Essays in Idleness and Hôjôki

Author	Yūko Tsushima
ISBN	0241312191

Territory of Light is the luminous story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her three-year-old daughter. Its twelve, stand-alone fragments follow the first year of her separation from her husband. The novel is full of light, sometimes comforting and sometimes dangerous: sunlight streaming...

Author	Natsume Sōseki
ISBN	0809260956

A languid, melancholic dream of a novel which pierces the heart of the reader with its quiet intensity.

Cautious in its narrative tread on the ground of contentious issues, delicate in its broaching of subjects like the indignity of death, sin and redemption, existentialist ennui, self-recrimination...

Author	Sei Shōnagon
ISBN	0231073372

"The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon" is a fascinating, detailed account of Japanese court life in the eleventh century. Written by a lady of the court at the height of Heian culture, this book enthralls with its lively gossip, witty observations, and subtle impressions.

Lady Shonagon was an erstwhile...

Author	Matsuo Bashō
ISBN	0140441859

In later life Basho turned to Zen Buddhism, and the travel sketched in this volume relfect his attempts to cast off earthly attachments and reach out to spiritual fulfillment. The sketches are written in the "haibun" style--a linking of verse and prose. The title piece, in particular, reveals Basho...

Author	Kamo no Chōmei
ISBN	1880656221

The single great work of literary witness in medieval Japan, Hojoki is a short social chronicle prompted by a series of calamities that overtook old Kyoto in the late 12th century. By building a rude home in the forest and eliminating desire, poet and Buddhist priest Chomei believed he would be spared...

Author	Yukio Mishima
ISBN	0811213129

One of the most powerful short stories ever written: Yukio Mishima’s masterpiece about the erotics of patriotism and honor, love and suicide.

By now, Yukio Mishima’s (1925-1970) dramatic demise through an act of seppuku after an inflammatory public speech has become the stuff of literary...

Author

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Smelly Souls


What a witty delicious kind of tale :)
Is this the Dostoyevsky we all know?!... The one from Crime and Punishment?!... Or a shrewdly disguised Gogol?!
It seems to me that our usually so dramatic Fyodor is sounding much more like the sarcastic Nicolai in this one! ...

Bobok...

Author	Kenji Miyazawa
ISBN	4770021844

It is time that Kenji Miyazawa, long recognized as a writer of genius in his own country, enjoyed the same reputation abroad. Are his fables, in which acorns quarrel and flowers fret about losing their looks, written for children or adults? They are for both: for adventurous young minds, but also for...