Includes bibliographical references (p. 371-378) and index. 20th century.

Having quit his job, Toru Okada is enjoying a pleasant stint as a "house husband", listening to music and arranging the dry cleaning and doing the cooking - until his cat goes missing, his wife becomes distant and begins acting strangely, and he starts meeting enigmatic people with fantastic life stories. They involve him in a world of psychics, shared dreams, out-of-body experiences, and shaman-like powers, and tell him stories from Japan's war in...

Nitta Sayuri recalls her life as a geisha, including being sold as a nine-year-old to a geisha house in 1929; learning the geisha arts of dance, music, wearing kimono, makeup, and hair; competing with jealous rivals; and reinventing her life when the geisha houses were forced to close during World War II.

"A vivid, deeply researched work of history that explores the life of an unconventional woman during the first half of the 19th century in Edo--the city that would become Tokyo--and a portrait of a great city on the brink of a momentous encounter with the West."--

When a Japanese woodcutter breaks his promise and describes his encounter with a terrifying snow woman, he loses his wife and must make a dangerous journey to win her back.

The story of Shoko, a Japanese woman who married an American GI, and her grown daughter, Sue, a divorced mother whose life as an American housewife hasn't been what she'd expected. When illness prevents Shoko from traveling to Japan, she asks Sue to go in her place. The trip reveals family secrets that change their lives in dramatic and unforeseen ways.

Explores the history, geography, wildlife, government, economy, religion, culture, and people of Japan, including the most current facts and statistics that relate to Japan.

Cho Norie, twenty-seven and originally from Taiwan, is working an office job in Tokyo. While her colleagues worry about the economy, life-insurance policies, marriage, and children, she is forced to keep her unconventional life hidden—including her sexuality and the violent attack that prompted her move to Japan. There is also her unusual fascination with death: she knows from personal experience how devastating death can be, but for her it is also...

"This fascinating history tells the story of the people of Japan, from ancient teenage priest-queens to teeming hordes of salarymen, a nation that once sought to conquer China, yet also shut itself away for two centuries in self-imposed seclusion."--Amazon.com.

Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength...