In this "witty, perceptive novel", a young woman moves to Tokyo and encounters the world of university enrollment and impending adulthood ( Elle).Banana Yoshimoto's novels of young life in Japan have made her an international sensation. Goodbye Tsugumi is an offbeat story of a deep and complicated friendship between two female cousins that ranks among her best work. Maria is the only daughter of an unmarried woman. She has grown up at the seaside ...

A pair of thematically linked novellas from the acclaimed author of Lizard, Amrita, and Goodbye Tsugumi.In cherished novels such as Kitchen and Goodbye Tsugumi, Banana Yoshimoto's warm, witty, and heartfelt depictions of the lives of young Japanese have earned her international acclaim and bestseller status. Her insightful, spare vision returns in two novellas possessed by the ghosts of love found and lost. In Hardbo...

100 Things Michigan State Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die is the ultimate resource guide for true fans of Michigan State football and men's basketball. Whether a die-hard booster from the days of Jumpin' Johnny Green or a new supporter of football coach Mark Dantonio, fans will value these essential pieces of Michigan State football and basketball knowledge and trivia, as well as all the must-do activities, that have been ranked from 1 to 100, providing an entertaining and e...

This fan book to the Mariners covers the team's history in Seattle since its enfranchisement in 1977, including the Ichiro Suzuki years, memories from the Kingdome, and the brief existence of the Seattle Pilots. Author Mike Emmerich has collected every essential piece of Mariners knowledge and trivia, including King's Court, Felix Hernandez's perfect game, the 116-win 2001 team, Randy Johnson, and having two Griffeys in the outfield, as well as must-do activities, and ranks them all from 1...

**A madcap, darkly comic novel about the strange fate of a tone-deaf girl who just wants to sing, from a Japanese literary star“Abe's superpower is to transform everything he touches into exciting literature.” — Kotaru Isaka, author of Bullet Train**This surreal, twisty novel presents a provocative portrayal of sibling competition and the exploitation of social outcasts.Shiori knows at heart that she’s a troubadour. She may be completely tone-deaf, but she ...

This two-volume set LNCS 12269 and LNCS 12270 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2020, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in September 2020.The 99 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 268 submissions. The topics cover classical subjects such as automated algorithm selection and configuration; Bayesian- and surrogate-assisted optimization; benchmarking and performance measures...

This book presents the state-of-the-art, current challenges, and future perspectives for the field of many-criteria optimization and decision analysis. The field recognizes that real-life problems often involve trying to balance a multiplicity of considerations simultaneously – such as performance, cost, risk, sustainability, and quality. The field develops theory, methods and tools that can support decision makers in finding appropriate solutions when faced with many (typically m...

A fascinating discovery, Kawabata’s unfinished final novel Dandelions is a great master’s last wordA fascinating discovery, Dandelions is Kawabata's final novel, left incomplete when he committed suicide in 1972.Beautifully spare and deeply strange, Dandelions explores love and madness and consists almost entirely conversations between a woman identified only as Ineko's mother, and Kuno, a young man who loves Ineko and wants to ma...

A tragedy in three letters: THE masterpiece of one of Japan's greatest writersThe Hunting Gun follows the consequences of a tragic love affair. Told from the viewpoints of three different women, this is a story of the psychological impact of illicit love. First viewed through the eyes of Shoko, who learns of the affair through reading her mother's diary, then through the eyes of Midori, who had long known about the affair of her husband with Saiko, and fin...

Tsugami, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper in war-scarred Osaka, agrees to sponsor a bullfight. For months this great gamble consumes him, makes him as wary and combative as if he was in a ring himself. And, as he becomes ever more distant, his lover Sakiko is unsure if she would like to see him succeed or be destroyed.Yasushi Inoue's novella won him the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and established him as one of Japan's most acclaimed authors. From the planning of a bullfight-through Tsuga...

Startlingly restless and immaculately compact, Manazuru paints the portrait of a woman on the brink of her own memories and future.Twelve years have passed since Kei’s husband, Rei, disappeared and she was left alone with her three–year–old daughter. Her new relationship with a married man—the antithesis of Rei—has brought her life to a numbing stasis, and her relationships with her mother and daughter have spilled into routine, day after day. Kei begins m...

A master forger lives in obscurity and disappointment, oppressed by the shadow of the artist whose work he copies. Unglamorous, unadorned lives such as this form the focus of Yasushi Inoue's tenderly observed, elegantly distilled short stories - two of which are appearing in English for the first time. With a haunting emotional intensity, they offer glimpses of love lost and lives wasted.These three luminous, compassionate tales showcase the mastery and exquisite talent of one of J...