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Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) is one of Japan's most beloved writers and poets. He has recently become known as the unofficial poet laureate of the tsunami-stricken districts of northern Japan. Some of you may know him from his fantasy novel "Night of the Milky Way Railway" (or the anime version, "Night on the Galactic Railroad"). Others may know him from his short stories, such as "The Restaurant of Many Orders." Still others will know him from his poetry, such as "Someone who is unfazed by the rain." Some have enjoyed the anime "Spring and Chaos," which beautifully depicts the world of creativity and imagination in which he lived as a mature artist. Few in the English-speaking world, however, know the full story of his life in any detail. This is precisely the story told in "The Manga Biography of Kenji Miyazawa, Author of Night of the Milky Way Railway." From being a somewhat odd child, to his early empathy for others, to his passion for rock collecting, mountain climbing, and the beauty of nature, to his study of soil sciences and fertilizers, his awakening to fantasy literature, poetry, and music, to the devastating loss of his sister, his religious conflicts with his father, his vegetarianism, his heroic and sometime quixotic efforts to come to the aid of impoverished local farmers, and, finally, to his failing health and eventual death at the age of thirty-seven -- all this and more is graphically depicted in this marvelous manga devoted to the short but full life of Kenji Miyazawa. "Upon finishing the book, I found myself moved to tears." Michael, Goodreads "--absolutely wonderful little book." Maria Papova, brainpicker "Brief, but surprisingly complex and information-rich." Ed Sizemore, Manga Worth Reading "--essential." David Cozy, Japan Times

The Book of Tea is a description of the history, underlying philosophy, and aesthetics of the Japanese tea ceremony. It is also, and more importantly, a book about how to live a meaningful life. It is about nature and simplicity, about art and beauty, about the unfathomable depth in the small things in life that surround us. In this edition of The Book of Tea, the author, Kakuzo Okakura, writes: The way of tea is founded on a love of what is beautiful in our common everyday lives. It teaches purity and harmony, mutual respect, and the importance of nature and the individual. It is essentially a worship of the imperfect. It is an attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible world of ours. Part of the "Classics Retold to be Read, Not just Revered" series, the aim of this retelling of The Book of Tea is to make the book more widely accessible -- without diluting its intellectual content -- for both young and emerging adults seeking broader perspectives as well as intellectually curious older readers. The book will be of particular interest to those who want a deeper insight into the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and Japanese aesthetics. The text is set in a slightly larger typeface for easier reading. The Author Kakuzo Okakura (1863-1913), was born in Yokohama five years before the outset of the Meiji period, which marked the end of over 200 years of national isolation and the beginning of Japan's headlong rush to transform itself into a military and industrial power that could resist Western incursions and colonization. Yokohama was a boisterous international port, and Okakura's father, a samurai stationed there for business reasons, was a progressive thinker, who started Okakura learning English at the age of six. Okakura's most important works, including The Book of Tea (1906), were written in English, and devoted to explaining and defending Japanese and Asian culture. The era in which Okakura lived was characterized by Western inroads into Asian countries. The West, thanks to the industrial revolution, was materially and militarily superior to the East, and considered itself to be culturally superior as well. Through heroic effort, Japan built up its industry and military, and when it emerged victorious from the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, it became the first non-Western country to achieve international recognition by Western powers. Okakura, however, was not concerned with this type of recognition. He wanted recognition for Japanese and Eastern arts and culture, and he felt the need to preserve them from increasing Westernization. In 1887 he was one of the founders of the first Japanese fine arts academy, and in 1898 he helped found the Japanese Institute of Fine Arts. In 1904 he was invited to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts as a curator, and in 1910 he became the first head of the Asian art division of that Museum. He died in 1913 at the age of fifty, having devoted his life to preserving Japan's traditional cultural heritage. Important figures influenced by Okakura include the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the American poet Ezra Pound, the Indian poet Rabindranth Tagore, the American art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the British translator Arthur Waley.

Walden is an account of the two years and two months that David Henry Thoreau lived on the shores of Walden Pond, supporting himself by the labor of his own hands. In conducting this natural experiment in simple living, Thoreau hoped to discover what was essential to life. In this book, he says: I went to the woods because I wanted to take a good look at life. I wanted to learn what life had to teach. What I didn't want was to discover, just before I died, that I hadn't lived at all. I did not want to live what is not life, for life is too precious. And I didn't want to just accept life, unless it was absolutely necessary. I wanted to live deeply, see into the heart of things. I wanted to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms. If life turned out to be ugly, then I wanted to see it as such and tell the world about it. If life were sublime, then I wanted to know all its wonders through personal experience, and give a true account of it. Walden is a revolutionary book, calling into question the very principles of modern society. It challenges the reader to reconsider the foundations of his or her life. The present version is a retelling of the first two chapters of the original. Part of the Classics Retold to be Read, Not just Revered series, this retelling of the first two chapters of Walden has been undertaken to make the book more widely accessible -- without diluting its intellectual content -- for both emerging adults seeking broader perspectives and intellectually curious older readers. The text is set in a slightly larger typeface for easier reading. The Author Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) was a philosopher, naturalist, and abolitionist. He is considered the father of modern environmentalism. In 1846 he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government that permitted slavery. This experience led to his writing Civil Disobedience, which called for individual resistance to immoral government, and which influenced the thinking of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and others.

Learning to read Japanese is a little like running a marathon: it is a long, drawn out process, and it can get a little boring along the way. What we learners of Japanese need is a little fun now and then, something that brings a smile to our faces. As luck would have it, this book does just that. This magic trick is accomplished by the book's nine curious stories. Taken from the weekly magazine "Shukan Asahi," these stories, while true to life, verge on the hard to believe, and that's what evokes the magic element of fun. But that's not all. Each story is accompanied by a translation, faithfully done and easy to follow. Then, sentence by sentence, follows a short gloss of each word and phrase, a reverse derivation of each declined verb and adjective, detailed notes on vocabulary and grammar, and information and commentary on the cultural background. All of these aids can be accessed easily when needed. "Reading Japanese with a Smile: Nine Stories from a Japanese Weekly Magazine for Intermediate Learners" represents the best of two worlds -- stories that are both fully annotated and enjoyable to read. Eight of the nine stories in this book were first published under the title "Strange but True" in 1997.

Isabella L. Bird was one of the most famous British travelers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her destinations included Canada, the United States (the Rocky Mountains), Hawaii, Japan, Korea, Persia, Kurdistan, China, and Morocco. She is particularly known for her intrepidness and lively writing style. Written in the form of letters to her sister, her account of her trip to Japan in 1878 is viewed as a classic of travel writing and a valuable account of little documented areas of Japan in that era. Rather than stay in the Tokyo region or travel south to Kyoto, the mecca of Japanese civilization, she chose to travel north through the most arduously mountainous areas and eventually visit the island of Hokkaido, where lived the indigenous Ainu. With the Ainu, Isabella took an ambiguous stance: she admired them tremendously on the one hand but could not, on the other, find it in her heart to remove them from the category of savages. The Foreword, "Reading between the Lines," calls into question the accuracy of Isabella's observations of the Japanese and Ainu and casts doubt on the judgments she formed. Readers are urged to read the book actively, rather than passively, if they are not to be led astray by Isabella's biases and eccentricities.

Arguably, one of the biggest hurdles to speaking Japanese is the need to switch between casual and polite Japanese: or, to put it another way, the need to speak politely in some situations and to speak casually in others. The two modes are so frustratingly different that they can require years and years of serious study to master. The present book aims to cut down on that time by comparing the casual and polite modes in practical terms, showing just how they differ in actual speech, and giving you enough ammunition in the form of realistic dialogues and sample sentences to enable you to speak much more fluently in either mode. This is accomplished, first of all, by contrasting and comparing sixteen real-life dialogues in eight chapters, each dialogue presented in English, Japanese, and romanization. The first dialogue uses casual Japanese because the relationship of the speakers requires it; the second, even though the situation is much the same, requires polite Japanese because the speakers are of different ages or social positions, or are simply speaking to each other for the first time. Following each dialogue is a discussion of each key word and phrase, with a great many example sentences, which enables the student not only to understand the point in question but to internalize it in a practical, reproducible form. Next comes the Equivalency Charts, listing relevant words and phrases from the dialogues in their parallel polite and casual forms, giving the student another opportunity to note differences and similarities. At the end of chapters four and eight are quizzes, where the student is given another means of mastering the material. Some students may choose to concentrate on the mode that they feel is most in need of work. Others may choose to study both modes. The latter approach has several advantages. First of all, it highlights elements in the two modes that would otherwise escape notice. Second, it enables students to come to grips with conversations that combine both modes. And third, it helps students, as an unintended benefit, to recognize when one mode is inserted into the other for humorous, ironic, or sarcastic effect, something that is not uncommon in real life. All in all, the purpose of the book is not to have students memorize the explanations but to help them internalize the key words and phrases, which, after all, is the rationale for the plethora of example sentences. In fact, after going through the book once, students might best go through it again, skipping the explanations and focusing on repeated readings of the dialogues and examples sentences, thereby committing them to their subconscious minds, ready to pop up for use one day, quite to the speaker's surprise. With the help of "Switching Smoothly between Casual and Polite Japanese," you can save years of time and immense amounts of energy. You can learn to speak casually or politely, and you can get it right. This book is an revised version of "T-Shirt Japanese Versus Necktie Japanese: Two Levels of Politeness," published by Kodansha International in 1995.

"Bushido: The Soul of Japan" was written in English for a Western audience by Inazo Nitobe, a career diplomat and scholar in his native Japan. First published in 1900, Bushido has enjoyed great popularity ever since, and has been reprinted many times. The current edition, however, is the first to preserve the content and voice of Nitobe's original while bringing the text into the 21st century and including explanations of obscure references.The samurai warriors of Japan have fascinated generations of people worldwide. Simultaneously well-known and misunderstood, the samurai's existence is popularly depicted as one dominated by violence -- a life and death ruled by the sword. But there is much more to this elite class of warriors, and Nitobe thoroughly explores the samurai themselves -- their military traditions, their reverence for the sword, and how they lived their daily lives.Nitobe discusses samurai values and beliefs, and explains how they translated into actions. He explores the lasting influence of Bushido and the samurai, whose legacy is perhaps most obvious to us today in Japanese martial arts. Not only did the samurai refine the technical aspects of the arts, they infused them with the spirit of Zen Buddhism, teaching that the highest mastery was attainable only by becoming one with yourself, your weapon and your opponent.Inazo Nitobe was dedicated to a greater understanding between East and West at a time when Japan's engagement with the Western world was in its adolescence. Though his primary subject is the moral code upon which the samurai built and wielded their power, Nitobe quickly broadens his scope into an examination of nothing less than what the title of the book suggests -- the soul of Japan itself.New to this edition are a short essay about the author, illustrations showing the samurai in their waning years, and an index.