Japanese Fiction
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Kenzaburo (Deborah Boliver Boehm) translator Oe, Deborah Boliver Boehm |
Atlantic
Books
Death by Water
$14.81
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Goodreads rating: 3.22
$14.81
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BRAND NEW, Exactly same ISBN as listed, Please double check ISBN carefully before ordering.
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Haruki Murakami
|
Random
House
Uk
Killing Commendatore
$12.50
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Goodreads rating: 3.91
$12.50
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The much-anticipated new novel from the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of 1Q84 and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Killing Commendatore is an epic tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art—as well as a loving homage to The Great Gatsby—and a stunning work of imagination from one of our greatest writers.
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$8.62
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A woman goes into a bakery to buy a strawberry cream tart. The place is immaculate but there is no one serving so she waits. Another customer comes in. The woman tells the new arrival that she is buying her son a treat for his birthday. Every year she buys him his favourite cake; even though he died in an accident when he was six years old. From this beginning Yoko Ogawa weaves a dark and beautiful narrative that pulls together a seemingly disconnected cast of characters. In the tradition of classical Japanese poetic collections, the stories in Revenge are linked through recurring images and motifs, as each story follows on from the one before while simultaneously introducing new characters and themes. Filled with breathtaking images, Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty.
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E. Dale Saunders, Kōbō Abe |
Tuttle
Publishing
The Woman in the Dunes
$9.68
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Goodreads rating: 3.89
$9.68
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This beautiful novel by one of Japan's most important writers is also one of the most strangely terrifying and memorable books you'll ever read. The Woman in the Dunes is the story of an amateur entomologist who wanders alone into a remote seaside village in pursuit of a rare beetle he wants to add to his collection. But the townspeople take him prisoner. They lower him into the sand-pit home of a young widow, a pariah in the poor community, who the villagers have condemned to a life of shoveling back the ever-encroaching dunes that threaten to bury the town. An amazing book.
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Yukio Mishima
|
Vintage/ebury
(a
Division
Of
Random
After the Banquet
$7.99
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Goodreads rating: 3.7
$7.99
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Reissued along side The Sound of the Waves plus three classics works by Junichiro Tanizaki.
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Shiga Naoya, Lane Dunlop |
Tuttle
Pub
Paper Door and Other Stories
$5.75
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Goodreads rating: 3.77
$5.75
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No modern Japanese writer was more idolized than Shiga Naoya. The Paper Door and Other Stories showcases the concise, delicate art of this writer who is often called "the god of the Japanese short story." Doyen of Japanese letters Donald Keene ranks some of Shiga's stories "among the most brilliant achievements in this genre by any twentieth-century Japanese writer." Shiga's unique style is concise and simple, with no unnecessary words. With the subtlest of gestures, he evokes the fullness of experience. Lane Dunlop's masterly translation of seventeen of Shiga's finest stories has provided English readers their first overview of the author's work. Now back in print, the book is augmented by Donald Keene's new preface contextualizing Shiga's awesome literary gifts. Dunlop has chosen stories that aptly represent Shiga's range and virtuosity. With selections spanning forty years, from the fable-like "The Little Girl and the Rapeseed Flower" to the psychologically complex "A Gray Moon," this collection delineates the development of Shiga's rare genius.
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Yukio Mishima
|
Vintage
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (Vintage Summer)
$4.27
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Goodreads rating: 3.86
$4.27
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A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disillusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - their retribution is deliberate and horrifying.Yukio Mishma was born into a samurai family and imbued with the code of complete control over mind and body, and loyalty to the Emperor - the same code that produced the austerity and self-sacrifice of Zen. He wrote countless short stories and thirty-three plays, in some of which he acted. Several films have been made from his novels, including The Sound of Waves; Enjo, which was based on The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea. Among his other works are the novels Confessions of a Mask and Thirst for Love and the short-story collections Death in Midsummer and Acts of Worship.
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$6.86
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A woman goes into a bakery to buy a strawberry cream tart. The place is immaculate but there is no one serving so she waits. Another customer comes in. The woman tells the new arrival that she is buying her son a treat for his birthday. Every year she buys him his favourite cake; even though he died in an accident when he was six years old.From this beginning Yoko Ogawa weaves a dark and beautiful narrative that pulls together a seemingly disconnected cast of characters. In the tradition of classical Japanese poetic collections, the stories in Revenge are linked through recurring images and motifs, as each story follows on from the one before while simultaneously introducing new characters and themes. Filled with breathtaking images, Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty.~from the back coverAfternoon at the bakery --Fruit juice --Old Mrs. J --The little dustman --Lab coats --Sewing for the heart --Welcome to the museum of torture --The man who sold braces --The last hour of the Bengal tiger --Tomatoes and the full moon --Poison plants
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Edward G. Seidensticker, Yukio Mishima |
Vintage
The Decay Of The Angel
$6.42
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Goodreads rating: 4.13
$6.42
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The dramatic climax of "The Sea of Fertility" tetraology takes place in the late 1960s. Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, discovers and adopts a sixteen-year-old orphan, Toru, as his heir, identifying him with the tragic protagonists of the three previous novels, each of whom died at the age of twenty. Honda raises and educates the boy, yet watches him, waiting.
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$7.21
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Kobo Abe, the internationally acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes, combines wildly imaginative fantasies and naturalistic prose to create narratives reminiscent of the work of Kafka and Beckett.In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless protagonist gives up his identity and the trappings of a normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Wandering the streets of Tokyo and scribbling madly on the interior walls of his box, he describes the world outside as he sees or perhaps imagines it, a tenuous reality that seems to include a mysterious rifleman determined to shoot him, a seductive young nurse, and a doctor who wants to become a box man himself. The Box Man is a marvel of sheer originality and a bizarrely fascinating fable about the very nature of identity.Translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders.
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Jay Rubin, Natsume Sōseki, Haruki Murakami |
Aardvark
Bureau
The Miner
$7.36
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Goodreads rating: 3.96
$7.36
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The Miner is the most daringly experimental and least well known novel of the great Meiji novelist Natsume Soseki (1867-1916). Written in 1908, it is an absurdist novel about the indeterminate nature of human personality, which in many respects anticipates the work of Joyce and Beckett. Virtually devoid of plot and characterization, it unfolds entirely within the mind of the unnamed protagonist. Focusing on a young man whose love life has fallen to pieces, The Miner follows him as he flees from Tokyo, is picked up by a procurer of cheap labor for a copper mine, and then travels toward - and finally burrows into the depths of - the mine where he hopes to find oblivion. The young man reflects at length on nearly every thought and perception he experiences along the way, in terms of what the experience means to him at the time and in retrospect as a mature adult narrating the tale. The narrator concludes that there is no such thing as human character, and the many passages in which he ruminates on the nature of personality constitute the theoretical core of the book. The intellectual distancing carries over into the style of writing as well, and instead of a tragedy of alienation, we find here an absurdist - truly absurd and comical - allegory of descent into the psyche.
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Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami |
Vintage
Books
Norwegian Wood
$7.66
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Goodreads rating: 4.01
$7.66
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Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman. A magnificent blending of the music, the mood, and the ethos that was the sixties with the story of one college student's romantic coming of age, Norwegian Wood brilliantly recaptures a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love.
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$5.87
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From the New York Times bestselling author—a gripping novel of late night encounters that’s “hypnotically eerie, sometimes even funny, but most of all … [a book] that keeps ratcheting up the suspense” ( The Washington Post Book World ).Nineteen-year-old Mari is waiting out the night in an anonymous Denny’s when she meets a young man who insists he knows her older sister, thus setting her on an odyssey through the sleeping city. In the space of a single night, the lives of a diverse cast of Tokyo residents—models, prostitutes, mobsters, and musicians—collide in a world suspended between fantasy and reality. Utterly enchanting and infused with surrealism, After Dark is a thrilling account of the magical hours separating midnight from dawn.
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Philip Gabriel, Haruki Murakami |
Vintage
Kafka on the Shore
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Goodreads rating: 4.13
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Alternate cover edition here.Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle—yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.
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On an island the shape of a tear drop live two sisters. One is the Oracle, the other is damned.One is admired far and wide. The other must sacrifice her life to fulfil her destiny. But what will happen when she returns to the island for revenge?
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Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami |
Harvill
Secker
After Dark
$8.64
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Goodreads rating: 3.74
$8.64
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The midnight hour approaches in an almost empty all-night diner. Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, a musician, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. The musician has plans to rehearse with his jazz band all night, Mari is equally unconcerned and content to read, smoke and drink coffee until dawn. They realise they've been acquainted through Eri, Mari's beautiful sister. The musician soon leaves with a promise to return before dawn. 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.Meanwhile Eri is at home and sleeps a deep, heavy sleep that is 'too perfect, too pure' to be normal; pulse and respiration at the lowest required level. She has been in this soporfic state for two months; Eri has become the classic myth - a sleeping beauty. But tonight as the digital clock displays 00:00 a faint electrical crackle is perceptible, a hint of life flickers across the TV screen, though the television's plug has been pulled.Murakami, acclaimed master of the surreal, returns with a stunning new novel, where the familiar can become unfamiliar after midnight, even to those that thrive in small hours. With After Dark we journey beyond the twilight. Strange nocturnal happenings, or a trick of the night?
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Hiromi Kawakami, Allison Markin Powell |
Portobello
Books
Strange Weather in Tokyo
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Goodreads rating: 3.71
$6.90
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"Strange Weather in Tokyo" could be just the book for you if you're intrigued by explorations of poignant human connections set against the backdrop of cultural rituals and seasonal change. Hiromi Kawakami has crafted a narrative that's both delicate and deeply resonant, capturing a romance that defies societal norms. It's a tale that invites introspection and offers a gentle, thoughtful dive into the complexity of love and loneliness.
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Yōko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder |
Vintage
The Housekeeper and the Professor : 'a poignant tale of beauty, heart and sorrow' Publishers Weekly
$10.23
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Goodreads rating: 4.05
$10.23
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An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper who is entrusted to take care of him.Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.
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Haruki Murakami, Ted Goossen |
Vintage
Wind/Pinball : Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (Two Novels)
$7.73
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Goodreads rating: 3.53
$7.73
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NATIONAL BESTSELLERWind/Pinball, a unique two-in-one volume, includes, on one side, Murakami’s first novel Hear the Wind Sing . When you flip the book over, you can read his second novel, Pinball, 1973 . Each book has its own stunning cover.In the spring of 1978, a young Haruki Murakami sat down at his kitchen table and began to write. The two remarkable short novels— Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 —that launched the career of one of the most acclaimed authors of our time.These powerful, at times surreal, works about two young men coming of age—the unnamed narrator and his friend the Rat—are stories of loneliness, obsession, and eroticism. They bear all the hallmarks of Murakami’s later books, and form the first two-thirds, with A Wild Sheep Chase , of the trilogy of the Rat. Widely available in English for the first time ever, newly translated, and featuring a new introduction by Murakami himself, Wind/Pinball gives us a fascinating insight into a great writer’s beginnings.
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