When beautiful, wealthy Yukiko and low-born artist Noriyoshi are found drowned together in a shinju, or ritual double suicide, everyone believes the culprit was forbidden love. Everyone but newly appointed yoriki Sano Ichiro. Despite the official verdict and warnings from his superiors, the shogun's Most Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations, and People suspects the deaths weren't just a tragedy -- they were murder. Risking his family's good name and his own life, Sano will search for a killer across every level of society -- determined to find answers to a mystery no one wants solved. No one but Sano... As subtle and beautiful as the culture it evokes, Shinju vividly re-creates a world of ornate tearooms and guady pleasure-palaces, cloistered mountaintop convents and dealthy prisons. Part love story, part myster, Shinju is a tour that will dazzle and entertain all who enter its world. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Laura Joh Rowland's The Shogun's Daughter.

Table of contents

A man in a poor village finds and plants some pumpkin seeds. Soon there are so many enormous pumpkins in the village that the people can eat their fill and even construct homes from the pumpkins.

Old lady comes again and asks if you have wasted anything. This is a story of teaching children about eliminating waste.

The classic study of the famous play by one of the most prominent Japanese playwrights has lost none of its appeal in the last half century. This monograph is divided in two parts, the first being a long introduction to the play, and the second a new translation of the original text supplemented with copious end notes. Originally published in 1953, the book is kept in print by the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan. -- Full review from gotterdammerung.org (see link).

In the continuation of the epic Sunset Warrior fantasy series, a man-god rises once more to confront a fearsome and unstoppable evil in a savage world where nothing is as it seems Once he was but a man named Ronin. Trained as a swordsman, endowed with breathtaking skill, he was not destined merely to live and then die in a doomed city beneath a frozen world. Many years have passed since he first ventured into the void. Now he possesses powers beyond all imagining—godlike abilities both marvelous and terrible. Now he is revered and feared as savior and avenger, the tamer of monstrous beasts, the destroyer of the dark angel of Chaos—and dearly loved by his devoted bond-brother, Moichi Annai-Nin, and the beautiful, enigmatic, and lethal Chiisai. Now he is Dai-San, the Sunset Warrior. Gone are the days of fire, ice, and necromancy, and yet there are grave perils in this world of illusion—and enemies, once defeated, who seek a way back to this plane, driven by an insatiable need for vengeance. For Chaos must again have its day, and no power in the universe can prevent its terrible reemergence—not even the might of the Sunset Warrior. In the fifth novel of the Sunset Warrior Cycle—an ingenious blending of fantasy, technology, spirit, and swordplay—bestselling author Eric Van Lustbader brings back to life some of the most beloved characters in fantastic literature in a story of danger, loyalty, fate, and friendship. The legend of the Dai-San grows ever stronger as the action-packed epic tale continues.

Using close readings of a range of premodern and modern texts, Atsuko Sakaki focuses on the ways in which Japanese writers and readers revised—or in many cases devised—rhetoric to convey "Chineseness" and how this practice contributed to shaping a national Japanese identity. The volume begins by examining how Japanese travelers in China, and Chinese travelers in Japan, are portrayed in early literary works. An increasing awareness of the diversity of Chinese culture forms a premise for the next chapter, which looks at Japan’s objectification of the Chinese and their works of art from the eighteenth century onward. Chapter 3 examines gender as a factor in the formation and transformation of the Sino-Japanese dyad. Sakaki then continues with an investigation of early modern and modern Japanese representations of intellectuals who were marginalized for their insistence on the value of the classical Chinese canon and literary Chinese. The work concludes with an overview of writing in Chinese by early Meiji writers and the presence of Chinese in the work of modern writer Nakamura Shin’ichiro. A final summary of the book’s major themes makes use of several stories by Tanizaki Jun’ichiro.