It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company's advertisement. What he doesn't realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins...

"It is the early eighties, and the housing industry is booming. Previously unpopulated mountainous areas of the Japanese countryside are being leveled to accommodate new waves of people. Similarly, a new wave of feminism, particularly a change in attitudes toward marriage and childrearing, is growing among the women of Japan. Both the physical and social landscapes are in flux. In her early forties, married, and childless by choice, Kyoko has no compunction...

A thirty-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the...

Here is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about...

As Guardian of the Cat Council, eight-year-old Kitty, in her cat form, tries to help Shadow, a cat that recently became unsociable.

What happens when a critique of modernity -- a "revolt against the traditions of the Western world" -- is situated within a non-European context, where the concept of the modern has been inevitably tied to the image of the West?

A hilarious story of one man's obsession and a brilliant reckoning of a nation's cultural confusion-from a master Japanese novelist.When twenty-eight-year-old Joji first lays eyes upon the teenage waitress Naomi, he is instantly smitten by her exotic, almost Western appearance. Determined to transform her into the perfect wife and to whisk her away from the seamy underbelly of post-World War I Tokyo, Joji adopts and ultimately marries Naomi, paying...

"November 9, 1938-Kristallnacht-the Nazis unleash a night of terror for Jews all across Germany. Meanwhile, the Japanese Imperial Army rampages through China and tightens its stranglehold on Shanghai, a city that becomes the last haven for thousands of desperate European Jews. Dr. Franz Adler, a renowned surgeon, is swept up in the wave of anti-Semitic violence and flees to Shanghai with his daughter. At a refugee hospital, Franz meets an enigmatic...

Presenting a fresh examination of women writers and prewar ideology, this book breaks new ground in its investigation of love as a critical aspect of Japanese culture during the early to mid-twentieth century. As a literary and cultural history of love and female identity, Becoming Modern Women focuses on same-sex love, love marriage, and maternal love-new terms at that time; in doing so, it shows how the idea of "woman," within the context of a...

"Every winter, Tommy Jack McMorsey makes the long haul from Texas to northern Minnesota to watch the meteor showers. One cold night, in a moment of kindness, Tommy picks up a deluded Japanese tourist determined to find the buried ransom money from the movie Fargo. When she dies of exposure in Tommy Jack's care, a media storm erupts, jarring loose pieces of Tommy Jack's past: the horrors of Vietnam, a love affair, and the suicide of his closest friend,...