Books about japanese

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.

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.

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.

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.

Combining an offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose, this novel is an assault on all the senses, a murder mystery that is also philosophical speculation, and a dark fable of advanced capitalism.

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.

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.

In these haunting, hilarious stories Murakami once again makes a determined assault on the normal. A man's favourite elephant simply vanishes; a couple suffering midnight hunger pangs hold up a McDonalds; and a woman finds she is irresistible to a green monster that burrows through her garden.

Presents a tale of Genji, the Shining Prince, son of an emperor, which is a passionate character with tempestuous nature, family circumstances, love affairs, alliances, and shifting political fortunes. This is a translation to the Japanese original work, and focuses on its early chapters, which evoke Genji as a young man.

A tale that tells the story of a geisha girl, uncovering a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a geisha house. She tells her story many years later from New York.

The economy was booming. People had more money than they knew what to do with. And then, the earthquake struck. Satsuki has spent 30 years hating one man: a lover who destroyed her chances of having children, and who now lives in Kobe. Did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake?

This guide provides the information needed to master the basic characters and the syllybaries of Japanaese. A list of 284 extra kanji used in names is also included.

The first book of Mishima's landmark The Sea of Fertility sequence, this novel is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders.

In a remote seaside village, Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist, is held captive with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit where they are pressed into shovelling off the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten the village.