Recommendations based on "The Typhoon Lover (The Rei Shimura Series, 8)"

Tokyo, 1912. The closed world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders - rich provincial familes, a new and powerful political and social elite. Kiyoaki has been raised among the elegant Ayakura family - members of the waning aristocracy - but he is not one of them. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new, and his feelings for the exquisite, spirited Satoko, observed from the sidelines by his devoted friend Honda. When Satoko is engaged to a royal prince, Kiyoaki realises the magnitude of his passion.

Tina Suzuki has just begun her first year of graduate study. Born and raised in San Francisco by her Japanese immigrant mother, Tina knows nothing about the rest of her family, and very little about her cultural heritage. But when her boyfriend's Japanese calligraphy teacher suffers a stroke, loses his ability to communicate, but continues to create magnificent calligraphic art, Tina knows she has stumbled across an ideal research subject. Getting people to cooperate with her research is an entirely different matter. The blank personal history presented by her mother is in fact a tightly wound scroll full of scandalous secrets. Tina's studies lead to revelations about her own family - secrets she would never have expected. Juxtaposed with Tina's story is that of the stricken calligraphy teacher as a young man in Kyoto, and the history of the ancient inkstone he carries with him.

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.

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.

Akutagawa was one of the towering figures of modern Japanese literature, and is considered the father of the Japanese short story. This paradigmatic selection, which includes the stories that inspired Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, showcases the terrible beauty, cynicism, sublime pain and absurd humour of his writing.'One never tires of reading and re-reading his best works. The elegantly spare style has a truly spine-tingling brilliance' - Haruki Murakami

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.

A major new collection of Japanese short stories, many appearing in English for the first time, with an introduction by Haruki Murakami, author of Killing CommendatoreA Penguin Classics HardcoverThis fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the art of the Japanese short story, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the remarkable practitioners writing today. Edited by acclaimed translator Jay Rubin, who has himself freshly translated some of the stories, and with an introduction by Haruki Murakami, this book is a revelation.Stories by writers already well known to English-language readers are included--like Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Murakami, Mishima, Kawabata, and Yoshimoto--as well as many surprising new finds. From Yuko Tsushima's "Flames" to Yuten Sawanishi's "Filling Up with Sugar" to Shin'ichi Hoshi's "Shoulder-Top Secretary" to Banana Yoshimoto's "Bee Honey," The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories is filled with fear, charm, beauty, and comedy.For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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

Yasuko lives a quiet life, working in a Tokyo bento shop, a good mother to her only child. But when her ex-husband appears at her door without warning one day, her comfortable world is shattered.When Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police tries to piece together the events of that day, he finds himself confronted by the most puzzling, mysterious circumstances he has ever investigated. Nothing quite makes sense, and it will take a genius to understand the genius behind this particular crime...

The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Gail Tsukiyama's The Samurai's Garden uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for this extraordinary story.A 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight.Matsu is a samurai of the soul, a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world, and Stephen is a noble student, learning to appreciate Matsu's generous and nurturing way of life and to love Matsu's soulmate, gentle Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy.