The Easy Life In Kamusari

From Shion Miura, the award-winning author of The Great Passage, comes a rapturous novel where the contemporary and the traditional meet amid the splendor of Japan's mountain way of life. Yuki Hirano is just out of high school when his parents enroll him, against his will, in a forestry training program in the remote mountain village of Kamusari. No phone, no internet, no shopping. Just a small, inviting community where the most common expression is "take it easy." At first, Yuki is exhausted, fumbles with the tools, asks silly questions, and feels like an outcast. Kamusari is the last place a city boy from Yokohama wants to spend a year of his life. But as resistant as he might be, the scent of the cedars and the staggering beauty of the region have a pull. Yuki learns to fell trees and plant saplings. He begins to embrace local festivals, he's mesmerized by legends of the mountain, and he might be falling in love. In learning to respect the forest on Mt. Kamusari for its majestic qualities and its inexplicable secrets, Yuki starts to appreciate Kamusari's harmony with nature and its ancient traditions. In this warm and lively coming-of-age story, Miura transports us from the trappings of city life to the trials, mysteries, and delights of a mythical mountain forest.

From Shion Miura, award-winning author of The Easy Life in Kamusari, comes a spirit-lifting novel about tradition, first love, and ancient lore in a Japanese mountain village. It's been a year since Yuki Hirano left home--or more precisely, was booted from it--to study forestry in the remote mountain village of Kamusari. Being a woodsman is not the future he imagined, but his name means "courage," and Yuki hopes to live up to it. He's adapting to his job and learning constantly. In between, he records local legends--tales pulsing with life, passion, and wondrous gods. Kamusari has other charms as well. One of them is Nao. Yuki's crush on the only other young single person in the village isn't a secret. Yet how impressed can she be with someone at least five years younger who makes less money and doesn't even own a car? More daunting, she's in love with another man. Finally finding his place among the villagers, a feeling deepened by his crush, Yuki seems headed for a dream life of adventure and camaraderie--and Nao could be the missing piece of that dream.

OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD ''A mesmerising reading experience for all of us seeking a meaningful life' JAPAN TIMES What he experienced that day wasn’t life-changing . . . It was life-making. Tomura is startled by the hypnotic sound of a piano being tuned in his school. It seeps into his soul and transports him to the forests, dark and gleaming, that surround his beloved mountain village. From that moment, he is determined to discover more. Under the tutelage of three master piano-tuners – one humble, one jovial, one ill-tempered – Tomura embarks on his training, never straying too far from a single, unfathomable question: do I have what it takes? Set in small-town Japan, this warm and mystical story is for the lucky few who have found their calling – and for the rest of us who are still searching. It shows that the road to finding one’s purpose is a winding path, often filled with treacherous doubts and, for those who persevere, astonishing moments of revelation. Mega-bestselling winner of the Japan Booksellers Award, selected by bookshop staff as the book they most wanted to hand-sell: A tender and uplifting novel for fans of A WHOLE LIFE by Robert Seethaler. [Contains 5 exquisite hand-drawn illustrations]

The Teas That Bind is the first book from J. C. Greenway, an English writer based in Japan. It is a collection of posts first written for the website ten minutes hate about life in Japan before and since the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011. It also includes a selection of emails, status updates and tweets from the days after the disaster and the following year, covering the writer's involvement in fundraising and volunteering efforts - along with plenty of new material - in an attempt to answer the question, 'what was it like?'

A rollercoaster ride from the cult master of the psycho-thriller 'A blistering portrait of contemporary Japan, its nihilism and decadence wrapped up within one of the most savage thrillers since The Silence of the Lambs' Kirkus 'Deft and fascinating ... A grisly tour of the darkness and confusion of the human mind' New York Times It's just before New Year, and Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo's nightlife. But Frank's behaviour is so odd that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: his client may in fact have murderous desires. Although Kenji is far from innocent himself, he unwillingly descends with Frank into an inferno of evil, from which only his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Jun, can possibly save him.

'If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination ... imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes'. So wrote the award winning Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima of her story, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, a piece that illuminates, as if by throwing a switch, the layers of wartime devastation that lie just below the surface of Tokyo's insistently modern culture. The ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are - by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past.

In a world of humans, what's a cyborg turtle to do? It's a fair question in the bizarre, compelling story of Mr. Turtle. Yusaku Kitano's science fiction masterpiece, originally published under the eponymous title Kame-kun, renews the visionary integrity that won it the Nihon SF Taisho (Japan's equivalent of the Nebula) Award in 2001 as it finds its way into English at last. Kitano's protagonist is a hero in a half shell of an altogether different sort, a killing machine designed for combat who wants only to enjoy the simple pleasures of his daily life-working a blue collar job, going to the library, and typing on his laptop-even as he is haunted by vague memories of a war on Jupiter. In order to determine his future, he must piece together his past, navigating an unsympathetic society toward revealing the novel's philosophical heartbeat. A character study of surreal wit, Mr. Turtle delivers action and insight, all the while crafting an homage to its chosen genre unlike any other.

A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick 'Ingenious ... touching, surprising and sometimes heartbreaking.' Guardian 'If you're itching to read a new novel by David Mitchell ... try this.' The Times _______________ In Tokyo - one of the world's largest megacities - a stray cat is wending her way through the back alleys. And, with each detour, she brushes up against the seemingly disparate lives of the city-dwellers, connecting them in unexpected ways. But the city is changing. As it does, it pushes her to the margins where she chances upon a series of apparent strangers - from a homeless man squatting in an abandoned hotel, to a shut-in hermit afraid to leave his house, to a convenience store worker searching for love. The cat orbits Tokyo's denizens, drawing them ever closer. 'Masterfully weaves together seemingly disparate threads to conjure up a vivid tapestry of Tokyo; its glory, its shame, its characters, and a calico cat.' David Peace, author of THE TOKYO TRILOGY One of the Independent's best debuts