Empfehlungen basierend auf "Sweetness and Lightning 7"

Alternate cover edition here.High-class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic 13-year-old dropout with a passion for Talking Heads. A hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. A one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem. Combine this offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose and out comes Dance Dance Dance.

A child prodigy with a talent for languages and an insatiable thirst for knowledge, Ludo shares with his single mother, Sibylla, an obsession with Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, absorbing its lessons in Samurai virtue, and embarks on a quest to find his father, approaching seven men to test their worthiness. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

"What a good dog you are. What a fine dog you are. Hachi, you are the best dog in all of Japan."Professor Ueno speaks these words to his faithful dog before boarding the train to work every morning. And every afternoon, just before three o'clock, Hachi is at the train station to greet his beloved master. One day, the train arrives at the station without the professor. Hachi waits.For ten years, Hachi waits for his master to return. Not even Yasuo, the young boy who takes care of Hachi, can persuade him to leave his post.Hachiko Waits, a novel inspired by a true story, brings to life the legendary Akita who became a national symbol for loyalty and devotion. This is a must-read for dog lovers of all ages.Hachiko Waits is a 2005 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Yasuko lives a quiet life, working in a Tokyo bento shop, a good mother to her only child. But when her ex-husband appears at her door without warning one day, her comfortable world is shattered.When Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police tries to piece together the events of that day, he finds himself confronted by the most puzzling, mysterious circumstances he has ever investigated. Nothing quite makes sense, and it will take a genius to understand the genius behind this particular crime...

The haunting and poignant story of a how a young Japanese girl's understanding of the historic and tragic bombing of Hiroshima is transformed by a memorial lantern-floating ceremony.Twelve-year-old Nozomi lives in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. She wasn't even born when the bombing of Hiroshima took place. Every year Nozomi joins her family at the lantern-floating ceremony to honor those lost in the bombing. People write the names of their deceased loved ones along with messages of peace, on paper lanterns and set them afloat on the river. This year Nozomi realizes that her mother always releases one lantern with no name. She begins to ask questions, and when complicated stories of loss and loneliness unfold, Nozomi and her friends come up with a creative way to share their loved ones' experiences. By opening people's eyes to the struggles they all keep hidden, the project teaches the entire community new ways to show compassion.Soul Lanterns is an honest exploration of what happened on August 6, 1945, and offers readers a glimpse not only into the rich cultural history of Japan but also into the intimate lives of those who recognize--better than most--the urgent need for peace.

This fascinating collection gave birth to a new paradigm when Akira Kurosawa made famous Akutagawa's disturbing tale of seven people recounting the same incident from shockingly different perspectives. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ryunosuke Akutagawa created disturbing stories out of Japan's cultural upheaval. Whether his fictions are set centuries past or close to the present, Akutagawa was a modernist, writing in polished, superbly nuanced prose subtly exposing human needs and flaws. "In a Grove," which was the basis for Kurosawa's classic film Rashomon, tells the chilling story of the killing of a samurai through the testimony of witnesses, including the spirit of the murdered man. The fable-like "Yam Gruel" is an account of desire and humiliation, but one in which the reader's sympathy is thoroughly unsettled. And in "The Martyr," a beloved orphan raised by Jesuit priests is exiled when he refuses to admit that he made a local girl pregnant. He regains their love and respect only at the price of his life. All six tales in the collection show Akutagawa as a master storyteller and an exciting voice of modern Japanese literature.

In "Memoirs of a Geisha," we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. Sayuri's story begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. Through her eyes, we see the decadent heart of Gion -- the geisha district of Kyoto -- with its marvelous teahouses and theaters, narrow back alleys, ornate temples, and artists' streets. And we witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup and hair; competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money that goes with it.But as World War II erupts and the geisha houses are forced to close, Sayuri, with little money and even less food, must reinvent herself all over again to find a rare kind of freedom on her own terms. "Memoirs of a Geisha" is a book of nuance and vivid metaphor, of memorable characters rendered with humor and pathos. And though the story is rich with detail and a vast knowledge of history, it is the transparent, seductive voice of Sayuri that the reader remembers.

Enter a world of samurai and geishas, ninjas and Zen masters in this “rousing tale of Shogun Japan” (New York Post) from the acclaimed author of Autumn Bridge.“Triumphant . . . terrific . . . This is a riveting read, alternately playful and suspenseful.”—PeopleThe year is 1861. After two centuries of isolation, Japan has opened its doors to the West. And as foreign ships threaten to rain destruction on the Shogun’s castle in Edo, a small group of American missionaries has arrived to spread the word of their God. They have yet to realize that their future in Japan has already been foreseen. For a young nobleman has dreamt that his life will be saved by an outsider in the New Year . . . and it is said that Lord Genji has the gift of prophecy. What happens next—when the handsome lord meets an apparently reformed gunslinger and a woman in flight from her own destructive beauty—sets the stage for a remarkable adventure. For as this unlikely band embarks on a journey through a landscape bristling with danger, East and West, flesh and spirit, past and future, collide in ways no one—least of all Genji—could have imagined.

Barefoot Gen Volume Eight ―"Merchants of Death" ― It's 1950 and Gen is now in middle school, where he meets both a progressive-minded schoolteacher at odds with his conservative superiors, and a brilliant but cynical classmate who challenges the teacher's -- and Gen's -- values at every turn. Gen also finds himself confronting the corrosive effects on postwar Hiroshima society of drugs and the arms industry. With the Korean War offering new business opportunities, a new generation of death merchants holds sway in Japan. Gen, his teacher mentor, and other peace-minded citizens are forced to struggle against red-baiting school officials, violent nationalists, and government censorship.

The definitive account of what happened, why, and above all how it felt, when catastrophe hit Japan—by the Japan correspondent of The Times (London) and author of People Who Eat Darkness