Tokyo Ueno Station (National Book Award Winner)

Tokyo Ueno Station (National Book Award Winner) PDF

Author: Yu Miri

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-06-22

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0593187520

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo. Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics. Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.

The Book of Tokyo

The Book of Tokyo PDF

Author: Hideo Furukawa

Publisher: Comma Press

Published: 2015-06-12

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network… A young woman is accompanied home one night by a reclusive student, and finds herself lured into a flat full of eerie Egyptian artefacts… A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive… At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time… The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’

We Need New Names

We Need New Names PDF

Author: NoViolet Bulawayo

Publisher: Reagan Arthur Books

Published: 2013-05-21

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0316230839

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Finalist for the Booker Prize: the "deeply felt and fiercely written" story of a young girl's journey out of Zimbabwe and to America (New York Times Book Review), from the author of Glory. Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad. But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America's famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo's debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her — from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to J.M. Coetzee — while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own. "Original, witty, and devastating." —People

Target Tokyo

Target Tokyo PDF

Author: Gordon W. Prange

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2014-05-06

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1480489484

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From the New York Times–bestselling authors of Miracle at Midway: A thrilling account of one of World War II’s most legendary spies. Richard Sorge was dispatched to Tokyo in 1933 to serve the spymasters of Moscow. For eight years, he masqueraded as a Nazi journalist and burrowed deep into the German embassy, digging for the secrets of Hitler’s invasion of Russia and the Japanese plans for the East. In a nation obsessed with rooting out moles, he kept a high profile—boozing, womanizing, and operating entirely under his own name. But he policed his spy ring scrupulously, keeping such a firm grip that by the time the Japanese uncovered his infiltration, he had done irreversible damage to the cause of the Axis. The first definitive account of one of the most remarkable espionage sagas of World War II, Target Tokyo is a tightly wound portrayal of a man who risked his life for his country, hiding in plain sight.

Dendo

Dendo PDF

Author: Brittany Long Olsen

Publisher: CreateSpace

Published: 2015-11-05

Total Pages: 628

ISBN-13: 9781499615951

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"Dendo" is the Japanese word for "missionary work." This daily journal of an LDS sister missionary in Tokyo, Japan, was kept entirely in comic pages. Sister Long spent 18 months teaching and serving among some of the most amazing people in the world, but it wasn't always easy. Read the story of her service teaching English, helping people follow Jesus Christ, and making some of the best friends of her life.

Ordesa

Ordesa PDF

Author: Manuel Vilas

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-11-30

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0593084055

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

”A meditation on yearning, solitude, and self; a soul storm, a mirage of phantom figures . . . a book of deep reckoning.” —The New York Times Book Review The #1 international bestselling phenomenon—a profound and riveting story of love, loss, and memory. A man at a crossroads in the middle of his life considers the place where he’s from, and where his parents have recently died. In the face of enormous personal tumult, he sits down to write. What follows is an audacious chronicle of his childhood and an unsparing account of his life’s trials, failures, and triumphs that becomes a moving look at what family gives and takes away. With the intimacy of a diarist, he reckons with the ghosts of his parents and the current specters of his divorce, his children, his career, and his addictions. In unswervingly honest prose, Vilas explores his identity after great loss—what is a person without a marriage or without parents? What is a person when faced with memories alone? Already an acclaimed poet and novelist in Spain, Vilas takes his work to a whole new level with this autobiographical novel; critics have called it “a work of art able to cauterize pain.” Elegiac and searching, Ordesa is a meditation on loss and a powerful exploration of a person who is both extraordinary and utterly ordinary—at once singular and representing us all—who transforms a time of crisis into something beautiful and redemptive.

Where the Wild Ladies Are

Where the Wild Ladies Are PDF

Author: Aoko Matsuda

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2020-10-20

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1593766904

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In this "delightfully uncanny" collection of feminist retellings of traditional Japanese folktales (The New York Times Book Review), humans live side by side with spirits who provide a variety of useful services—from truth-telling to babysitting, from protecting castles to fighting crime. A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath; a silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women—who also happen to be ghosts. This is a realm in which jealousy, stubbornness, and other excessive “feminine” passions are not to be feared or suppressed, but rather cultivated; and, chances are, a man named Mr. Tei will notice your talents and recruit you, dead or alive (preferably dead), to join his mysterious company. With Where the Wild Ladies Are, Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millenia-old tradition of Japanese folktales—shapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wells—and wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them.

Terminal Boredom

Terminal Boredom PDF

Author: Izumi Suzuki

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2021-04-20

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1788739884

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Thrillist, The Millions, Frieze, and Metropolis Japan The first English language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on. Translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O'Horan.

The Dud Avocado

The Dud Avocado PDF

Author: Elaine Dundy

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2010-11-17

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1590174135

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living. “I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).” –Groucho Marx "[The Dud Avocado] is one of the best novels about growing up fast..." -The Guardian

Gold Rush

Gold Rush PDF

Author: Miri Yū

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781566492836

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"A work composed of eerily vivid scenes that possess an animation-like hyper-reality, Gold Rush is a graphic, violent, controversial novel of the corruption of modern Japan and its youth."--BOOK JACKET.