Recommendations based on "People from My Neighborhood"

Bringing together novelist Osamu Dazai’s best autobiographical shorts in a single, slim volume, Self-Portraits shows the legendary writer at his best―and worst“Art dies the moment it acquires authority.” So said Japan’s quintessential rebel writer Osamu Dazai, who, disgusted with the hypocrisy of every kind of establishment, from the nation’s obsolete aristocracy to its posturing, warmongering generals, went his own way, even when that meant his death―and the death of others. Faced with pressure to conform, he declared his individuality to the world―in all its self-involved, self-conscious, and self-hating glory. “Art,” he wrote, “is ‘I.’”In these short stories, collected and translated by Ralph McCarthy, we can see just how closely Dazai’s life mirrored his art, and vice versa, as the writer/narrator falls from grace, rises to fame, and falls again. Addiction, debt, shame, and despair dogged Dazai until his self-inflicted death, and yet despite all the lies and deception he resorted to in life, there is an almost fanatical honesty to his writing. And that has made him a hero to generations of readers who see laid bare, in his works, the painful, impossible contradictions inherent in the universal commandment of social life―fit in and do as you are told―as well as the possibility, however desperate, of defiance.Long out of print, these stories will be a revelation to the legions of new fans of No Longer Human, The Setting Sun, and The Flowers of Buffoonery.

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.

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.

Junichirō Tanizaki’s magisterial evocation of a proud Osaka family in decline during the years immediately before World War II is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century and a classic of international literature. Tsuruko, the eldest sister of the once-wealthy Makioka family, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her husband prepares to move their household to Tokyo, where that name means nothing. Sachiko compromises valiantly to secure the future of her younger sisters. The shy, unmarried Yukiko is a hostage to her family’s exacting standards, while the spirited Taeko rebels by flinging herself into scandalous romantic alliances and dreaming of studying fashion design in France. Filled with vignettes of a vanishing way of life, The Makioka Sisters is a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family—and an entire society—sliding into the abyss of modernity. It possesses in abundance the keen social insight and unabashed sensuality that distinguish Tanizaki as a master novelist.

Ginko is a master of the ephemeral life-form known as mushi. Their influence can be as visible as a mountain never giving up its winter to allow for spring, or as subtle as a prank played in a child's game. To some they are a curse, to others they offer unimagined possibility. Read the final three volumes of Ginko's journeys in this one remarkable edition!

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, the ten-volume saga shows life in Japan after years of war and privations, as seen through the eyes of seven-year-old Gen Nakaoka. By Volume Seven, Gen has grown old enough to think about the legacy of the victims of the atomic bombing. Picking up from Volume Six, the story opens with Gen searching for a printer willing to publish an eyewitness account of the bombing written by "Papa," the journalist who serves as a father figure to Gen's war orphan friends. By hook and crook Gen and Ryuta manage to get the book printed and distributed, only to arouse the wrath of U.S. Army censors, who teach them a hard lesson about the politics of memory. Meanwhile, Gen's brother Koji returns home at last, only to find that their mother is on her deathbed.

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.

Yoko (winner of the Akutagawa Prize in 1971) is the story of a sensitive young man's relationship with the title character, a beautiful young woman who is suffering from an apparently hereditary mental illness. Through Y¯ko's vivid but distorted perceptions of the world, Furui highlights the process by which reality and identity are created. Above all, however, Yoko is a touching, if somewhat unusual, tale of a young couple's deepening love.The other two short stories in this collection, "The Plain of Sorrows" and "The Doll," deal with the subject of coming to terms with aging and death, thus shifting the focus from the crises of young adulthood to those of middle age."This important author's work has been hard to find in the West, and one is grateful for the translations and accompanying commentaries by Donna George Storey."--William Ferguson, New York Times Book ReviewFurui Yoshikichi has won the Akutagawa Prize (1971), the Nihon Bungaku Taisho¯ (1980), the Tanizaki Prize (1983), the Kawabata Yasunari Prize (1988), and the Yomiuri Prize (1989).Donna George Storey is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Japanese Literature, University of California, Berkeley.

Acclaimed creator Kaoru Mori's tale of life on the nineteenth-century Silk Road turns westward, following Englishman Mr. Smith on his long journey to Ankara. Passing through a fishing village along the Aral Sea, Smith and his guide encounter a pair of spirited young girls named Laila and Leily-identical twins who are fishing not for sturgeon, but for husbands! Despite their efforts to find two wealthy, healthy, and handsome brothers to wed, Laila and Leily's plans generally only land them in loads of trouble!