In 1984, David Mura, a third-generation Japanese-American, was awarded a writing grant to live in Japan. After years of ignoring his ethnic heritage, Mura, with his wife (an American), embarked on a trip that profoundly changed his life. Turning Japanese chronicles his quest for self-knowledge and racial identity.

“The poet David Mura brings an intriguing perspective to the New World quest for enlightenment from this ancient and ascendant culture” (The New York Times). Award-winning poet David Mura’s critically acclaimed memoir Turning Japanese chronicles how a year in Japan transformed his sense of self and pulled into sharp focus his complicated inheritance. Mura is a sansei, a third-generation Japanese-American who grew up on baseball and hot dogs in a Chicago suburb where he heard more Yiddish than Japanese. Turning Japanese chronicles his quest for identity with honesty, intelligence, and poetic vision, and it stands as a classic meditation on difference and assimilation and is a valuable window onto a country that has long fascinated our own. Turning Japanese was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of an Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Book Award. This edition includes a new afterword by the author. “A dizzying interior voyage of self-discovery and splintered identity.” —Chicago Tribune “There is brilliant writing in this book, observations of Japanese humanity and culture that are subtly different from and more penetrating than what we usually get from Westerners.” —The New Yorker “Turning Japanese reads like a fascinating novel you can’t put down . . . Mura’s story is a universal one, and one that is accessible to everyone, even those whose experience in the U.S. is not that of a person of color.” —Asian Week “[Mura] paints a portrait of Japan that is rich and satisfying . . . a refreshingly kindly and tolerant study, a powerful antidote to the venomous anti-Japanese mood that seems, distressingly, to be seizing some corners of the American mind.” —Conde Nast Traveler

This first original graphic novel in an exciting new series is based on the popular hit television show, "Degrassi: The Next Generation." It presents two "off screen" stories, shown from a different perspective, tying both the show and the book together.

Analysing major interwar women's magazines - the literary journal 'Ladies' Review', the popular domestic periodical 'Housewife's Friend', and the politically radical magazine 'Women's Arts' - this book considers the central place of representations of women for women in the culture of interwar-era Japan.

So-called 'turning points' or 'defining moments' are both the oxygen and grid lines that historians and researchers seek in plotting the path of social and political development of any country. In the case of Japan, the ninth Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies provided a unique opportunity for leading scholars of Japanese history, politics and international relations to offer an outstanding menu of 'turning points' (many addressed for the first time), over 20 of which are included here. Thematically, the book is divided into sections, including Medieval and Early Modern Japan, Japan and the West, Contested Constructs in the Study of Tokugawa and Meiji Japan, Aspects of Modern Japanese Foreign Policy, and Democracy and Monarchy in Post-War Japan.

Gou ni itte wa, gou ni shitagae, runs an old Japanese proverb: Obey the customs of the village you enter. Just don’t overdo things. It may already be too late for Cricket Collins, a recent Ivy League graduate who travels to Osaka for his first real job as an English instructor. The time is late 1970s, with Japan quickly becoming the new find-yourself region that India was to the backpack set in the 1960s. From pachinko parlors to paper cranes, tea ceremonies to translation problems, everything is entrancing to Cricket, at first, as he throws himself headfirst into a two-thousand-year-old culture. But soon he gets fired from his teaching job at Kansai Gakuin for petty theft, and on a brief trip to Korea he becomes embroiled in a sexual misadventure with painful after-effects. Spinning slowly out of orbit in his free-floating expatriate existence, he starts to lose touch with family, friends, and reality. It isn’t until he returns home to America that he begins to turn Japanese with a vengeance. Turning Japanese is as much about the allure of a foreign culture as it is about the divided existence of an expat and the terrors of ones own mind. Be careful of breaking down the barriers between two cultures: the breakdown you create may be your own.

The Devil Wears Prada meets Lost in Translation in this irresistible new novel from L. A. Woman author Cathy Yardley Meet Lisa Falloya, an aspiring half-Japanese, half-Italian American manga artist who follows her bliss by moving to Tokyo to draw the Japanese-style comics she's been reading for years. Leaving behind the comforts of a humdrum desk job and her workaholic fiancée, Lisa has everything planned---right down to a room with a nice Japanese family---but hasn't taken into account that being half-Asian and enthusiastic isn't going to cut it. Faced with an exacting boss and a conniving "big fish" manga author, Lisa risks her wedding, her friends, and her fears for a shot at making it big.