]Black Rain is centered around the story of a young woman who was caught in the radioactive "black rain" that fell after the bombing of Hiroshima. lbuse bases his tale on real-life diaries and interviews with victims of the holocaust; the result is a book that is free from sentimentality yetmanages to reveal the magnitude of the human suffering caused by the atom bomb. The life of Yasuko, on whom the black rain fell, is changed forever by periodic bouts of radiation sickness and the suspicion that her future children, too, may be affected. lbuse tempers the horror of his subject with the gentle humor for which he is famous. His sensitivity to the complex web of emotions in a traditional community torn asunder by this historical event has made Black Rain one of the most acclaimed treatments of the Hiroshima story.

Product Description: Two brothers, takashi and mitsu, return from tokyo to the village of their childhood. Selling their family home leads them to an inescapable confrontation with their family history. Their attempt to escape the influence of the city ends in failure as they realize that its tentacles extend to everything in the countryside, including their own relationship...read more

Product Description: This is the fascinating true story of a Japanese boy's growing disillusionment with the conduct of a patriotic war. Boy H's father was a tailor, his mother a tambourine-banging Christian in a country of very few Christians. His childhood unfolded in the 1930s, when militarism was steadily strengthening its grip on Japan; it ended when the nation lay in ruins...read more

Product Description: Enter the fascinating world of bonsai, the centuries-old gardening art form of cultivating trees as potted plants. Refined to a high art in Japan, bonsai offers not only the familiar gardening delights but also, at its highest levels, a philosophical and aesthetic communion with nature...read more

Product Description: Enjoy it for its sheer beauty or use it for inspiration while creating your own small landscape garden.Japanese gardening is the art of arranging plants, rocks, lanterns, and basins in an open or, as here, an enclosed space. According to the aesthetic principles long prevailing in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, even two rocks arranged in a tiny, enclosed space can be considered a garden...read more

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Product Description: An illustrated introduction to the colourful world of traditional Japanese celebrations. The book provides an insight into an aspect of Japanese culture rarely seen outside of Japan, with many photographs exploring the human and individual aspects of the whole festival experience...read more

Product Description: 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 older readers in whom the spark of curiosity, combined with a taste for fantasy and a love of language, is still alight...read more

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Product Description: This is the true story, as told to the doctor who looked after him just before he died, of the life of one of the last traditional yakuza in Japan. It wasn't a "good" life, in either sense of the word, but it was an adventurous one; and the tale he has to tell presents an honest and oddly attractive picture of an insider in that separate, unofficial world...read more

The narrator's settled life of material comfort and easy sexual pleasure is suddenly disturbed by unwelcome memories and premonitions and by the inexplicable new demands of his previously docile women

Product Description: This collection of short stories displays Masuji Ibuse's style of satire to wry lyricism.

The first comprehensive collection in English of the controversial Japanese writer's short fiction includes stories from throughout his career, dealing with love and sexuality, the union of mind and body, and other themes

Product Description: Here, at last, is the definitive guide to the beauty of bonsai, the centuries-old gardening form transmitted from China and refined to a high art in Japan. 130 color and 70 black-and-white photos; 40 line drawings.