Legendary 17th-century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi authored this book in the last years of his life, expanding his "two heavens as one" double-sword strategies into a complete life philosophy.
Give the lingering late-summer heat the slip and duck into the shadows with "All She Was Worth," a classic Japanese crime mystery.
As members of Japan's postwar baby boom generation approach their seventh decade, they have been wallowing in an extended nostalgia boom over the historical and cultural accouterments of the Showa Era (1926-89). If you feel left out of the discussion, the antidote is to ...
Okinawa at times is like heaven and hell in equal measures: tropical beaches next to ammunition dumps. A garrison island where people come to take vacations, the most politicized region of Japan can seem like being teleported back to the agitprop heyday of the ...
Japan's passion for the modern coexists with aesthetic proclivities that favor antiquity and refinement. Wabi Sabi: The Art of Impermanence, by Andrew Juniper.176 pages TUTTLE, Nonfiction. One expression of the appreciation for age and beauty is the much-cherished effect known as wabi-sabi, the subject of Andrew Juniper's ...
Yasunari Kawabata is often seen in the West as one of the quintessential modern Japanese writers. His most famous novels are filled with tea ceremonies and geisha and his prose is a consummate example of mono no aware, the Japanese aesthetic that finds beauty ...
The Japanese novel has taken some interesting twists and turns in the post-bubble era, but quality has often been the price of experimentation. Dream Messenger, by Masahiko Shimada, Translated by Philip Gabriel.293 pages TIME WARNER, Fiction. Masahiko Shimada's novel "Dream Messenger," which focuses on a mother's search ...
Richard Henry Brunton was a Scottish engineer who came to Japan in 1868, one of a number of o-yatoi-gaikokujin — foreigners hired to help Japan modernize at the beginning of the Meiji Era (1868-1912). This book is his memoir, the story of the eight ...
The bulk of Martin Cruz Smith's "Tokyo Station" is set in 1941, when the impending war with the Allied Forces was the talk of Tokyo. Tokyo Station, by Martin Cruz Smith.464 pages SIMON & SCHUSTER, Fiction. Yet a third of the way into the book, which was ...
This 1957 novel has at its heart Shusaku Endo's fascination with a seemingly tranquil and civilized postwar Japan still traumatized by the horrors of the Pacific War. Even a harmless-looking gas station attendant might be a grizzled war veteran involved in brutal killings on ...
The "Great Man" theory of history has largely been discredited. Propounded by Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s, it suggests that history is moved and swayed by the personalities of "great men" such as Alexander the Great and Napoleon. While there are clearly examples throughout ...
Based on the true story of a stock trader, the 1965 novel "The Informer" is remarkably prescient in describing the greed and venality that was, two decades later, to become a hallmark of the delirious days of Japan's bubble-era economy. The Informer, by Akimitsu Takagi, ...
