"I'm here to take you to live with your father. In Tokyo, Japan! Happy birthday!" In the Land of the Rising Sun, where high culture meets high kitsch, and fashion and technology are at the forefront of the First World's future, the foreign-born teen elite attend ICS -- the International Collegiate School of Tokyo. Their accents are fluid. Their homes are ridiculously posh. Their sports games often involve a (private) plane trip to another country. They miss school because of jet lag and visa issues. When they get in trouble, they seek diplomatic immunity. Enter foster-kid-out-of-water Elle Zoellner, who, on her sixteenth birthday, discovers that her long-lost father, Kenji Takahara, is actually a Japanese hotel mogul and wants her to come live with him. Um, yes, please! Elle jets off first class from Washington, DC, to Tokyo, which seems like a dream come true. Until she meets her enigmatic father, her way-too-fab aunt, and her hyper-critical grandmother, who seems to wish Elle didn't exist. In an effort to please her new family, Elle falls in with the Ex-Brats, a troop of uber-cool international kids who spend money like it's air. But when she starts to crush on a boy named Ryuu, who's frozen out by the Brats and despised by her new family, her already tenuous living situation just might implode. My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life is about learning what it is to be a family, and finding the inner strength to be yourself, even in the most extreme circumstances.

A personal tour of Tokyo’s architecture, as seen through the eyes of one of the world’s most acclaimed architects who is also designing the primary venue for the Tokyo Olympic games. Tokyo is Japan’s cultural and commercial epicenter, bursting with vibrancy and life. Its buildings, both historical and contemporary, are a direct reflection of its history and its people. Kengo Kuma was only ten years old when he found himself so inspired by Tokyo’s cityscape that he decided to become an architect. Here he tells the story of his career through twenty-five inspirational buildings in the city. Kuma’s passion is evident on every page, as well as his curiosity about construction methods and his wealth of knowledge about buildings around the world, making this a unique commentary on Tokyo’s dynamic architecture. Kengo Kuma: My Life as an Architect is an intimate and truly inspiring book, revealing the beauty that exists in the world’s everyday spaces.

The memoirs of Seidensticker, perhaps best know for his translations of modern and classical Japanese novels, including the 11th century Tale of Genji. Seidensticker was introduced to Japan as a young diplomat during the Allied occupation and remained in Tokyo afterwards, befriending many of the luminaries of the Japanese literary scene. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Japanese cuisine.

The stunning biographical portraits in Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo, some adapted from essays that first appeared in The New Yorker, explore the lives of five women who did their best to stand up and cause more trouble than was considered proper in Japanese society. Their lives stretch across a century and a half of explosive cultural and political transformations in Japan. These five artists-two actresses, two writers, and a painter-were noted for their talents, their beauty, and their love affairs rather than for any association with politics. But through the fearlessness of their art and their private lives, they influenced the attitudes of their times and challenged the status quo. Phyllis Birnbaum presents her subjects from various perspectives, allowing them to shine forth in all of their contradictory brilliance: generous and petulant, daring and timid, prudent and foolish. There is Matsui Sumako, the actress who introduced Ibsen's Nora and Wilde's Salome to Japanese audiences but is best remembered for her ambition, obstreperous temperament and turbulent love life. We also meet Takamura Chieko, a promising but ultimately disappointed modernist painter whose descent into mental illness was immortalized in poetry by a husband who may well have been the source of her troubles. In a startling act of rebellion, the sensitive, aristocratic poet Yanagiwara Byakuren left her crude and powerful husband, eloped with her revolutionary lover, and published her request for a divorce in the newspapers. Uno Chiyo was a popular novelist who preferred to be remembered for the romantic wars she fought. Willful, shrewd, and ambitious, Uno struggled for sexual liberation and literary merit. Birnbaum concludes by exploring the life and career of Takamine Hideko, a Japanese film star who portrayed wholesome working-class heroines in hundreds of films, working with such directors as Naruse, Kinoshita, Ozu, and Kurosawa. Angry about a childhood spent working to provide for greedy relatives, Takamine nevertheless made peace with her troubled past and was rewarded for years of hard work with a brilliant career. Drawing on fictional accounts, interviews, memoirs, newspaper reports, and the creative works of her subjects, Birnbaum has created vivid, seamless narrative portraits of these five remarkable women.

Piano tuner and jazz musician Frank Ryan is in Japan teaching bored housewives how to play piano. Then he gets a gig in a trendy underground bar and ends up ensnared with a young woman with a grudge and the crime boss who owns the bar. Drawn into Tokyo Girl’s vendetta, Frank stumbles into an underworld where transgressions are paid for by the flash of a razor-sharp cleaver. And for a pianist, that’s not a good thing. Tokyo Girl is the follow-up to Beethoven’s Tenth, featuring reluctant sleuth Frank Ryan.

Have you ever been to Tokyo, Japan? Far away, in the Pacific Ocean, Tokyo is a busy city of color, activity, celebrations, gigantic buildings, and much more. Seven-year-old Mimiko lives in Tokyo, and here you can follow a year’s worth of fun, food and festivities in Mimiko’s life, month by month. Learn the right way to put on a kimono and see Mimiko’s top ten favorite meals—just try not to eat the pages featuring delicious wagashi!