Catalog Search Results
1) Hiroshima
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On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. This book, John Hersey's journalistic masterpiece, tells what happened on that day. Told through the memories of survivors, this timeless, powerful and compassionate document has become a classic "that stirs the conscience of humanity" (The New York Times). Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, John Hersey went back to Hiroshima...
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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...
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"Human beings are full of contradictions." Twenty-five-year-old Takako takes up residence for a few months in her uncle Satoru's second-hand bookshop in Jimbicho, Tokyo in the wake of her breakup with her cad of a boyfriend/ coworker and her subsequent resignation. Depressed and unemployed, Takako is glad for the room above the Morisaki Bookshop to hide from the rest of the world even though she doesn't quite enjoy reading. Surrounded by towering...
4) Malice
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Acclaimed bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found brutally murdered in his home on the night before he's planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver. His body is found in his office, a locked room, within his locked house, by his wife and his best friend, both of whom have rock solid alibis. Or so it seems. At the crime scene, Police Detective Kyochiro Kaga recognizes Hidaka's best friend, Osamu Nonoguchi. Years ago when they were both...
5) Japanese inn
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The beguiling story of the Minaguchi-ya, an ancient inn on the Tokaido Road, founded on the eve of the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. Travellers and guests flow into and past the inn - warriors on the march, lovers fleeing to a new life, pilgrims on their merry expeditions, great men going to and from the capital. The story of the Minaguchi-ya is a social history of Japan through 400 years, a ringside seat to some of the most stirring events...
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Ranging from ancient times to modern-day environmental threats, a natural and cultural history of soil explains how an elimination of protective vegetation and an exposure to wind and rain causes severe erosion of cultivated soils, how the use and abuse of soil has shaped human history, and the how the rise of organic and no-till farming holds hope for the future.
7) The thief
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The Thief is a seasoned pickpocket. Anonymous in his tailored suit, he weaves in and out of Tokyo crowds, stealing wallets from strangers so smoothly sometimes he doesn't even remember the snatch. Most people are just a blur to him, nameless faces from whom he chooses his victims. He has no family, no friends, no connections. But he does have a past, which finally catches up with him when Ishikawa, his first partner, reappears in his life, and offers...
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Yasuko Hanaoka thought she had escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day, the situation quickly escalates and Togashi ends up dead. Yasuko's next-door-neighbor Ishigami offers his help, not only disposing of the body, but plotting the cover-up as well.
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This authoritative history of Japan's elite warrior class separates fact from myth as it chronicles centuries of samurai combat, culture, and legend.
In Legends of the Samurai, Hiroaki Sato examines the history of these medieval Japanese warriors, as well as the many long-standing myths that surround them. In doing so, he presents an authentic and revealing picture of these men and their world. Sato's masterful translations of original samurai tales,...
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"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...
11) Grenade
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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...
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I survived volume 8
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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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Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength...
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When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside, to get to know Kyoto, one of the loveliest old cities in the world, and to find out something about Japanese culture today -- not the world of businessmen and production lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons and the silence of temples, of the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives on behind...
15) The gun
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"On a nighttime walk along a Tokyo riverbank, a young man named Nishikawa stumbles on a dead body, besides which is lying a gun. From the moment Nishikawa makes the decision to take the gun, the world around him blurs. Knowing he possesses the gun brings an intoxicating sense of purpose to his dull university life. But Nishikawa's personal entanglements are becoming unexpectedly complicated: he finds himself romantically involved with two women, while...
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Rei Shimura mysteries volume 2
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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.
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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...
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"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...
19) Breasts and eggs
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"Breasts and Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the thirty-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko's daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement...
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"Tokyo is ground zero for Japan's popular "geek" or otaku culture--a phenomenon that has now swept across the globe. This is the most comprehensive guide to Tokyo's geeky underworld ever produced. It provides a comprehensive run-down on each major Tokyo district where geeks congregate, shop, play and hang outfrom hi-tech Akihabara and trendy Harajuku to newer and lesser-known haunts like chic Shimo-Kita and working-class Ikebukuro."--Amazon.com.
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