Product Description: Spirit Matters is a ground-breaking work, the first to explore a broad range of writings on spirituality in contemporary Japanese literature. It draws on a variety of literary works, from enormously popular fiction (Miura Ayako’s Hyôten and Shirokari Pass and the novels of Murakami Haruki) to more problematic "serious" fiction (Ôe Kenzaburô’s Somersault) to nonfiction meditations on martyrdom and miracles (Sono Ayako’s Kiseki) and the dynamics of religious cults (Murakami’s interviews with members of Aum Shinrikyô in Underground)...read more

An unrequited love for a woman devoted to Kerouac and the writer's life leads a man on a quest to uncover the mysteries of love and human longing after the woman disappears without a trace during her odyssey from parochial Japan through Europe to a Greek island, leaving behind only computer accounts of bizarre events and stories within stories. Reprint.

Covers the 1995 Tokyo Gas Attack, during which agents of a Japanese cult released a gas deadlier than cyanide into the subway system, as documented in interviews with its survivors, perpetrators, and victim family members. Original. 15,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

An unrequited love for a woman devoted to Kerouac and the writer's life leads a man on a quest to uncover the mysteries of love and human longing after the woman disappears without a trace during her odyssey from parochial Japan through Europe to a Greek island, leaving behind only computer accounts of bizarre events and stories within stories. 30,000 first printing.

Product Description: One of the most important Japanese novels of the last two decades, winner of the Tanizaki PrizeMeet the households Kiuchi, Takigawa, Yasunaga, and Oda…. In this gently twisted domestic fable, award-winning novelist Senji Kuroi explores modern Japan through the lives of four families who live on a typical street in suburban Tokyo...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Mrs. Amino, a wealthy widow, asks Maiko Rokujo, a securities broker, to act as a private detective and find her son, whom she hasn't seen in twenty-five years