The Makioka Sisters

Written by Junichiro Tanizaki

Format: Trade Paperback, 544 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 26, 1995
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76164-8 (0-679-76164-0)

In Osaka, in the years immediately before W.W.II, four aristocratic women try to preserve a way of life that is vanishing. The story of the Makioka sisters is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the 20th century, a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family--and society--sliding into the abyss of modernity... Read more >

Naomi

Written by Junichiro Tanizaki

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 10, 2001
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72474-9 (0-375-72474-5)

Na-o-mi. The three syllables of this name, unusual in 1920s Japan, captivate a 28-year-old engineer, who soon becomes infatuated with the girl so named, a teenaged café waitress. Drawn to her Eurasian features and innocent demeanor, Joji is eager to whisk young Naomi away from the seamy underbelly of post—World War... Read more >

Quicksand

Written by Junichiro Tanizaki

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 24, 1995
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76022-1 (0-679-76022-9)

Quicksand is a silkily nuanced novel of erotic gamesmanship and obsession. Sonoko Kakiuchi, an Osaka lady of good family, married to a dully respected lawyer, tells a story of temptation and betrayal. Sonoko is infatuated with the beautiful art student and femme fatale Mitsuko, a woman so seductive and heartless she... Read more >

The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto's Mother
Two Novellas
Written by Junichiro Tanizaki

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 24, 1995
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-75791-7 (0-679-75791-0)

With a precision and brilliance unmatched perhaps by any other novelist of the twentieth century, Junichiro Tanizaki interweaves a sense of his country's deep past with the kind of pathologies and obsessions we are likely to think of as modern. Here, in two eerie and beautiful novellas, he displays this skill... Read more >

The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot
Two Novels
Written by Junichiro Tanizaki

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 11, 2003
Price: $12.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-71931-8 (0-375-71931-8)

From a Japanese master of romantic and sexual obsession come two novels that treat traditional themes with sly wit and startling psychological sophistication. In The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, Junichir Tanizaki reimagines the exploits of a legendary samurai as a sadomasochistic dance between the hero and the wife... Read more >

Seven Japanese Tales

Written by Junichiro Tanizaki

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 1, 1996
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76107-5 (0-679-76107-1)

In these seven stories, the author of The Makioka Sisters explores the territory where love becomes self-annihilation, where the contemplation of beauty gives way to fetishism, and where tradition becomes an instrument of refined cruelty. Read more >

Some Prefer Nettles

Written by Junichiro Tanizaki
Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 26, 1995
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-75269-1 (0-679-75269-2)

This is an exquisitely nuanced novel about the allure of Japanese tradition--and about the profound disquiet that accompanied its passing. This is the tale of Kaname and his wife, Misako, living in Tokyo in the 1920s. Having long since stopped sleeping together, they share a parody of a Western marriage, while... Read more >

Buddha: Volume 5: Deer Park

Written by Osamu Tezuka

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vertical
On Sale: January 16, 2007
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-932234-60-2 (1-932234-60-8)

In the fifth installment of manga-godfather Osamu Tezuka's Buddha, engagement with death imparts the lesson of life's sancity. In a Machiavellian rise to power, Devadatta, a rogue aristrocrat, incites war between two kingdoms that will leave thousands dead. King Bimisara of Magadha, fearing death his son's own hand, withdraws fatherly love... Read more >

Paprika

Written by Yasutaka Tsutsui

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 12, 2013
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-38918-3 (0-307-38918-9)

Widely acknowledged as Yasutaka Tsutsui's masterpiece, Paprika unites his surreal, quirky imagination with a mind-bending narrative about a psychiatric institute that has developed the technology to invade people's dreams.

When prototype models of a dream-invading device go missing at the Institute for Psychiatric Research, it transpires that someone is using them to... Read more >

Salmonella Men on Planet Porno

Written by Yasutaka Tsutsui

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 12, 2010
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-38915-2 (0-307-38915-4)

An irresistible mix of imagination, satire, and humor, these stories by acclaimed Japanese author Yasutaka Tsutsui imagine the consequences of a world where the fantastic and the mundane collide.

The opening story, “The Dabba Dabba Tree,” details the hilarious side effects of a small conical tree that, when placed at the foot... Read more >

Japanese Tales

Written by Royall Tyler

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: August 13, 2002
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-71451-1 (0-375-71451-0)

Here are two hundred and twenty dazzling tales from medieval Japan, tales that welcome us into a fabulous, faraway world populated by saints and scoundrels, ghosts and magical healers, and a vast assortment of deities and demons. Stories of miracles, visions of hell, jokes, fables, and legends, these tales reflect the... Read more >

Haiku

Edited by Peter Washington

Format: Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Everyman's Library
On Sale: November 11, 2003
Price: $13.50
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4128-2 (1-4000-4128-7)

Simple yet capable of great complexity, the haiku is a tightly structured verse form that has a remarkable power to distill the essence of a moment keenly perceived. For centuries confined to a small literary elite in Japan, the writing of haiku is now practiced all over the world by those... Read more >

Villain
A Novel
Written by Shuichi Yoshida

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 9, 2011
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-45494-2 (0-307-45494-0)

A young insurance saleswoman is found strangled at Mitsuse Pass. Her family and friends are shocked and terrified. The pass—which tunnels through a mountainous region of southern Japan—has an eerie history: a hideout for robbers, murderers, and ghostly creatures lurking at night.

Soon afterward, a young construction worker becomes the primary suspect... Read more >

One Hundred and One Ways

Written by Mako Yoshikawa

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Bantam
On Sale: May 2, 2000
Price: $13.00
ISBN: 978-0-553-37969-3 (0-553-37969-0)

Lyrical, haunting, and evocative, One Hundred and One Ways is the tale of a young Japanese-American woman whose past and future are colliding. Taskehashi is a woman torn between two men and two cultures, who turns for answers to her Japanese grandmother, Yukiko, once a famous geisha. Read more >

The Lake

Written by Banana Yoshimoto
Translated by Michael Emmerich

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: January 24, 2012
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-61219-089-1 (1-61219-089-8)

A major literary sensation is back with a quietly stunning tour de force about the redemptive power of love.

While The Lake shows off many of the features that have made Banana Yoshimoto famous–a cast of vivid and quirky characters, simple yet nuanced prose, a tight plot with an upbeat pace–it’s also... Read more >