After three years in Japan, Fred Buchanan is broke, unemployed and engaged in a telepathic turf war with a feral cat behind an Okinawa convenience store. Thus begins his metaphysical odyssey back to Tokyo. Along the way, symbols and sages materialize in the form of a two-fingered jazz musician, the faded tattoo on an ex-yakuza lover, an odd brood of internet cafe refugees, the kite flyer of Kabukicho and Yukie, an alluring hostess with strips of delicious thigh and strange power imbued in the etched eye on her fingernail. Charging through Shinjuku’s neon jungle, enveloped in a boozy, nicotine-stained haze, past and present collide as an empty orchestra croons a slow dance of people and place, memory and madness, loss and love. All the while, Fred struggles to be an agent of his destiny and not another ball bearing bouncing through the cosmic pachinko. Rainy Day Ramen and the Cosmic Pachinko is told as a uniquely clever mix of Murakami-esque magical realism and gonzo Japan travelogue.

Oceans and decades apart, two women are inextricably bound by the secrets between them. Japan, 1957. Seventeen-year-old Naoko Nakamura’s prearranged marriage to the son of her father’s business associate would secure her family’s status in their traditional Japanese community, but Naoko has fallen for another man—an American sailor, a gaijin—and to marry him would bring great shame upon her entire family. When it’s learned Naoko carries the sailor’s child, she’s cast out in disgrace and forced to make unimaginable choices with consequences that will ripple across generations. America, present day. Tori Kovac, caring for her dying father, finds a letter containing a shocking revelation—one that calls into question everything she understood about him, her family and herself. Setting out to learn the truth behind the letter, Tori’s journey leads her halfway around the world to a remote seaside village in Japan, where she must confront the demons of the past to pave a way for redemption. In breathtaking prose and inspired by true stories from a devastating and little-known era in Japanese and American history, The Woman in the White Kimono illuminates a searing portrait of one woman torn between her culture and her heart, and another woman on a journey to discover the true meaning of home.

A girl struggling to fit in. A homeless kitten. An unexpected job offer in an unfamiliar country that changes everything. CJ had a long history of escaping places and people she wasn't fond of. But for the sake of a silver tabby, she decided to stay in Japan for a while. This decision helped her open up her heart and mind, revisit her way of thinking, and reconnect with her estranged family. Let this heartwarming memoir take you to the land of cats and cherry trees as you read about CJ's adventures - from the craziness of the naked men festival, the experience of forest bathing and the significance of finding a life purpose or ikigai, to the temples of Takayama, and wonders of Cat Island - you'll see what a homeless kitten found outside a temple in Japan taught her about an old culture and new beginnings

In Kanazawa, the first literary novel in English to be set in this storied Japanese city, Emmitt’s future plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of negotiations to purchase their dream home. Disappointed, he’s surprised to discover Mirai’s subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo, a city he dislikes. Harmony is further disrupted when Emmitt’s search for a more meaningful life in Japan leads him to quit an unsatisfying job at a local university. In the fallout, he finds himself helping his mother-in-law translate Kanazawa’s most famous author, Izumi Kyoka, into English. While continually resisting Mirai’s efforts to move to Tokyo, Emmitt becomes drawn into the mysterious death thirty years prior of a mutual friend of Mirai’s parents. It is only when he and his father-in-law climb the mountain where the man died that he learns the somber truth, and in turn discovers what the future holds for him and his wife. Packed with subtle literary allusion and closely observed nuance, with an intimacy of emotion inexorably tied both to the cityscape and Japan’s mountainous terrain, Kanazawa reflects the mood of Japanese fiction in a fresh, modern incarnation.

'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.

Alluring, nurturing, dangerous, and vulnerable the yamamba, or Japanese mountain witch, has intrigued audiences for centuries. What is it about the fusion of mountains with the solitary old woman that produces such an enigmatic figure? And why does she still call to us in this modern, scientific era? Co-editors Rebecca Copeland and Linda C. Ehrlich first met the yamamba in the powerful short story “The Smile of the Mountain Witch” by acclaimed woman writer Ōba Minako. The story revealed the compelling way creative women can take charge of misogynistic tropes, invert them, and use them to tell new stories of female empowerment. This unique collection represents the creative and surprising ways artists and scholars from North America and Japan have encountered the yamamba.

Another Kyoto is an insider's meditation on the hidden wonders of Japan's most enigmatic city. Drawing on decades living in Kyoto, and on lore gleaned from artists, Zen monks and Shinto priests, Alex Kerr illuminates the simplest things - a temple gate, a wall, a sliding door - in a new way. 'A rich book of intimate proportions ... In Kyoto, facts and meaning are often hidden in plain sight. Kerr's gift is to make us stop and cast our eyes upward to a temple plaque, or to squint into the gloom of an abbot's chamber' Japan Times 'Kerr and Sokol have performed a minor miracle by presenting that which is present in Kyoto as that which we have yet to see. I know that I will never pass a wall, or tread a floor, or sit on tatami the same way again' Kyoto Journal