Ozu's Tokyo Story is generally regarded as one of the finest films ever made. Universal in its appeal, it is also considered to be 'particularly Japanese'. Exploring its universality and cultural specificity, this collection of specially commissioned essays demonstrates the multiple planes on which the film may be appreciated. The introduction outlines Ozu's career as both a contract director of a major studio and as a singular figure in Japanese film history, and also analyses the director's cinematic style, particularly his narrative strategies and spatial compositions. Other essays situate Ozu's cinema in its relationship to Hollywood film-making: his relationship to aspects of Japanese tradition, situating the film within artistic modes, religious systems and beliefs, and socio-cultural and familial formations. Also included is an analysis of how Ozu has been misunderstood in Western criticism.

On the 100th anniversary of the great director's birth, a book celebrating his greatest film.

A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network… A young woman is accompanied home one night by a reclusive student, and finds herself lured into a flat full of eerie Egyptian artefacts… A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive… At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time… The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’

Have you ever been to Tokyo, Japan? Far away, in the Pacific Ocean, Tokyo is a busy city of color, activity, celebrations, gigantic buildings, and much more. Seven-year-old Mimiko lives in Tokyo, and here you can follow a year’s worth of fun, food and festivities in Mimiko’s life, month by month. Learn the right way to put on a kimono and see Mimiko’s top ten favorite meals—just try not to eat the pages featuring delicious wagashi!

From the New York Times–bestselling authors of Miracle at Midway: A thrilling account of one of World War II’s most legendary spies. Richard Sorge was dispatched to Tokyo in 1933 to serve the spymasters of Moscow. For eight years, he masqueraded as a Nazi journalist and burrowed deep into the German embassy, digging for the secrets of Hitler’s invasion of Russia and the Japanese plans for the East. In a nation obsessed with rooting out moles, he kept a high profile—boozing, womanizing, and operating entirely under his own name. But he policed his spy ring scrupulously, keeping such a firm grip that by the time the Japanese uncovered his infiltration, he had done irreversible damage to the cause of the Axis. The first definitive account of one of the most remarkable espionage sagas of World War II, Target Tokyo is a tightly wound portrayal of a man who risked his life for his country, hiding in plain sight.

WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo. Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics. Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.

NOW A MAX ORIGINAL SERIES. A riveting true-life tale of newspaper noir and Japanese organized crime from an American investigative journalist who "pulls the curtain back on ... [an] element of Japanese society that few Westerners ever see" (San Francisco Examiner). Jake Adelstein is the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, where for twelve years he covered the dark side of Japan: extortion, murder, human trafficking, fiscal corruption, and of course, the yakuza. But when his final scoop exposed a scandal that reverberated all the way from the neon soaked streets of Tokyo to the polished Halls of the FBI and resulted in a death threat for him and his family, Adelstein decided to step down. Then, he fought back. In Tokyo Vice he delivers an unprecedented look at Japanese culture and searing memoir about his rise from cub reporter to seasoned journalist with a price on his head.