Recommendations based on "My Friend Hitler"

A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and EmptinessFinalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award“A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

Isao is a young, engaging patriot, and a fanatical believer in the ancient samurai ethos. He turns terrorist, organising a violent plot against the new industrialists, who he believes are threatening the integrity of Japan and usurping the Emperor's rightful power. As the conspiracy unfolds and unravels, Mishima brilliantly chronicles the conflicts of a decade that saw the fabric of Japanese life torn apart.

Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem―ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.She is an astute young Housekeeper―with a ten-year-old son―who is hired to care for the Professor.And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor's mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities―like the Housekeeper's shoe size―and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

Yasuko hanaoka accidentally kills her ex-husband, when circumstances rose to an unendurable level of ghastly behaviour from him. What follows is an elongated and witty brain-game between the investigator and her accomplice, ishigami, who aided yasuko in covering up the murder. The devotion of suspect x is the story about an ingenious plotter, and clever dr manabu yukawa, who helps in solving the case. Yasuko hanaoka works in a restaurant. She is divorced, and is a single mother to misato. Her ex-husband, togashi, was an abusive man, stalking and extorting money from her. With similar intentions, he showed up at yasuko’s home, this time threatening to kill her and her daughter if she refused to lend him money. What started from denial, reached to a heated argument, and within a short span of time, turned to a nasty fight. In the spur of the moment, yasuko killed togashi. Hearing the commotion in their apartment, tetsuya ishigami came into the picture. Ishigami was a middle-aged, singl

What if you woke up one morning, and everything changed?It's one week before Christmas Eve, and Haruhi and the S.O.S. Brigade (a club for her high school's strangest and most extraordinary students) are gearing up for holiday festivities. But just before the fun kicks off, Kyon, the only 'normal' member, wakes up in a weird alternate dimension, one where Haruhi attends another school entirely, Nagato the time traveling robot is just an ordinary human, and Mikuru (the cute girl of Kyon's dreams) doesn't even recognize him-in other words, S.O.S. Brigade never existed.The only clue Kyon can find is a bookmark left by the robot version of Nagato, which leads him on a quest back in time, where he interacts with the storyline from 'Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody', a short story from the previous Haruhi book, The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya. This fun and quirky holiday tale is reminiscent of A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life

In April 1926, the Japanese poet Taneda Santoka (1882–1940) set off on the first of many walking trips, journeys in which he tramped thousands of miles through the Japanese countryside. These journeys were part of his religious training as a Buddhist monk as well as literary inspiration for his memorable and often painfully moving poems. The works he wrote during this time comprise a record of his quest for spiritual enlightenment.Although Santoka was master of conventional-style haiku, which he wrote in his youth, the vast majority of his works, and those for which he is most admired, are in free-verse form. He also left a number of diaries in which he frequently recorded the circumstances that had led to the composition of a particular poem or group of poems. In For All My Walking, master translator Burton Watson makes Santoka's life story and literary journeys available to English-speaking readers and students of haiku and Zen Buddhism. He allows us to meet Santoka directly, not by withholding his own opinions but by leaving room for us to form our own. Watson's translations bring across not only the poetry but also the emotional force at the core of the poems.This volume includes 245 of Santoka's poems and of excerpts from his prose diary, along with a chronology of his life and a compelling introduction that provides historical and biographical context to Taneda Santoka's work.

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.

These translated poems were written by 2 ladies of the Heian court of Japan between the ninth and eleventh centuries A.D. The poems speak intimately of their authors' sexual longing, fulfillment and disillusionment.