Matsuri And Murder

Even on vacation, Mei can’t get away from murder. Traveling to Kubako for a three-day matsuri festival and fireworks, Mei, Akiko, and Kayo are just looking for some relaxation and tasty food, not a weekend full of drama. But when a local celebrity is poisoned in Kayo’s family brewery, Kayo's father is the main suspect. Now, Mei, Akiko, and Kayo must put their meddling ways to the test. With the help of Kayo’s mother and some local friends, they gather evidence while dodging hotheaded detectives and another dead body. But time is running out and the murderer has everything they need to bury the evidence and deflect suspicion onto someone else. How will they find the murderer when the matsuri is in full swing and everything points to the wrong suspect? Matsuri and Murder is a Miso Cozy Mysteries novella that will keep you on the chase and rooting for Mei until the very end!

Mei can never catch a break from mysteries! With her tea shop now open and living her dream life married to Yasahiro Suga, she's just trying to avoid bad luck and live a normal life. But when a friend shows up asking for help with an old missing person's case, Mei can’t resist the pull of a mystery unsolved. She knew the young woman who went missing and had always wondered what happened to her. Now's her chance to find out, even if it turns long-time Chikata residents against her. While Mei is working at the tea shop and helping with the case, she's also assisting her mom on the family farm. Convincing her mom to renovate the old house is not an easy task, and Mei is continually frustrated by her mom's lack of enthusiasm for the project. Until Mei's brother shows up and wants to buy the business out from under her, betraying Mei and Yasahiro in the process. Can Mei find the missing woman and keep her reputation intact? And will she and Yasahiro repair their relationship with Mei's mom before it tears their family apart? With her head in the clouds and a taste for solving crime, you don’t want to miss Mei in The Daydreamer Detective Returns A Favor, the surprisingly rich fourth course to the Miso Cozy series of cozy mystery novels. Buy The Daydreamer Detective Returns A Favor today to continue with the series! Additional Keywords: cozy mystery, cozy, mystery, J-drama, interracial, multicultural, romance, Japan, Tokyo, chef, culinary, farming, slow food, murder, failure, painting, family drama, female detective, detective, sleuth, amateur sleuth, Japanese, Japanese food.

For fans of the Miso Cozy Mysteries series! Perfect to read after The Daydreamer Detective Braves The Winter, Mei and Yasahiro attempt to spend New Year's Eve on vacation, but the universe has other plans for them. Follow them to Hakone where they learn there's nothing more important than family. Ozoni and Onsens is the satisfying side dish to the Miso Cozy series of cozy mystery novels. Originally only for newsletter subscribers, this novella is now available for all! Though not a traditional mystery, you'll learn more about what happened between Braves The Winter and Opens A Tea Shop and why this trip cements Mei's love for her family.

Mei Yamagawa’s bad luck is almost at an end… Her tea shop is a week away from opening, she and Yasahiro have planned a trip away, and the future is looking bright and hopeful. But when Yasahiro’s ex-fiancée, Amanda, shows up unexpectedly, demanding his time and presence, all of their plans dissolve. Amanda is tough and drives Mei up the wall, so it’s no surprise when Mei tells her to get lost, only for Amanda to be murdered a few hours later. Yasahiro becomes the prime suspect, and Mei must put everything on hold to help free him. Following Amanda’s past through her digital footprint, Mei uncovers secret lovers, shady business deals, and the biggest secret of all, why Amanda and Yasahiro broke up in the first place. With everyone turning against her and the case under media scrutiny, tracking down the killer becomes an obsession Mei can’t give up. There’s no turning back, though, because solving the murder means getting her life back. Not solving it means losing everything forever. With her head in the clouds and a taste for solving crime, you don’t want to miss Mei in The Daydreamer Detective Opens A Tea Shop, the hearty third course to the Miso Cozy series of cozy mystery novels. Buy The Daydreamer Detective Opens A Tea Shop today to continue with the series! Additional Keywords: cozy mystery, cozy, mystery, J-drama, interracial, multicultural, romance, Japan, Tokyo, chef, culinary, farming, slow food, murder, failure, painting, family drama, female detective, detective, sleuth, amateur sleuth, Japanese, Japanese food.

When a fellow author is murdered during a literary festival, crime writer Francis Meadowes determines to discover who killed him. At the start of one of the English summer’s highlights, the annual literary festival in the pretty little country town of Mold-on-Wold, famous critic Bryce Peabody is found dead in his bed at the White Hart Hotel. At first it seems as if fifty-something Bryce might have succumbed to a heart attack, but the forensics team soon uncover evidence of something more sinister. Bryce had made many enemies in the past, with his scandalous private life and scathing reviews. Could it be that one of the many writers he insulted in print has taken a bitter revenge? Or perhaps there’s a more personal reason? Unable to help himself, crime writer Francis Meadowes, who is also staying at the White Hart, is drawn into a role he knows only from his own fiction, that of amateur detective.

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is more than a musical event that ostensibly “unites European people” through music. It is a spectacle: a performative event that allegorically represents the idea of “Europe.” Since its beginning in the Cold War era, the contest has functioned as a symbolic realm for the performance of European selves and the negotiation of European identities. Through the ESC, Europe is experienced, felt, and imagined in singing and dancing as the interplay of tropes of being local and/or European is enacted. In Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest, contributors interpret the ESC as a musical “mediascape” and mega-event that has variously performed and performs the changing visions of the European project. Through the study of the cultural politics of the ESC, contributors discuss the ways in which music operates as a dynamic nexus for making national identities and European sensibilities, generating processes of “assimilation” or “integration,” and defining the celebrated notion of the “European citizen” in a global context. Scholars in the volume also explore the ways otherness and difference are produced, spectacularized, challenged, or even neglected in the televised musical realities of the ESC. For the contributing authors, song serves as a site for constituting Europe and the nation, on- and offstage. History and politics, as well as the constant production of European subjectivities, are sounded in song. The Eurovision song is a shifting realm where old and new states imagine their pasts, question their presents, and envision ideal futures in the New Europe. Essays in Empire of Song adopt theoretical and epistemological orientations in their exploration of “popular music” within ethnomusicology and critical musicology, questioning the idea of “Europe” and the “nation” through and in music, at a time when the European self appears more fragmented, if not entirely shattered. Bringing together ethnomusicology, music studies, history, social anthropology, feminist theory, linguistics, media ethnography, postcolonial theory, comparative literature, and philosophy, Empire of Song will interest students and scholars in a vast array of disciplines.

Japanese Theatre presents a full historical account for Westerners of the theater arts that have flourished for centuries in Japan. Kabuki, arising in the late seventeenth century, is the theater of the commoner. The successive syllables of Kabuki mean "song – dance – skill." The precursors of Kabuki were the puppet theater and the comic interludes in the stately, aristocratic Noh drama – all fully described by the author. In the modem era the Japanese have broken away from Kabuki, and their stage has shown a realistic trend. Left–wing theater groups arose in the 1920’s, were suppressed by the militarists, and then revived during the occupation. Appended to the historical chapters are Mr. Bowers's translations of three Kabuki plays: The Monstrous Spider, Gappo and His Daughter Tsuji, and the bombastic Sukeroku. This book, with its many excellent photographs, is a permanent addition to the West's knowledge of the exotic, exciting theater of Japan and its tradition of great acting.