Empfehlungen basierend auf "The Girl from the Well"

Kafka on the Shore follows the fortunes of two remarkable characters. Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. Their parallel odysseys are enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerising dramas. Cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghostlike pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since WWII. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle. Murakami's novel is at once a classic quest, but it is also a bold exploration of mythic and contemporary taboos, of patricide, of mother-love, of sister-love. Above all it is an entertainment of a very high order.

A "dreamlike and compelling” tour de force (Chicago Tribune)—an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II.Now with a new introduction by the author.In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

Fourteen tales selected from the breadth of Dazai’s fabled career, some never before seen in EnglishNo one really understands how we suffer. One day, when we’re adults, we may come to recall this suffering, this misery, as silly and laughable, but how are we to get through the long, hateful period until then? No one bothers to teach us that.Osamu Dazai was a master raconteur who plumbed―in an addictive, easy style―the absurd complexities of life in a society whose expectations cannot be met without sacrificing one's individual ideals on the altar of conformity. The gravitational pull of his prose is on full display in these stories. In “Lantern,” a young woman, in love with a well-born but impoverished student, shoplifts a bathing suit for him―and ends up in the local newspaper indicted as a crazed, degenerate communist. In “Chiyojo,” a high-school girl shows early promise as a writer, but as her uncle and mother relentlessly push her to pursue a literary career, she must ask herself: is this what I really want? Or am I supposed to fulfill their own frustrated ambitions? In “Shame,” a young reader writes a fan letter to a writer she admires, only to find out, upon visiting him, that he’s a bourgeoise sophisticate nothing like the desperate rebels he portrays, and decides (in true Dazai style): “Novelists are human trash. No, they’re worse than that; they’re demons. . . They write nothing but lies.”This collection of 14 tales―a half-dozen of which have never before appeared in English―is based on a Japanese collection of, as Dazai described them, “soliloquies by female narrators.” No One Knows includes the quietly brilliant long story “Schoolgirl” and shows the fiction of this 20th-century genius in a fresh light.

The private collections of longtime Japan resident and expert on modern Japanese culture Donald Richie capture the personalities of certain Japanese people--some famous, some unknown--with insight and humor.This extraordinary collection of individual portraits is perhaps the first book about the Japanese to view them entirely unhindered by the various theories about them—people as complicated, as simple, as inscrutable, and as understandable as anyone else.In these fifty–four pieces there are both the famous—Mishima, Kawabata, Mifune, Kurosawa—and the unknown: the would–be geisha, the ex–boxer turned gangster, the scheming bar madame and the old man dying alone. Here is the notorious Sada Abe, who mutilated her dead lover and whose story was filmed in Oshima's The Realm of the SensesAnd here is Oshima himself, dead drunk and making perfect sense; here is the actress who played Abe, exiled in Rome. Here too is the delivery boy who kills himself for love, the girl who loved a Korean, and the actress, a public idol, who suddenly and permanently disappeared from view.And there are dozens of others, individuals who have in common, besides their Japanese nationality, the fact that they knew the author, and that —fortunatly for us—he knew them. This highly personal reminiscences form one of the most original and deeply felt books on Japan ever to appear.

The first novel of Mishima's landmark tetralogy, The Sea of fertility Spring Snow is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders -- rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power. Among this rising new elite are the ambitious Matsugae, whose son has been raised in a family of the waning aristocracy, the elegant and attenuated Ayakura. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new -- fiercely loving and hating the exquisite, spirited Ayakura Satoko. He suffers in psychic paralysis until the shock of her engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion, and leads to a love affair that is as doomed as it was inevitable.

"The danger posed by nuclear weapons is as great as ever, yet few people survive who witnessed their horror. Nakazawa's manga illustrates the true impact of nuclear weapons when used against a civilian population. It is vital reading for people of all ages, and especially for today's youth. By keeping this tragedy in our collective consciousness, we can strive to never repeat it and guide humanity towards a course of peace. Cartoonist Keiji Nakazawa was seven years old and living in Hiroshima in the early days of August 1945 when the city was destroyed by an atomic bomb dropped by the U.S.A. Starting a few months before that event, his ten- volume saga shows life in Japan after years of war and privations, as seen through the eyes of seven-year-old Gen Nakaoka." --

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 danger posed by nuclear weapons is as great as ever, yet few people survive who witnessed their horror. Nakazawa's manga illustrates the true impact of nuclear weapons when used against a civilian population. It is vital reading for people of all ages, and especially for today's youth. By keeping this tragedy in our collective consciousness, we can strive to never repeat it and guide humanity towards a course of peace. Cartoonist Keiji Nakazawa was seven years old and living in Hiroshima in the early days of August 1945 when the city was destroyed by an atomic bomb dropped by the U.S.A. Starting a few months before that event, his ten- volume saga shows life in Japan after years of war and privations, as seen through the eyes of seven-year-old Gen Nakaoka." --

"Guri and Gura accidentally trip over a piece of yarn while out on a picnic one fine day. In true-to-themselves fashion, they unravel this mystery with a new friendship and a good meal. The two field mice Guri and Gura are the beloved companions of generations of Japanese children; now translated into English, the Guri and Gura series can enchant a new audience."

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. Travelers 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 of a stirring period.