The Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan offers a captivating exploration into the intricacies of Heian period literature and culture. This anthology brings together a collection of diaristic narratives crafted by three eminent figures of the era: Sugawara no Takasue no Musume, Izumi Shikibu, and Murasaki Shikibu. Their writings traverse the emotional and political landscapes of the Japanese imperial court, revealing both the subtle and overt power dynamics at play. The anthology displays ...

Derived from the journals of an empress's tutor and companion, this unique book offers rare glimpses of court life in eleventh-century Japan. Lady Murasaki recounts episodes of drama and intrigue among courtiers as well as the elaborate rituals related to the birth of a prince. Her observations, expressed with great subtlety, offer penetrating and timeless insights into human nature.Murasaki Shikibu (circa AD 973–1025) served among the gifted poets and writers of the imperial court ...

The poems in the text, slight and occasional as they are, depending often for their charm on plays upon words of two meanings, or on the suggestions conveyed to the Japanese mind by a single word, have presented problems of great difficulty to the translators, not perfectly overcome.Izumi Shikibu's Diary is written with extreme delicacy of treatment. English words and thought seem too downright a medium into which to render these evanescent, half-expressed sentences and poems—vague ...

The 15 essays collected here examine the inner spiritual life of Japan through the people that make Japan the unique place it is. The word "Kokoro" itself can be translated as "heart," "spirit" or "inner meaning," and that's exactly what this title can teach us about Japan. (Goodreads) This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

A new translation of the idiosyncratic diary of a C10 court lady in Heian Japan. Along with the TALE OF GENJI, this is one of the major Japanese Classics.

This collection contains some of the best stories of Tagore who put India on the literary map of the world. Translated from Bengali to English, these stories depict the human condition in its many forms: innocence and childhood, love and loss, the city and the village, the natural and the supernatural. Prominent among the stories are the famous The Cabuliwallah, which has also been adapted as a movie. The book also gives an insight into the socio-economic conditions prevalent in Colonial B...

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, by Lafcadio Hearn, features several Japanese ghost stories and a brief study on insects. Hearn declares in his introduction, that most of these stories were translated from old Japanese texts (probably with the help of his wife, Setsu Koizumi). He also states that one of the stories - Yuki-onna - was told to him by a farmer in Musashi Province, and this was, to the best of his knowledge, the first record of it.

An abridged edition of the world’s first novel, in a translation that is “likely to be the definitive edition . . . for many years to come” (The Wall Street Journal)A Penguin ClassicWritten in the eleventh century, this exquisite portrait of courtly life in medieval Japan is widely celebrated as the world’s first novel—and is certainly one of its finest. Genji, the Shining Prince, is the son of an emperor. He is a passionate charac...

This file includes: Chitra (a one-act play), Creative Unity, The Fugitive, Glimpses of Bengal, The Home and the World, The Hungry Stones and Other Stories, The King of the Dark Chamber, Mashi and Other Stories, Sadhana the Realisation of Life, and Stories from Tagore. According to Wikipedia: "Rabindranath Tagore (May 1861 7 August 1941)was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he bec...

This is a short story set in the first century CE during the height of Buddhism in India. Carus uses the story as a frame to discuss Buddhist concepts of God, non-violence and religious tolerance.

Critics sometimes complain that we get nothing meaningful from spirit communication. They say that it is just bits of obscure information and trivia that may serve as evidence for survival of consciousness after death but that it tells us nothing about the afterlife environment. Such claims are clearly false. I have scores of books in my library in which communicating spirits have given detailed reports on afterlife conditions. One of the very best books in this regard is Letters from a Li...