Recommendations based on "The Amberglow Candy Store The charming and cosy fable for fans The Dallergut Dream Department Store and Before The Coffee Gets Cold"

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.

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.

Dance Dance Dance—a follow-up to A Wild Sheep Chase—is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through Murakami’s Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs.As Murakami’s nameless protagonist searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, he is plunged into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread. In this propulsive novel, featuring a shabby but oracular Sheep Man, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work today fuses together science fiction, the hardboiled thriller, and white-hot satire.

"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.

“Soseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature.”—Haruki MurakamiThe father of modern Japanese literature's best-loved novel, in its first new English translation in half a centuryNo collection of Japanese literature is complete without Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, his most famous novel and the last he completed before his death. Published here in the first new translation in more than fifty years, Kokoro—meaning "heart"—is the story of a subtle and poignant friendship between two unnamed characters, a young man and an enigmatic elder whom he calls "Sensei." Haunted by tragic secrets that have cast a long shadow over his life, Sensei slowly opens up to his young disciple, confessing indiscretions from his own student days that have left him reeling with guilt, and revealing, in the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between his moral anguish and his student's struggle to understand it, the profound cultural shift from one generation to the next that characterized Japan in the early twentieth century.

Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother who thought she had finally escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day to extort money from her, threatening both her and her teenaged daughter Misato, the situation quickly escalates into violence and Togashi ends up dead on her apartment floor. Overhearing the commotion, Yasuko’s next door neighbor, middle-aged high school mathematics teacher Ishigami, offers his help, disposing not only of the body but plotting the cover-up step-by-step.When the body turns up and is identified, Detective Kusanagi draws the case and Yasuko comes under suspicion. Kusanagi is unable to find any obvious holes in Yasuko’s manufactured alibi and yet is still sure that there’s something wrong. Kusanagi brings in Dr. Manabu Yukawa, a physicist and college friend who frequently consults with the police. Yukawa, known to the police by the nickname Professor Galileo, went to college with Ishigami. After meeting up with him again, Yukawa is convinced that Ishigami had something to do with the murder. What ensues is a high level battle of wits, as Ishigami tries to protect Yasuko by outmaneuvering and outthinking Yukawa, who faces his most clever and determined opponent yet.

Oceans and decades apart, two women are inextricably bound by the secrets between them.Japan, 1957. Seventeen-year-old Naoko Nakamura’s prearranged marriage would secure her family’s status in their traditional Japanese community, but Naoko has fallen for another man—an American sailor—and to marry him would bring great shame upon her family. When it’s learned Naoko carries the sailor’s child, she is cast out in disgrace, forced to make unimaginable choices with far-reaching consequences.America, present day. Tori Kovac finds a letter containing a shocking revelation about her father—one that calls into question everything she understood about her family and herself. Setting out to learn the truth behind the letter, Tori’s journey leads her halfway around the world to a remote seaside village in Japan, where she must confront the demons of the past to pave a way for redemption.In breathtaking prose and inspired by true stories from a devastating and little-known era in Japanese and American history, The Woman in the White Kimono illuminates a searing portrait of one woman torn between her culture and her heart, and another woman on a journey to discover the true meaning of home.

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.

In his perfectly crafted haiku poems, Basho described the natural world with great simplicity and delicacy of feeling. When he composed The Narrow Road to the Deep North he was a serious student of Zen Buddhism setting off on a series of travels designed to strip away the trappings of the material world and bring spiritual enlightenment. He wrote of the seasons changing, of the smell of the rain, the brightness of the moon and the beauty of the waterfall, through which he sensed the mysteries of the universe. These travel writings not only chronicle Basho's perilous journeys through Japan, but also capture his vision of eternity in the transient world around him.

A bestseller in Japan--a beautiful story about shared self-discovery and friendship involving an unlikely group of students who decide to defy the odds and pursue a seemingly impossible goal together. After shoplifting some bread one chilly March night, just before the start of a new academic year at Kansei University in western Tokyo, former high school track and field star Kakeru Kurahara runs through the city streets. Though he has grown disillusioned with the sport, he feels as if he could keep running forever . . . but to where, and for what His revery is broken by a mysterious boy on a bike who has been following him, a fellow student at Kansei University named Haiji Kiyose, who also happens to be a runner. Impressed by Kakeru's agility, Haiji Kiyose persuades Kakeru to move into Chikusei-so, a run-down dormitory where he lives with eight other boys, including identical twins Jota and Joji, honor student Shindo, detail-oriented Yuki, trivia junkie King, Tanzanian international student Musa, nicotine-loving Nico, and manga otaku Prince. None of the students know that Chikusei-so is the historic home of the Kansei University Track and Field team. At Kakeru's welcoming party, Kiyose reveals his grand plan: assembling a 10-man team of runners to compete in the Hakone Ekiden, a legendary college marathon relay race. Except for Kakeru and Kiyose, the Chikusei-so gang aren't athletic--or interested in competing. But Kiyose's enthusiasm wins them over and they agree to this crazy plan. Over the course of ten months, this ragtag team will put aside their differences to pursue an elusive dream . . . and gain so much more than they ever expected. Heartfelt and inspiring, Run with the Wind is a thrilling celebration of what it means to run--for yourself, for others, and with the wind. Translated from the Japanese by Yui Kajita