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Author
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Description
1799, Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor. Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk, has a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city's powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken--the consequences of which will extend beyond Jacob's worst imaginings.
2) 1Q84: novel
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Formats
Description
An ode to George Orwell's "1984" told in alternating male and female voices relates the stories of Aomame, an assassin for a secret organization who discovers that she has been transported to an alternate reality, and Tengo, a mathematics lecturer and novice writer.
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Description
An elegant and intellectual work, The Book of Tea was written in 1906 by Kakuzo Okakura, a brilliant Japanese man with an early education in English. Through his intimate knowledge of Japanese aesthetics and ability to effectively communicate them to a Western audience, Okakura is able to discuss Teaism and its impact on Japanese culture, thought, and life in an informative and profound way. He develops this theory by explaining the history and universality...
Author
Lexile measure
630L
Description
Hospitalized with the dreaded atom bomb disease, leukemia, a child in Hiroshima races against time to fold one thousand paper cranes to verify the legend that by doing so a sick person will become healthy.Includes a section on "How to fold a paper crane."Good luck signs -- Peace Day -- Sadako's secret -- A secret no longer -- The Golden Crane -- Kenji -- Hundreds of wishes -- Last days -- Racing with the wind.
Author
Description
"Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists had a different view. This 'Bomber Mafia' asked:...
Author
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Description
"For fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a charming, internationally bestselling Japanese novel about how the perfect book recommendation can change a readers' life. What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo's most enigmatic librarian. For Sayuri Komachi is able to sense exactly what each visitor to her library is searching for and provide just the book recommendation to help them find it. A restless retail assistant looks to gain new skills, a mother...
7) Grenade
Author
Description
On April 1, 1945 with the battle of Okinawa beginning, fourteen-year-old native Okinawan Hideki, drafted into the Blood and Iron Student Corps, is handed two grenades and told to go kill American soldiers; small for his age Hideki does not really want to kill anyone, he just wants to find his family, and his struggle across the island will finally bring him face-to-face with Ray, a marine in his very first battle--and the choice he makes then will...
Author
Series
I survived volume 8
Description
A massive earthquake and devastating tsunami hit Japan while Ben is visiting his late father's hometown, pulling Ben's family apart and leaving him stranded in a strange country during an epic disaster.
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Formats
Description
From the Publisher: It is Tokyo in 1939. On the Street of a Thousand Blossoms, two orphaned brothers dream of a future firmly rooted in tradition. The older boy, Hiroshi, shows early signs of promise at the national obsession of sumo wrestling, while Kenji is fascinated by the art of Noh theater masks. But as the ripples of war spread to their quiet neighborhood, the brothers must put their dreams on hold-and forge their own paths in a new Japan....
Author
Series
Rei Shimura mysteries volume 2
Formats
Description
In Tokyo, American antique dealer and sleuth Rei Shimura pays too much for a tansu (chest of drawers). When the man who sold it to her is found murdered, she must find the secret of the tansu to solve the murder.
Author
Formats
Description
Harry Niles, whose fluency in Japanese idioms of culture and language was honed for years as a missionary brat, knows that there is just one chance for him to leave Japan before war breaks out. A wheeler-dealer of the first order, he must extricate himself from the love affairs, vendettas, investigations, and outright cons that he has perpetrated over the years. Strongly suspected of being a spy by both Japan and the United States, Harry plays both...
Author
Series
Appears on list
Description
"It is a normal afternoon in Sussex when Russell and Holmes return home to find a peculiar addition to their garden: a beautiful stone that once occupied the Imperial gardens in Kyoto. The stone immediately recalls the spring of 1924, when, on their way back from India (The Game), Russell and Holmes agreed to perform a small but exceedingly dangerous job for the emperor of Japan. At the time, Russell encountered a young Japanese woman on board their...
Author
Description
"Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers' style of dress and speech...
Author
Series
Tales of the Otori volume 1
Description
In his black-walled fortress at Inuyama, the warlord Iida Sadamu surveys his famous nightingale floor. Constructed with exquisite skill, it sings at the tread of each human foot. No assassin can cross it unheard.
The youth Takeo has been brought up in a remote mountain village among the Hidden, a reclusive and spiritual people who have taught him only the ways of peace. But unbeknownst to him, his father was a celebrated assassin and a member of...
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Edition
First edition.
Description
Yoshio delights in the everyday sounds of Tokyo, but when a musician tells him that her favorite sound is ma, the Japanese word for silence, Yoshio sets out to hear this sound for himself among the hustle and bustle of the city. Includes information on the Japanese concept of ma.
17) The Pearl diver
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Formats
Description
In 1948, a nineteen-year-old pearl diver's dreams of spending her life combing the waters of Japan's Inland Sea are shattered when she discovers she has leprosy. By law, she is exiled to an island leprosarium, where she is stripped of her dignity and instructed to forget her past. Her name is erased from her family records, and she is forced to select a new one. To the two thousand patients on the island of Nagashima, she becomes Miss Fuji. Although...
18) Idoru
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Series
Formats
Description
21st century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Neon rain. Light everywhere blowing under any door you might try to close. Where the New Buildings, the largest in the world, erect themselves unaided, their slow rippling movements like the contractions of a sea-creature . . . Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is an intuitive fisher for patterns of information, the "signature" an individual creates simply by going about the business of living....
Author
Description
Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning 'red pine', and Oumi, 'blue sea', while the girls' names were Shirane, 'white root', and Kurono, 'black field'. Tazaki was the only last name with no colour in it. One day Tsukuru Tazaki's friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him, ever again. Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through...
Author
Series
Tales of the Otori volume 3
Description
Takeo, secretly wed to his beloved Kaede, sets out to help her reclaim her lands and avenge the deaths of his biological and adoptive fathers, all the while aware of the prophecy that he must fight five battles--four to win, and one to lose.
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