Recommendations based on "Early Light"

He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper who is entrusted to take care of him. Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.

Mitsuha, a high school girl living in a small town in the mountains, has a dream that she's a boy living in Tokyo. Taki, a high school boy in Tokyo, dreams he's a girl living in a quaint little mountain town. Sharing bodies, relationships, and lives, the two become inextricably interwoven--but are any connections truly inseverable in the grand tapestry of fate? Written by director MAKOTO SHINKAI during the production of the film by the same title, your name. is in turns funny, heartwarming, and heart-wrenching as it follows the struggles of two young people determined to hold on to one another.

In this literary tour de force, novelist Arthur Golden enters a remote and shimmeringly exotic world. For the protagonist of this peerlessly observant first novel is Sayuri, one of Japan's most celebrated geisha, a woman who is both performer and courtesan, slave and goddess.We follow Sayuri from her childhood in an impoverished fishing village, where in 1929, she is sold to a representative of a geisha house, who is drawn by the child's unusual blue-grey eyes. From there she is taken to Gion, the pleasure district of Kyoto. She is nine years old. In the years that follow, as she works to pay back the price of her purchase, Sayuri will be schooled in music and dance, learn to apply the geisha's elaborate makeup, wear elaborate kimono, and care for a coiffure so fragile that it requires a special pillow. She will also acquire a magnanimous tutor and a venomous rival. Surviving the intrigues of her trade and the upheavals of war, the resourceful Sayuri is a romantic heroine on the order of Jane Eyre and Scarlett O'Hara. And Memoirs of a Geisha is a triumphant work - suspenseful, and utterly persuasive.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Will Meiko find her place in the world, or will the world force her to fit?Meiko Inoue is a recent college grad working as an office lady in a job she hates. Her boyfriend Naruo is permanently crashing at her apartment because his job as a freelance illustrator doesn't pay enough for rent. And her parents in the country keep sending her boxes of veggies that just rot in her fridge. Straddling the line between her years as a student and the rest of her life, Meiko struggles with the feeling that she's just not cut out to be a part of the real world.

- Half A Million Copies Sold - Winner Of The Japan Booksellers Award Voted For By The Booksellers Across Japan - Convenience Store Woman With A Fantasy Twist, Exploring Mental Health And Anxiety Issues In Modern-day Japan. Seven Students Are Avoiding Going To School, Hiding In Their Darkened Bedrooms, Unable To Face Their Family And Friends, Until The Moment They Discover A Portal Into Another World That Offers Temporary Escape From Their Stressful Lives. Passing Through A Glowing Mirror, They Gather In A Magnifcent Castle Which Becomes Their Playground And Refuge During School Hours. The Students Are Tasked With Locating A Key, Hidden Somewhere In The Castle, That Will Allow Whoever Finds It To Be Granted One Wish. At This Moment, The Castle Will Vanish, Along With All Memories They May Have Of Their Adventure. If They Fail To Leave The Castle By 5 Pm Every Afternoon, They Will Be Eaten By The Keeper Of The Castle, An Easily Provoked And Shrill Creature Named The Wolf Queen. Delving Into Their Emotional Lives With Sympathy And A Generous Warmth, Lonely Castle Shows The Unexpected Rewards Of Reaching Out To Others. Exploring Vivid Human Stories With A Twisty And Puzzle-like Plot, This Heart-warming Novel Is Full Of Joy And Hope For Anyone Touched By Sadness And Vulnerability. Readers Love Lonely Castle In The Mirror: - Ms. Tsujimura Often Deals With Important Themes, But What I Like Is You're Left With An Upbeat Feeling After You Finish. - I Shed Some Tears This Time, Too, At The End. - I Got Gooseflesh I Don't Know How Many Times As I Read This - I Couldn't Stop Crying At The Ending And The Epilogue. - I'd Like My Daughter To Read This, And Look Forward To Her Thoughts. - Rare Is The Novel That Is This Sad, Surprising, Moving, And Heart-warming. Shows How Important It Is When People Reach Out And Help Each Other.

The door never changes, but the rooms behind it do. Bonsai artist Shiori Ametsuchi never knows where the door will lead her next. All she is sure of is that whoever she finds in these rooms will be dead before she leaves. Since she woke up without any memory of her past, Shiori has been thrust into a life of walking through a mysterious door and visiting people in their last moments. The door takes Shiori and the souls to rooms containing the present, past, and possibility, experiences the souls need to finally move on. Shiori is resigned to a life without a past, until she learns that like the people she visits, she is dying too. And Shiori knows too well what happens to people who die without knowing who they are. They get lost. Shiori races to discover her past, accompanied by Aiden, a man who will be dead by morning. While Shiori remembers nothing, Aiden cannot forget a single moment of his life, no matter how hard he tries. Together, they journey through burning rooms, dark rooms, rooms with monsters and angels, and rooms that aren’t rooms at all. As they piece together Shiori’s past, they learn the truth that lives between the border of loneliness and living, forgiveness and freedom, and death and dreams.

Hiroshima-born Sadako is lively and athletic--the star of her school's running team. And then the dizzy spells start. Soon gravely ill with leukemia, the "atom bomb disease," Sadako faces her future with spirit and bravery. Recalling a Japanese legend, Sadako sets to work folding paper cranes. For the legend holds that if a sick person folds one thousand cranes, the gods will grant her wish and make her healthy again. Based on a true story, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes celebrates the extraordinary courage that made one young woman a heroine in Japan.

The reissue of this classic manga's first volume has impeccable timing. It recounts the bombing of Hiroshima from the perspective of a young boy, Gen, and his family. But the book's themes (the physical and psychological damage ordinary people suffer from war's realities) ring chillingly true today. Despite its harrowing nature, this work is invaluable for the lessons it offers in history, humanity and compassion. Published to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.

Logos Bookstore Association Award Dallas Willard Center Book Award Finalist Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist World Magazine's Best Books Aldersgate Prize by the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University ECPA Top Shelf Book Cover Award Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year Missio Alliance Essential Reading ListShusaku Endo's novel Silence, first published in 1966, endures as one of the greatest works of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Its narrative of the persecution of Christians in seventeenth-century Japan raises uncomfortable questions about God and the ambiguity of faith in the midst of suffering and hostility.Endo's Silence took internationally renowned visual artist Makoto Fujimura on a pilgrimage of grappling with the nature of art, the significance of pain and his own cultural heritage. His artistic faith journey overlaps with Endo's as he uncovers deep layers of meaning in Japanese history and literature, expressed in art both past and present. He finds connections to how faith is lived in contemporary contexts of trauma and glimpses of how the gospel is conveyed in Christ-hidden cultures.In this world of pain and suffering, God often seems silent. Fujimura's reflections show that light is yet present in darkness, and that silence speaks with hidden beauty and truth.

The new novel from the award-winning translator of Sweet Bean Paste Winner of the Naoki Prize Winner of the Society of Authors Sasakawa Foundation Prize Perfect for fans of The Guest Cat and Before the Coffee Gets Cold 'It's no wonder the author won the prestigious Naoki Prize for this novel, which is at times heartwarming and suspenseful, detailing true resilience and survival.' Belfast Telegraph 'Everyone, please read this English translation and keep a handkerchief nearby.' Nozomi Abe, Sasakawa Prize judge One dog changes the life of everyone who takes him in on his journey to reunite with his first owner in this inspiring tribute to the bond between humans and dogs and the life-affirming power of connection. Following a devastating earthquake and tsunami, a young man in Japan finds a stray dog outside a convenience store. The dog's tag says "Tamon," a name evocative of the guardian deity of the north. The man decides to keep Tamon, becoming the first in a series of owners as the dog journeys south to find the boy whom disaster tore him from. Over the course of five years, Tamon will be taken into six vastly different homes, the final one belonging to his beloved first owner, Hikaru, a boy who has not spoken since the trauma of the tsunami. An agent of fate, Tamon is a gift to everyone who welcomes him into their life. At once heart-rending and heart-warming, intimate and panoramic, suspenseful and luminous, this bestselling, award-winning novel weaves a feel-good tale of survival, resilience, and love beyond measure. "Heartrending . . . Powerfully demonstrates how love and loyalty can overcome obstacles . . . and how a dog's love can save a person in every possible way." Booklist "Affecting . . . Moving . . . Never feels sentimental or overdrawn . . . [Seishu Hase] proves himself a gifted storyteller." Publishers Weekly "Heartbreakingly moving in its simplicity . . . A touching meditation on shining lights in the face of trauma and hopelessness." Kirkus Reviews