Businessman Yuki Yajima is fifty-one years old. He and his wife, Asako, are the parents of two daughters: Ryo, seventeen, and Yuka, an infant of only two months. Asking himself why he's allowed himself to become a father again at his age, Yuki begins to remember his uncle, who died quite young--younger, indeed, than Yuki is now. Thinking of this man, whom the young Yuki idolized, and who first introduced the boy to authors like Kenzaburo Oe and the Marquis de Sade, serves as a strange tipping point: allowing a sense of chaos and complexity back into his otherwise well-heeled life. A rare work of fiction focused simply on a man of integrity--a dying breed, in novels--"The Shadow of a Blue Cat" meticulously renders his life and opinions as Yuki tries to find a middle path between the radicalism of his uncle's life and the quiet bourgeois home he's worked so hard to build.

"The blue cat is like a knight on a quest. His quest is to find a hearth to fit the song the river taught him and to teach the owner of the hearth to sing that song"--Jacket.

In a 19th-century Vermont hamlet, a little blue kitten falls under the spell of the song of the river and ventures off to share the song with the world. Newbery Honor winner.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output. Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.

Here is the great Irish novel of Berlin, way back before the Wall came down. Dallan Weaver, a writer and professor who’s been fêted and flattered but has seen better days, has come to the great divided city as a guest of DILDO (Deutsche-Internationale Literatur-Dienst Organization). On arriving, Weaver’s life immediately begins to fall apart. Women fight over him. He is not always in the soberest state of mind. Moving from relatively conventional narrative to deliriously long lists, incorporating everything from children’s drawings to minute recollections of dreams, Lions of the Grunewald is—in the author’s own words—a “missionary stew,” marvelously served up in Aidan Higgins’s inimitable style.

An occasionally terrifying and always vivid portrayal of what it was like to live as a refugee immediately after the end of the Korean War. This novel is based on the author's own experience in his early teens in Daegu, in 1954, and depicts six families that survive the hard times together in the same house, weathering the tiny conflicts of interest and rivalries that spring up in such close quarters, but nonetheless offering one another sympathy and encouragement as fellow sufferers of the same national misfortune: brothers and sisters in privation.