New books from Japan.
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A compact, color-coded guide for tourists.
The Little Tokyo Subway Guidebook
Everything You Need to Know to Get Around the City and Beyond
96 pp, 4 1/4 x 5 7/8", paper
ISBN 978-4-89684-457-3, $9.95
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Prepared with the official cooperation of the Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau of Transportation and Tokyo Metro Co., Ltd., this little guidebook has everything you need to negotiate Tokyo’s vast subway system with confidence. Includes maps with color-coded details on all thirteen subway lines, information on ticketing, tourist fares, and commuter passes, helpful phrases, and Exit Finder, and much more! An excellent pre-travel purchase for planning your trip and your voyage from the airport to downtown.
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A twisted psychiatrist cures eccentric patients of their modern-day obsessions.
In the Pool
Hideo Okuda
224 pp, 5 3/8 x 8 1/4", casebound
978-4-925080-94-1, $24.95
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Meet Dr. Ichiro Irabu. In today’s Japan, a traditional land beset by modern pressures and confusion, image-conscious people just can’t be seen going to a therapist. Instead they visit “doctors of neurology” like Dr. Irabu. What makes the good doctor unique is his penchant for sharing his patients’ stress-related ailments, aiding and abetting their compulsions . . . and making them much worse before they get better.
In this sardonic collection by award-winning Hideo Okuda, we meet the many faces of dysfunction in modern Japan. In “In the Pool,” a magazine editor‘s midlife crisis sends him deep into an addiction to swimming that threatens his job and his marriage. “Making a Stand” focuses on a man who, recently left by his wife, suffers a constant, painful, and embarrassing erection. In “Trade Show Model” a pretty young woman believes every man she sees on the street is a stalker. In “Cell,” a high-school student addicted to his cell phone cannot stop text-messaging the “friends” he so desperately wants. “Double Check” tells of a journalist afraid to leave home, for fear his house will burn down while he’s gone.
How does Dr. Irabu do it? “No, no, no. I don’t do any of that fancy-pants sort of thing. . . . Some counselor listening to a patient’s worries, then giving him wise words of encouragement. Perfectly useless.” His approach seems to work.
Hideo Okuda was an advertising copywriter and a magazine editor before starting to write at the age of thirty-four. He sees manga comics as the main inspiration for his work, and has said that his first concern as an author is to “give readers a good time.” His work, which includes a novel and several short-story collections, has won some of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, including the Naoki Prize in 2004. In the Pool has been made into a major Japanese motion picture.
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The lives of ordinary people in the subway train as seen by famed photographer Nobuyoshi Araki.
Subway Love
Nobuyoshi Araki
228 pp, 10 x 8", 200 b&w illustrations,
978-4-89684-140-4, $40.00
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This book contains more than 200 black & white portraits of subway passengers in Tokyo by Nobuyoshi Araki. Taken between 1963 and 1972, these portraits of ordinary people in transit are a memorable look at the Japan of decades ago and a study of human interaction and solitude in changing world. Without using the viewfinder, Araki hid the camera in his lap and secretly photographed commuters sleeping, picking their teeth, flirting, smiling to themselves and trying not to cry. And true to his nature and future works, Araki’s spy camera finds its way around men’s trousers and up women’s skirts.
Araki’s interview, printed in both Japanese and English, provides the photographer’s thoughts on his photos and his career, and shows off his unique sense of humor: “I wonder what the subway is like nowadays?”
Nobuyoshi Araki, born in Tokyo in 1940, has a worldwide reputation for his brilliant – and sometimes shocking – photographs. His subject matter is Tokyo and the people who live there. His work can be seen as a detailed diary of his life, or a catalogue of things that catch his visual interest.
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Experience Tokyo as you never have before:
from the inside
Tokyo Fragments
SHORT STORIES OF MODERN TOKYO BY FIVE OF JAPAN'S LEADING CONTEMPORARY WRITERS
Ryuji Morita, Tomomi Muramatsu,
Mariko Hayashi, Makoto Shiina, Chiya Fujino;
Translated by Giles Murray
206 pp, 51⁄2 x 81⁄2", case,
ISBN 4-925080-88-1, $19.95
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What does Tokyo mean to you? Businessmen in gray suits? Teenagers in wacky street-fashion? Schoolgirls in sailor costumes? Or could life in this city of 35 million souls have a little more variety and depth that the stereotypes would have us believe?
Find the answers here in Tokyo Fragments where five of Japan's most popular contemporary writers of fiction present their vision of life in different quarters of Japan's capital.
Spend a day with Ryota and Hiroshi on the mean streets of Shinjuku, spying on visitors to the local love hotel and sniffing glue in station toilets. Eavesdrop on the regulars at a bar in the old town as they fantasize about fellow-customer who claims to work in the insurance business - but may be more experienced at taking life than insuring it. Join Eriko as she hunts for Mr. Right in the trendy western Tokyo. Can you judge men by the same standards you apply to consumer goods? Maybe you can . . . but you'd better watch out for counterfeits!
Experience Tokyo as you never have before: from the inside. These five stories break down the world's biggest city into fragments of experience anyone can relate to and enjoy.
Ryuji Morita specializes in the dislocated and precarious lives of Tokyo outcasts. Tomomi Muramatsu is famous for his empathetic portrayal of old-fashioned Tokyo characters. Mariko Hayashi doubles up as a lifestyle guru and magazine columnist. Makoto Shiina has written science fiction novels and scripted and directed feature films. Chiya Fujino is noted for her ability to turn the mundane into the extraordinary.
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A gripping tale of magic and illusion
by one of Japan's master
mystery storytellers
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders
DETECTIVE MITARAI'S CASEBOOK
Soji Shimada;
translated by Ross and Shika Mackenzie
240 pp, 51⁄2 x 81⁄2", case, b&w illustrations, charts & maps, ISBN 4-925080-81-4, $22.95
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"Nominated for the Edogawa Rampo Award and a best seller in Japan, this is an intriguing, well-crafted mystery with charts and crime scene maps to ponder over. Recommended for libraries with a large mystery following." Library Journal
“Intricately constructed and entertainingly exotic.” The Japan Times
In this elaborate whodunit, private detective and astrologer Kiyoshi Mitarai faces his greatest challenge - in just one week he must solve a bizarre mystery that has baffled the Japanese nation for more than 40 years: who murdered the Tokyo artist Heikichi Umezawa, raped and killed his eldest daughter, and then chopped up the bodies of six of his daughters and nieces to create Azoth, the supreme woman? Do you have what it takes to solve the mystery before he does?
Soji Shimada has worked as a designer, musician and an astrology writer for a major newspaper. The Tokyo Zodiac Murders was his first mystery novel and is still one of the best selling mystery novels in Japan. Other works include the Detective Mitarai and the Detective Yoshiki series, more than one hundred other mystery novels, and several essays. A television drama has been based on his work. As well as being a gifted writer, Shimada is also an active campaigner for the removal of the death penalty in Japan.
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