The Sakura Obsession

Each year, the flowering of cherry blossoms marks the beginning of spring. But if it weren’t for the pioneering work of an English eccentric, Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram, Japan’s beloved cherry blossoms could have gone extinct. Ingram first fell in love with the sakura, or cherry tree, when he visited Japan on his honeymoon in 1907 and was so taken with the plant that he brought back hundreds of cuttings with him to England. Years later, upon learning that the Great White Cherry had virtually disappeared from Japan, he buried a living cutting from his own collection in a potato and repatriated it via the Trans-Siberian Express. In the years that followed, Ingram sent more than 100 varieties of cherry tree to new homes around the globe. As much a history of the cherry blossom in Japan as it is the story of one remarkable man, The Sakura Obsession follows the flower from its significance as a symbol of the imperial court, through the dark days of the Second World War, and up to the present-day worldwide fascination with this iconic blossom.

Each year, the flowering of cherry blossoms marks the beginning of spring. But if it weren’t for the pioneering work of an English eccentric, Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram, Japan’s beloved cherry blossoms could have gone extinct. Ingram first fell in love with the sakura, or cherry tree, when he visited Japan on his honeymoon in 1907 and was so taken with the plant that he brought back hundreds of cuttings with him to England. Years later, upon learning that the Great White Cherry had virtually disappeared from Japan, he buried a living cutting from his own collection in a potato and repatriated it via the Trans-Siberian Express. In the years that followed, Ingram sent more than 100 varieties of cherry tree to new homes around the globe. As much a history of the cherry blossom in Japan as it is the story of one remarkable man, The Sakura Obsession follows the flower from its significance as a symbol of the imperial court, through the dark days of the Second World War, and up to the present-day worldwide fascination with this iconic blossom.

Tété-Michel Kpomassie was a teenager in Togo when he discovered a book about Greenland—and knew that he must go there. Working his way north over nearly a decade, Kpomassie finally arrived in the country of his dreams. This brilliantly observed and superbly entertaining record of his adventures among the Inuit is a testament both to the wonderful strangeness of the human species and to the surprising sympathies that bind us all.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the New York Times bestselling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and one of the world’s greatest storytellers comes "an insistently metaphysical mind-bender” (The New Yorker) about a teenager on the run and an aging simpleton. Now with a new introduction by the author. Here we meet 15-year-old runaway Kafka Tamura and the elderly Nakata, who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, acclaimed author Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder, in what is a truly remarkable journey. “As powerful as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.... Reading Murakami ... is a striking experience in consciousness expansion.” —The Chicago Tribune

Wallpaper* City Guides not only suggest where to stay, what to eat, and what to drink, but what the tourist passionate about design might want to see, whether he or she has a week or just 24 hours in the city. Some of the highlights include up-and-coming neighborhoods, an `Architour? of landmark buildings, design centers, and the best shops to buy unique items. Wallpaper* City Guides present travelers with a fast-track ticket to the chosen location. The tightly-edited guides offer the best, most exciting, and the most beautiful of the featured city. The guides are expertly designed with function as a priority, and they have tabbed sections so that readers can find information easily. The guides include currency rate information, maps, and a color-coding system to help the reader navigate through different parts of the city. They are the ultimate combination of form and function. The guides are compiled by Wallpaper* magazine experts and their extraordinary network of international correspondents. The writers have put their heads together to come up with fascinating, efficient guides for the hip, urban traveler with his or her finger on the pulse. They are truly the insider?s guide to each featured city. The first Wallpaper* City Guides were published in Fall 2006 on the occasion of Wallpaper*?s first anniversary. For more than a decade, Wallpaper* has been the first to uncover and enticingly present the best urban travel spots from across the globe. The City Guides are the perfect way to present a decade of experience in one precisely edited guide. As of early 2010, there are 80 city guides available, with seven more on the way by the end of the year.

The untold story of how Japan became a cultural superpower through the fantastic inventions that captured—and transformed—the world’s imagination. “A masterful book driven by deep research, new insights, and powerful storytelling.”—W. David Marx, author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style Japan is the forge of the world’s fantasies: karaoke and the Walkman, manga and anime, Pac-Man and Pokémon, online imageboards and emojis. But as Japan media veteran Matt Alt proves in this brilliant investigation, these novelties did more than entertain. They paved the way for our perplexing modern lives. In the 1970s and ’80s, Japan seemed to exist in some near future, gliding on the superior technology of Sony and Toyota. Then a catastrophic 1990 stock-market crash ushered in the “lost decades” of deep recession and social dysfunction. The end of the boom should have plunged Japan into irrelevance, but that’s precisely when its cultural clout soared—when, once again, Japan got to the future a little ahead of the rest of us. Hello Kitty, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and multimedia empires like Dragon Ball Z were more than marketing hits. Artfully packaged, dangerously cute, and dizzyingly fun, these products gave us new tools for coping with trying times. They also transformed us as we consumed them—connecting as well as isolating us in new ways, opening vistas of imagination and pathways to revolution. Through the stories of an indelible group of artists, geniuses, and oddballs, Pure Invention reveals how Japan’s pop-media complex remade global culture.

A warm, gorgeous exploration of a little girl's experience immigrating to a new country and missing her home and her grandmother, who still lives far away. Sakura's dad gets a new job in America, so she and her parents make the move from their home in Japan. When she arrives in the States, most of all she misses her grandmother and the cherry blossom trees, under which she and her grandmother used to play and picnic. She wonders how she'll ever feel at home in this new place, with its unfamiliar language and landscape. One day, she meets her neighbor, a boy named Luke, and begins to feel a little more settled. When her grandmother becomes ill, though, her family takes a trip back to Japan. Sakura is sad when she returns to the States and once again reflects on all she misses. Luke does his best to cheer her up -- and tells her about a surprise he knows she'll love, but she'll have to wait till spring. In the meantime, Sakura and Luke's friendship blooms and finally, when spring comes, Luke takes her to see the cherry blossom trees flowering right there in her new neighborhood. Sakura's Cherry Blossoms captures the beauty of the healing power of friendship through Weston's Japanese poetry-inspired text and Saburi's breathtaking illustrations.

Creator Masashi Kishimoto’s tale of the ninja who could, and then, eventually actually did, spend more than a decade captivating us with the long-game adventures of Naruto, Sakura, Sasuke, Jiraiya, Tsunade and any of the other worthy favorites we meet along the way. Whether you’re a long time die-hard or a newcomer in the enviable position of discovering this story for the first time, consider this new book our gift to you as you get lost in the Ninja World over and over again. -- VIZ Media