"The tortured relationship between Yukiko and Tomioka, a minor official with the Department of Agriculture and Forestry, provides the dramatic center of the novel. Yukiko meets Tomioka while working as a typist for the Japanese ministry in Indochina, where they begin their affair. After the war, Tomioka returns to his wife but remains emotionally inscrutable to Yukiko, refusing to break off their relationship. Meanwhile, Yukiko must find her way in a radically changed Japan. When Yukiko and Tomioka's lives once again cross, the two set down a path shaped by their passion and sense of desperation."--BOOK JACKET.

Set in the years before, during, and after World War II, this classic of modern Japanese literature provides a rich cast of characters drawn from the back alleys of urban Japan and a rare portrait of Japanese colonialism and Japan's postwar experience from the perspective of a woman.

- An inspiring record of many years of conversations by the author with various architects and others, with the aim being to challenge the reader through the presentation of diverse sources of inspiration - Provides a wealth of insight, opinions, and thoughts from 73 architects, 12 artists, 8 photographers, 4 critics, 2 designers, and 1 curator - Illustrated with important works deliberately selected by the author to match the vision of the architect or visionary - An important reference book containing the thoughts and visions of more than 100 architects, designers, artists, and other visionaries In this thought-provoking collection of interviews, Vladimir Belogolovsky reflects on nearly 20 years of conversations with leading architects and others, selecting one essential part to form a question-and-answer that would expose the complexity of their thinking process, while comparing and contrasting them to one another, thereby distilling more than 100 ideas. His engaging narrative captures the stories behind every project and every personality while exploring the important question -- what makes a building architecture? The selection of interviews gathers many answers but inevitably, also many more questions. This book represents people who work in diverse places culturally and climatically and came of age in very different times -- from the revolutionary 1960s to our own time, and as such forms an invaluable reference.

Insisting on collective and common memories, Floating Clouds Beyond the Elastic Limit champions a new national literature grounded in the histories of a restless tribe, we who have found a home away from home. Xi Ni Er’s poetry is alive with awareness of locality and origins – this awareness feeds the present, the future and the past in his work. Wide-ranging in their sweep, the poems go into historical and societal themes, reflecting deep concern and anxiety for the people, the happenings and the objects in a floating city, a transient life, and a pitiless history.

The novel tells the story of Akira Kumo, a retired couturier living in Paris, owner of the world's largest collection of books about clouds, and Virginie Latour, whom Kumo hires to help catalogue his library. While they work he tells her the story behind three figures in particular, all British, all obsessed by clouds: Luke Howard, a real-life Quaker who in 1802 wrote the first treatise classifying clouds (we still use it today); a painter named Carmichael, clearly based on John Constable, one of the most famous cloud painters of all time, and a fictional amateur meteorologist named Richard Abercrombie, who aspires to write the definitive book on cloud description, which would come to be known in cloud circles as the Abercrombie Protocol. Kumo sends Virginie Latour to London to buy the Protocol. By the end of the novel, we learn the Protocol's great secret; we understand what binds these men together; and and we learn that Kumo himself is a survivor of the Hiroshima blast, in whose cloud his family vanished.

Two novellas, Yellow mud street and Old floating cloud, by one of mainland China's most innovative contemporary writers. Translated by Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang, with a foreword by Charlotte Innes. Can Xue's only other book in English is Dialogues in paradise, published in 1989 by Northwestern U. Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR