical essays that follow, Tyler emphasizes Ishikawa's importance as an anti-establishment--even "resistance"--writer and argues that the writer's political iconoclasm goes hand-in-hand with the modanizumu of his literary experimentation. The Legend of Gold will be of tremendous importance in enlarging a Western understanding of the development of the writer's role as social critic and the evolution of the modernist movement in postwar Japan.

The Legend of Gold and Other Stories

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Erika Kobayashi

Brian Bergstrom

"Delicately weaves generations of women to the lasting wounds of nuclear destruction and the hubris of war. A unique and unforgettable novel." --Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Woman of Light

A literary thriller about the effects of nuclear power on the mind, body, and recorded history of three generations of Japanese women.

Nine years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, Japan is preparing for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. An unnamed narrator wakes up in a cold, sterile room, unable to recall her past. Across the country, the elderly begin to hear voices emanating from black stones, compelling them to behave in strange and unpredictable ways. The voices are a symptom of a disease called "Trinity."

As details about the disease come to light, we encounter a thread of linked histories--Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, the discovery of radiation, the nuclear arms race, the subsequent birth of nuclear energy, and the disaster in Fukushima. The thread linking these events begins to unravel in the lead-up to a terrorist attack at the Japan National Olympic Stadium. 
 
A work of speculative fiction reckoning with the consequences of the past and continued effects of nuclear power, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity follows the lives of three generations of women as they grapple with the legacy of mankind's quest for light and power.

Trinity, Trinity, Trinity

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Early one spring morning in 1689 Basho, arguably the greatest of all Japanese poets, accompanied by his friend and disciple Sora, set forth on foot from his hermitage in Edo (old Tokyo) on one final journey. This pilgrimage took him through the backlands and highlands north of the capital, then across the island of Honshu and down the west coast toward Lake Biwa, a journey of nearly 1,500 miles. Basho would not return to Edo until 1691, three years before his death. Back Roads to Far Towns, the last of Basho's travel diaries, is the evocative account of this arduous journey, the crowning achievement of a lifetime of writing.

Translation and notes by ￼Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu

Maryland

Back Roads to Far Towns: Basho’s Oko-No-Hosomichi

Kotaro Isaka

Sam Malissa

Michigan

"Three Assassins feels like a fever dream that makes sense when you're in it, but whose strange contours linger long after you wake up." --New York Times Three Assassins is the high-stakes, high-style, and utterly propulsive follow-up to Kotaro Isaka's international bestseller, Bullet Train, a Crime Reads "Most Anticipated Book of 2021." Suzuki is an ordinary man until his wife is murdered. To get answers and his revenge, Suzuki abandons his law-abiding lifestyle and takes a low-level job with a front company operated by the crime gang Maiden, who are responsible for his wife's death. Before long, Suzuki finds himself caught up in a network of quirky and highly effective assassins: The Cicada is a knife expert. The Pusher nudges people into oncoming traffic. The Whale whispers bleak aphorisms to his victims until they take their own lives. Intense and electrifying, Three Assassins delivers a wild ride through the criminal underworld of Tokyo, populated by contract killers who are almost superhumanly good at their jobs.

Three Assassins

5d64865e-ea97-456e-9ac5-de8ba551d60e-1

Yukio Mishima

John Nathan

Explores an adolescent's response to his mother's love affair with a handsome visitor to Yokohama

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

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has some wear but in overall great condition

Virginia

“A taut and compelling depiction of loneliness and obsession.” --Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train “[It] will keep you firmly in its grip.” --Oyinkan Braithwaite, bestselling author of My Sister, the Serial Killer “The love child of Eugene Ionesco and Patricia Highsmith.” --Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get in Trouble A bestselling, prizewinning novel by one of Japan's most acclaimed young writers, for fans of Convenience Store Woman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, and the movies Parasite and Rear Window I think what I'm trying to say is that I've been wanting to become friends with the Woman in the Purple Skirt for a very long time... Almost every afternoon, the Woman in the Purple Skirt sits on the same park bench, where she eats a cream bun while the local children make a game of trying to get her attention. Unbeknownst to her, she is being watched--by the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who is always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes, what she eats, whom she speaks to. From a distance, the Woman in the Purple Skirt looks like a schoolgirl, but there are age spots on her face, and her hair is dry and stiff. She is single, she lives in a small apartment, and she is short on money--just like the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who lures her to a job as a housekeeper at a hotel, where she too is a housekeeper. Soon, the Woman in the Purple Skirt is having an affair with the boss and all eyes are on her. But no one knows or cares about the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. That's the difference between her and the Woman in the Purple Skirt. Studiously deadpan and chillingly voyeuristic, and with the off-kilter appeal of the novels of Ottessa Moshfegh, The Woman in the Purple Skirt explores envy, loneliness, power dynamics, and the vulnerability of unmarried women in a taut, suspenseful narrative about the sometimes desperate desire to be seen.

NISIOISIN

Daniel Joseph

Love Tale

Circling back to a middle school girl’s apotheosis, if we can call it that, in Otorimonogatari, and the mortal threat it poses to the hero and his girl, this “Season Two” finale is narrated, for the first time in the series, by a grown-up—but if the word conjures a sense of reliability, of stability and certainty to you, dear reader, then the lesson to take home from this is to trust no one. Because the teller of the tale, who has been summoned by the heroine to defuse the situation, despite having been her nemesis since the very outset of the series, is—in the absence of the equally shady adult, Oshino, who at least was an expert—none other than his college frenemy, the fake ghostbuster who doesn’t believe in ghosts, the shameless swindler Deishu Kaiki. And it is indeed a con that he agrees to perpetrate, uncharacteristically pro bono, on a wrathful god—a mythic undertaking if true, which it may be, when a liar among liars holds that his story, like any other, is all a lie. But maybe not, when a man who claims to be wise in the ways of the world sounds just as self-conscious as his adolescent counterparts or a Russian anti-hero.

Koimonogatari

5867f051-f0ae-4608-929d-300f3a296fae-1

Kaori fujino

Kendall Heitzman

South Carolina

Tense, subtly disturbing Japanese literary horror perfect for fans of Tender is the Flesh and The Vegetarian An unforgettably creepy child narrator weaves uncanny tales about her new stepmother in this feminist horror novella + short story collection that introduces a unique new voice in Japanese literature A young girl loses her mother, and her father blindly invites his secret lover into the family home to care for her. As she obsessively tries to curate a pristine life, this new interloper remains indifferent to the girl, who seems to record her every move - and she realises only too late all that she has failed to see. With masterful narrative control, Nails and Eyes—appearing in English for the first time—builds to a conclusion of disturbing power. Paired with two additional stories of unsettled minds and creeping tension, it introduces a daring new voice in Japanese literature.

Nails and Eyes

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Toshikazu Kawaguchi

California

If you could go back, who would you want to meet? In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee--the chance to travel back in time. Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn't so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold. Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi's internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

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Comes with a free bookmark! 224 written in pencil on inside first page. Some huge pages. Some scuffs on front. See photos.

Vermont

Murasaki Shikibu

West Virginia

An abridged edition of the world’s first novel, in a translation that is “likely to be the definitive edition . . . for many years to come” (The Wall Street Journal) The inspiration behind The Metropolitan Museum of Art's "The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated" -- Now through June 16 at The Met Fifth Avenue A Penguin Classic Written in the eleventh century, this exquisite portrait of courtly life in medieval Japan is widely celebrated as the world’s first novel—and is certainly one of its finest. Genji, the Shining Prince, is the son of an emperor. He is a passionate character whose tempestuous nature, family circumstances, love affairs, alliances, and shifting political fortunes form the core of this magnificent epic. Royall Tyler’s superior translation is detailed, poetic, and superbly true to the Japanese original while allowing the modern reader to appreciate it as a contemporary treasure. In this deftly abridged edition, Tyler focuses on the early chapters, which vividly evoke Genji as a young man and leave him at his first moment of triumph. This edition also includes detailed notes, glossaries, character lists, and chronologies.

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Washington

Ao Omae

Emily Balistrieri

Stories

A fresh, thoughtful, and always surprising short story collection from a rising young star in the world of Japanese literature.

Composed of the title novella and three short stories, People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice sensitively explores gender, friendship, romance, love, human interaction and its absence, and how a misogynistic society limits women and men.

In the title story, Nanamori and Mugito, two university students appalled by society's gendered roles, rebel. Refusing to interact with other people they use stuffed toys for emotional support. Unlike Nanamori and Mugito, their fellow plushie society member Shiraki does not talk to plushies. Pragmatic, she accepts the status quo that boys sometimes make nasty jokes; she believes their behavior resembles the real world.

In "Realizing Fun Things Through Water," a young woman named Hatsuoka must contend with a mother-in-law who swears by cancer-preventing "hyper-organization" water, and a sister who writes fake news for a living. "Bath Towel Visuals" illuminates the mental cost of not just laughing along at mean humor, while "Hello, Thank You I'm Okay" follows a family's response when their shut-in son announces he wants to throw himself a birthday party.

Written in brisk and gentle prose, Ao Omae's stories capture the subtleties and complexities of his characters' inner world, individuals struggling to conform in an inflexible society little tolerant of difference. These stories, sometimes comical, sometimes bittersweet, and always thought-provoking, speak to the pain and desires of all who embrace nuance, repudiate traditional sex roles, and long for a gentler and more tolerant world.

People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice

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Ihara Saikaku

Georgia

Amorous Tales from 17th-Century Japan

First published in 1686, Five Women Who Loved Love was an immediate bestseller in the bawdy, life-loving world that was Genroku Japan.

Five Women Who Loved Love

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Yoko Tawada

Susan Bernofsky

Cut on front cover stopping before the first chapter, used book, underlining in about 10%, very readable 

New York

The Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in the New Yorker as "Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness"--Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In chapter two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in the circus. Her son--the last of their line--is Knut, born in chapter three in a Leipzig zoo but raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo, until his keeper, Matthias, is taken away...

Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and "the intimacy of being alone with my pen."

The Memoirs of a Polar Bear

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Soseki Natsume

Aiko Ito

"A nonchalant string of anecdotes and wisecracks, told by a fellow who doesn't have a name, and has never caught a mouse, and isn't much good for anything except watching human beings in action…" —The New Yorker Written from 1904 through 1906, Soseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle-class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him. A classic of Japanese literature, I Am a Cat is one of Soseki's best-known novels. Considered by many as the most significant writer in modern Japanese history, Soseki's I Am a Cat is a classic novel sure to be enjoyed for years to come.

I Am a Cat

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Mieko Kawakami

Louise Heal Kawai

Massachusetts

New edition of this witty, moving story of adolescent love and loss from the acclaimed, prize- winning author of Breasts and Eggs.

Ms Ice Sandwich

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Natsuo Kirino

Rebecca Copeland

A fantastical retelling of the Japanese myth of Izanami and Izanagi from the internationally bestselling author of Out.

The Goddess Chronicle

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Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

Allison Markin Powell

Akutagawa's magical final work is a short novel with a magic spell all its own--poignant, fantastical, wry, melancholic, and witty

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Keiichiro Hirano; Juliet Winters Carpenter

At the End of the Matinee

Keiichiro Hirano; Juliet Winters Carpenter

At the End of the Matinee

Murasaki Shikibu

The Tale of Genji

Natsuko Imamura; Lucy North

The Woman in the Purple Skirt

Jun Ishikawa; William J. Tyler

The Legend of Gold and Other Stories

Erika Kobayashi; Brian Bergstrom

Trinity, Trinity, Trinity

Matsuo Basho

Back Roads to Far Towns: Basho’s Oko-No-Hosomichi

Kotaro Isaka; Sam Malissa

Three Assassins

Yukio Mishima; John Nathan

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Natsuko Imamura; Lucy North

The Woman in the Purple Skirt

NISIOISIN; Daniel Joseph

Koimonogatari

Kaori fujino; Kendall Heitzman

Nails and Eyes

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Natsuko Imamura; Lucy North

The Woman in the Purple Skirt

Natsuko Imamura; Lucy North

The Woman in the Purple Skirt

Murasaki Shikibu

The Tale of Genji

Yukio Mishima; John Nathan

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Ao Omae; Emily Balistrieri

People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice

Ihara Saikaku

Five Women Who Loved Love

Yoko Tawada translation by Susan Bernofsky

The Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Soseki Natsume; Aiko Ito

I Am a Cat

Mieko Kawakami; Louise Heal Kawai

Ms Ice Sandwich

Natsuo Kirino; Rebecca Copeland

The Goddess Chronicle

Ryunosuke Akutagawa; Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda; Allison Markin Powell

Kappa