Set in mid-17th century Boston, this tale of passion, puritanism and revenge is one of the foremost classics of American literature. Its heroine, Hester Prynne, is compelled by her own moral autonomy to wear the scarlet letter but she emerges as a woman with her integrity intact.

Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers' style of dress and speech...

In the tales that make up The Elephant Vanishes, the imaginative genius that has made Haruki Murakami an international superstar is on full display.

In these stories, a man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald’s in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who...

Fox loves looking out over the village from his forest home, but he gets curious when he sees that Kikuchi's sushi restaurant always has a line out the door. Sushi must be delicious. When Fox goes to investigate, Kikuchi teaches him all about sushi - how to prepare rice for it, how to catch fish for it, and most important, how to eat it! A double page spread in the back provides added information about sushi and Japan.

Tojiro, a young seller of rice cakes in the Japanese capital of Edo, later known as Tokyo, is amazed to discover that the grumpy and shabby old man who buys his cakes is a famous artist renowned for his sketches, prints, and paintings of flowers, animals, and landscapes.

"Even before the steel frame incident in the 20th Ward, there were ghouls lurking among the masses in Tokyo, carefully stalking their prey. This novel covers the events that occurred before the opening act of Tokyo Ghoul--a time when Kaneshi was still human, the Kirishimas still lived together, and Rize enjoyed her feasts"--Back cover.

"Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozamu Dazai died, a suicide, in 1948. But the influence of his book has made "people of the setting sun" a permanent part of the Japanese language, and his heroine, Kazuko, a young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, a symbol of the anomie which pervades so much of the modern world."--Provided by publisher....

Fourteen-year-old Mexican American Lincoln Mendoza spends a summer with a host family in Japan, encountering new experiences and making new friends.

""A graceful, lucid translation of the world's first, and one of its greatest, novels."--Alan Tansman, University of California, Berkeley. Murasaki Shikibu, born into the middle ranks of the aristocracy during the Heian Period (794-1185 CE), wrote The Tale of Genji--widely considered the world's first novel--during the early years of the eleventh century. Expansive, compelling, and sophisticated in its representation of ethical concerns and aesthetic...