A modern-day Bengali Decameron, My Kind of Girl is a sensitive and vibrant novella containing four disarming accounts of unrequited love. In a railway station one bleak December night, four strangers from different walks of life —a contractor, a government bureaucrat, a writer, and a doctor—face an overnight delay. The sight of a young loving couple prompts them to reflect on and share with each other their own experiences of the vagaries of the human heart in a story cycle that is in turn...

When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside, to get to know Kyoto, one of the loveliest old cities in the world, and to find out something about Japanese culture today -- not the world of businessmen and production lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons and the silence of temples, of the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives on behind the rising sun of geopolitical power.

When Ceola's bar-partner sister finds interest in the business waning, even leaving for days on end without warning, the tavernista needs help and she needs it fast. But along with the bar her sister has abandoned a young lover known to his friends as Shadow... and whoever else he is, he's not one to permit a good thing to die. A Scout to his core, young Shadow introduces Ceola to Jasper, and to other possibilities she never knew existed, in "Shadow Partner."In "Persistence" Joshu ...

"These three stories illustrate Inoue's versatility, his mastery of detail and his control of narrative structure. Inoue presents the tale as mystery and solution, the tale as psychoanalytic exploration…, the tale as emblematic social history."-Arizona QuarterlyIn The Counterfeiter, a writer is commissioned to write the biography of a famous painter but becomes fascinated by a man who produced forgeries of the artist's work. Obasute

An NYRB Calssics OriginalA humble clerk and his loving wife scrape out a quiet existence on the margins of Tokyo. Resigned, following years of exile and misfortune, to the bitter consequences of having married without their families’ consent, and unable to have children of their own, Sōsuke and Oyone find the delicate equilibrium of their household upset by a new obligation to meet the educational expenses of Sōsuke’s brash younger brother. While an unlikely new friendship appears ...

Finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction"The excellent strength [the novellas] share is a gracefulness and dreamlike sonority, reminiscent of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and W.G. Sebald, wherein strange evolutions of solitary lives are the rule, and readers are held by the stately, hypnotic dignity of the voice that tells them." – San Francisco ChronicleSet in modern India, these three novellas move beyond the cities to places still haunted by the past, and to ...

This modern classic, written in 1913, was the source for the highly acclaimed film, The MistressIn The Wild Geese, prominent Japanese novelist Ogai Mori offers a poignant story of unfulfilled love, set against the background of the dizzying social change accompanying the fall of the Meiji regime. The young heroine, Otama, is forced by poverty to become a moneylender's mistress. She is surrounded by skillfully-drawn characters—her weak-willed fathe...

Geisha in Rivalry, first published as Udekurabe in 1918, has a secure place among Kafu Nagai's masterpieces.Set against the backdrop of Tokyo's Shimbashi geisha district, a company of vivid characters play out their drama of illicit love, shady intrigue, and unrelenting rivalry. In the forefront are the geisha: some powerful and spiteful like the imperious Rikiji, some crude and obvious like the gaudy Kikuchiyo, some naive and pathetic like the he...

Originally published as Garusudo no Uchi in daily serialization in the Asahi newspaper in 1915, before appearing in book form, this is the first time Inside My Glass Doors has been published in English. It is a moving literary reminiscence, a collection of thirty-nine autobiographical essays penned a year before the author's death. Written in the genre of shohin (little items), the personal vignettes provide a kaleidoscopic view of Natsume Soseki's private world ...

The Japanese poet-recluse Ryokan (1758–1831) is one of the most beloved figures of Asian literature, renowned for his beautiful verse, exquisite calligraphy, and eccentric character. Deceptively simple, Ryokan's poems transcend artifice, presenting spontaneous expressions of pure Zen spirit. Like his contemporary Thoreau, Ryokan celebrates nature and the natural life, but his poems touch the whole range of human experience: joy and sadness, pleasure and pain, enlightenment and illusion, lo...

Prefiguring the vital modernist voices of the Western literary canon, Akutagawa writes with a trenchant psychological precision that exposes the shifting traditions and ironies of early twentieth-century Japan and reveals his own strained connection to it. These stories are moving glimpses into a cast of characters at odds with the society around them, singular portraits that soar effortlessly toward the universal. "What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?" Aku...

The Square Persimmon and Other Stories is an introduction to Takashi Atoda-one of Japan's most popular and versatile writers of fiction.Takashi Atocia is a master storyteller. Like the bar madam in "The Glow of Lipstick," he is capable of weaving a tale that captures the reader's attention from beginning to end. His plots deal with ordinary people, yet the emotional impact of each story is unusually strong. His down-to-earth characters inhabit a world that...