Summoning up more than 20 years of Japan's most dramatic history, the geisha's story uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. It moves from a small fishing village in 1929 to the glamorous and decadent Kyoto of the 30s and on to postwar New York.

Presents an epic saga of one Pilot-Major John Blackthorne, and his integration into the struggles and strife of feudal Japan. Starting with his shipwreck on this most alien of shores, this novel charts Blackthorne's rise from the status of reviled foreigner up to the hights of trusted advisor and eventually, Samurai.

Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then, there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, are turned inside out.

Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. This book follows the fortunes of two remarkable characters.

This is the prose masterpiece of the Heian era of the 10th and 11th centuries, which is recognized as a great period in Japanese literature. It is an account of the intricate, exquisite, highly ordered court culture which made such a masterpiece possible.

When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, killing 100,000 men, women and children, a new era in human history opened. This book presents an account of six men and women who struggled to cope with catastrophe and with often crippling disease.

In his black-walled fortress at Inuyama, the murderous warlord, Iida Sadamu, surveys his famous nightingale floor. Constructed with exquisite skill, it sings at the tread of each human foot. No assassin can cross it unheard. What happens when Takeo's supernatural powers lead him there?

Toru Watanabe is looking back on the love and passions of his life and trying to make sense of it all. As his first love Naoko sinks deeper into mental despair, he is inexorably pushed to find a new meaning and a new love in order to survive.

Otori Takeo has pledged his life to the Tribe, and in doing so he must deny his birthright as an Otori lord - and his love for Shirakawa Kaede. If he does not serve them, the Tribe will kill him. Kaede, separated from Takeo, must use her intelligence, beauty and cunning to assert her place in a world of all-powerful men.

Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. Shortly afterwards Mari will be interrupted a second time by a girl from the Alphaville Hotel; a Chinese prostitute has been hurt by a client, the girl has heard Mari speaks fluent Chinese and requests her help.

Mineko begins with her initiation into the profession she would perfect. Following her blossoming over the years, we learn all about the intricate training and rigid education system by which Japanese girls become geishas, and the extraordinary foundation of wealth upon which their culture rests.

The story of a man, a girl, her ears and a very special sheep. It is a world where people sweat about their careers, drink too much, and drift through broken marriages. The protagonist is an advertising executive who finds himself drawn into an elaborate quest for a mysterious sheep.

Twenty two year old, Sumire is in love for the first time with a woman seventeen years her senior, Miu. Surprised that she might, after all, be a lesbian, Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend, K, a primary school teacher, who is used to answering questions, but what he most wants to say to Sumire is I love you.

Juxtaposes two tales about mothers, trans-sexuality, kitchens, love, tragedy, and the terms they all come to in the minds of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan.

A translation of the idiosyncratic diary of a C10 court lady in Heian Japan. Along with the Tale of Genji , it is one of the major Japanese classics.

In the Tokyo suburbs four women work the draining graveyard shift at a boxed-lunch factory. Burdened with chores and heavy debts and isolated from husbands and children, they all secretly dream of a way out of their dead-end lives.

Growing up in the suburbs in post-war Japan, Hajime and Shimamoto had been childhood sweethearts. The two eventually lost touch but now, in their thirties, they meet up again. Hajime, now a father and husband, finds himself catapulted into the past, risking all that he has in the present.

Zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. This title seeks to serve as an inventive fantasy and a meditation on the many uses of the mind.