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Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan

10 best books like Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan (Murasaki Shikibu): The Confessions of Lady Nijō, Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan, The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World, One Hundred Leaves: A new annotated translation of the Hyakunin Isshu, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan, Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation, Autobiography of a Geisha

The Confessions of Lady Nijō
AuthorLady Nijō
ISBN0804709300
In about 1307 a remarkable woman in Japan sat down to complete the story of her life. The result was an autobiographical narrative, a tale of thirty-six years (1271-1306) in the life of Lady Nijo, starting when she became the concubine of a retired emperor in Kyoto at the age of fourteen and ending, several...
Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan
AuthorAlex Kerr
ISBN0809039435
A surprising assessment of the failures and successes of modern Japan.

In Dogs and Demons, Alex Kerr chronicles the many facets of Japan's recent, and chronic, crises -- from the failure of its banks and pension funds to the decline of its once magnificent modern cinema. He is the first to give...
The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan
AuthorMichitsuna no Haha
ISBN0804811237
Kagero Nikki, translated here as The Gossamer Years, belongs to the same period as the celebrated Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikuibu.

This remarkably frank autobiographical diary and personal confession attempts to describe a difficult relationship as it reveals two tempestuous decades...
The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan
AuthorOno no Komachi
ISBN0679729585
Japanese poetry is said to be originated in human heart and mind and grows in to the myriad leaves of words. The collection of poems The Ink Dark Moon is from the Heian era of Japanese literature, the era is considered as Golden Age in the history of Japanese literature. The language in that era was very inflected...
Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World
AuthorKamo no Chōmei
ISBN1880656221
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...
One Hundred Leaves: A new annotated translation of the Hyakunin Isshu
AuthorFujiwara no Teika
The Hyakunin Isshu is a poetry anthology beloved by generations of Japanese since it was compiled in the 13th century. Many Japanese know the poems by heart as a result of playing the popular card game version of the anthology. Collecting one poem each from one hundred poets living from the 7th century...
The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan
AuthorIvan Morris
ISBN1568360290
The World of the Shining Prince, Ivan Morris's widely acclaimed portrait of the ceremonious, inbred, melancholy world of ancient Japan, has been a standard in cultural studies for nearly thirty years. Using as a frame of reference The Tale of Genji and other major literary works from Japan's Heian...
As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan
AuthorLady Sarashina
ISBN0140442820
In the mainstream of Japan's literary tradition, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams not only reveals much that is most appealing in Japanese literature but also stands on its own as a remarkable and haunting portrait of a woman.
Born in A.D. 1008 at the height of the Heian period, Lady Sarashina (as she...
Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation
AuthorVeronica Chambers
ISBN0743271564
Forget the stereotypes. Today's Japanese women are shattering them -- breaking the bonds of tradition and dramatically transforming their culture. Shopping-crazed schoolgirls in Hello Kitty costumes and the Harajuku girls Gwen Stefani helped make so popular have grabbed the media's attention....
Autobiography of a Geisha
AuthorSayo Masuda
ISBN0231129513
The glamorous world of big-city geisha is familiar to many readers, but little has been written of the life of hardship and pain led by the hot-springs-resort geisha. Indentured to geisha houses by families in desperate poverty, deprived of freedom and identity, these young women lived in a world of...
Black Elk: The Sacred Ways of a Lakota
AuthorWallace Black Elk
ISBN0062500740
I wanted to like this book more than 3 stars... it probably deserves more than that. But I fall into the category of people Black Elk refers to as "educated". Which means I've been to school, college, etc and some of the more basic truths have probably been schooled right out of me. I did like the ideas he talks...
Splendid Slippers: A Thousand Years of an Erotic Tradition
AuthorBeverley Jackson
ISBN0898159571
Excellent exploration of the cultural phenomenon of footbinding, along with beautiful photographs. To be honest, I hadn't really thought much about it until reading Lisa See's "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan." Not only does Jackson explore the horrific pain of footbinding, she puts it in good context,...
1000 Poems from the Manyōshū
AuthorŌtomo no Yakamochi
ISBN0486439593
Dating from the 8th century and earlier, the Manyoshu is the oldest Japanese poetry anthology; it is also widely considered to be the best. The 1,000 poems (out of a total of more than 4,500) in this famous selection were chosen by a distinguished scholarly committee based on their poetic excellence,...
Watching the Tree
AuthorAdeline Yen Mah
ISBN0006531547
Adeline Yen Mah, whose autobiography ‘Falling Leaves’ is an international bestseller, here interweaves her own experiences with her views on Chinese thought and wisdom to create an illuminating and highly personal guide for Western readers.

Adeline Yen Mah was born in Tianjin, and...
Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola: Nature, Accident, or Intentional?
AuthorLeonard G. Horowitz
ISBN0923550127
a thick compelling read. He's done a ton of research to link AIDS as a manmade virus and why it appeared in gay & central African populations simultaneously in the late 1970's. As a molecular biologist that deals with pathogenic microorganisms,I find his claims / theory deserve a cold hard look which...
The Tales of Ise
AuthorAnonymous
List of Illustrations
Foreword, by Donald Keene
Introduction & Notes
Further Reading
Note on the Translation and Text

--The Tales of Ise

A Note on the Commentary
Commentary

Appendix 1: Glossary of Literary and Social Conventions
Appendix...
Fresh Fruits
AuthorShoichi Aoki
ISBN0714845108
Presented in an identical format to Phaidon's previous Fruits, published in 2001, Fruits Too is a collection of Tokyo teenage street fashion portraits selected from Japan's premier street fanzine of the same title. Published every month by Shoichi Aoki, who is also the sole photographer for the magazine,...
Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan
AuthorGary P. Leupp
ISBN0520209001
Tokugawa Japan ranks with ancient Athens as a society that not only tolerated, but celebrated, male homosexual behavior. Few scholars have seriously studied the subject, and until now none have satisfactorily explained the origins of the tradition or elucidated how its conventions reflected class...
Memories of Silk and Straw: A Self-Portrait of Small-Town Japan
AuthorJunichi Saga
ISBN0870119885
Come, sit down by the fire, and listen to the grandparents tell stories about "how it was in the old days" in a small lakeside town just north of Tokyo.



Midwives and pawnbrokers, fishermen and thatchers spin tales of a different world--one that was still very much a part of Japan's ancient...
Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō
AuthorYoshida Kenkō
ISBN0231112556
Written sometime between 1330 and 1332, the Essays in Idleness, with their timeless relevance and charm, hardly mirror the turbulent times in which they were born. Despite the struggle between the Emperor Go-Daigo and the usurping Hojo family that rocked Japan during these years, the Buddhist priest...
The Great Mirror of Male Love
AuthorSaikaku Ihara
ISBN0804718954
The first complete translation of Nanshoku okagami by Ihara Saikaku (1642-93), this is a collection of 40 stories describing homosexual love affairs between samurai men and boys and between young kabuki actors and their middle-class patrons. Seventeenth-century Kyoto was the center of a flourishing...
Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.
AuthorRoland Kelts
ISBN1403974756
As a Brit in Japan, I was intrigued by the parallels Kelts sees between the British invasion of the States in the 1960s and the Japanese invasion that has been ongoing since the late '70s or so. Just as the Brits learnt from US (black) culture and re-exported it back to white Americans, the Japanese manga...
Japanese Art
AuthorJoan Stanley-Baker
ISBN0500203261
The uniqueness of Japanese culture rests on the fact that, throughout its history, Japan has continually taken, adapted, and transformed diverse influences from Korea, China, the South Seas, Europe, and the Americas into distinct traditions of its own. Extensively revised, updated, and expanded...
Women of the Pleasure Quarters: The Secret History of the Geisha
AuthorLesley Downer
ISBN0767904907
Ever since Westerners arrived in Japan, they have been intrigued by Japanese womanhood and, above all, by geisha. This fascination has spawned a wealth of extraordinary fictional creations, from Puccini's Madame Butterfly to Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha. But as denizens of a world defined...
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