Tokyo Love Story

Author: Julie Blanchin Fujita
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 1462922155
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
A funny and intimate travelogue of one woman's unexpected adventures in Japan. French illustrator Julie Blanchin-Fujita arrived in Tokyo for what she thought would be a one-year stint, and ended up never leaving. In this graphic novel-style memoir she shares her love of Japan, while depicting personal experiences and stories from her life in Tokyo--from the exotic (sumo wrestlers, ramen, hot springs, tatami mats, bentos, Japanese trains, Mount Fuji, earthquakes) to the everyday (hanging out with friends, moving houses, falling in love). Her voyage of discovery in the world's most exciting city will appeal to a broad range of readers--from those contemplating a trip to Tokyo and Japanophiles to fans of graphic novels and anyone who enjoys a good manga love story. Packed with keen cultural observations, this enchanting story is told in both English and Japanese--also making it a great language learning resource.

From Little Tokyo, with Love

Author: Sarah Kuhn
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593327500
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
One of People magazine's Best Books of Summer! "Evocatively written and beautiful in its rage, From Little Tokyo, with Love is one to treasure." —Helen Hoang, USA Today bestselling author of The Kiss Quotient Celebrated author Sarah Kuhn reinvents the modern fairy tale in this intensely personal yet hilarious novel of a girl whose search for a storybook ending takes her to unexpected places in both her beloved LA neighborhood and her own guarded heart. At first glance, Rika's life might seem like the beginning of a familiar fairy tale—after all, she's an orphan with two bossy cousins, a demanding job in the family business, and an ever-present feeling that she doesn't quite belong. But as a biracial girl with formidable judo skills and a firey temper, Rika knows she is the least princess-like person in all of LA. So when a series of tantalizing clues spread out over her Little Tokyo neighborhood seem to point her to her mother being alive, Rika has to take a leap of faith (accompanied by cute actor Hank Chen) that a girl like her might deserve happiness too. But as their madcap quest brings her closer to the truth—and closer to Hank—her doubts and insecurities threaten to destroy everything. In the sudden fairy tale that's taken over her life, Rika must decide if she's destined for tragedy . . . or brave enough to write her own happy ending.

I Live in Tokyo

Author: Mari Takabayashi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618494842
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description
A look at Japanese life and customs through the eyes of a Tokyo schoolgirl.

The Book of Tokyo

Author: Hideo Furukawa
Publisher: Comma Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
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.’

Tokyo Love

Author: Nan Goldin
Publisher: Scalo Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
"I want to capture the joys of life. Not"AIDS" or "cancer" or "suffering" but joy. Closing my eyes to those realities, I want to bubble over with pleasure in these pictures. I know that the minute you let go, death comes creeping up from behind. But I want to have a ball anyway. That's exactly what I thought it would be like to work wiht Nan Goldin. Not to depict death." Nobuyoshi Araki

Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore

Author: Ray Loriga
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802199461
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
This dreamlike dystopian novel “shines a dark spotlight on the modern allure of pharmaceuticals’ seeming power to assuage all ills” (Booklist). Set in the very near future, this is the story of a traveling salesman floating from arid Arizona parking lots to steamy Bangkok bars and beyond to peddle the hottest new commodity for a group known only as The Company. What he has is a drug that erases memory. You can choose your oblivion, be it one mistake or a lifetime of pain. But things become hazy when our hero begins sampling the goods and reaches the point where he can’t even remember what it is he cannot remember. A pitch-perfect piece for our times filled with hypnotic prose, Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore is both a riveting story and a thoughtful exploration of the drug culture that surrounds us, the nature of forgetfulness, and the implacable tyranny of emotions—questioning what it means to be human when everything, including human identity, can be bought. “Part crime novel, part political allegory, part love story . . . Compelling.” —The New York Times Book Review

Tokyo on Foot

Author: Florent Chavouet
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 1462906400
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
This prize-winning book is both an illustrated tour of a Tokyo rarely seen in Japan travel guides and an artist's warm, funny, visually rich, and always entertaining graphic memoir. Florent Chavouet, a young graphic artist, spent six months exploring Tokyo while his girlfriend interned at a company there. Each day he would set forth with a pouch full of color pencils and a sketchpad, and visit different neighborhoods. This stunning book records the city that he got to know during his adventures. It isn't the Tokyo of packaged tours and glossy guidebooks, but a grittier, vibrant place, full of ordinary people going about their daily lives and the scenes and activities that unfold on the streets of a bustling metropolis. Here you find businessmen and women, hipsters, students, grandmothers, shopkeepers, policemen, and other urban types and tribes in all manner of dress and hairstyles. A temple nestles among skyscrapers; the corner grocery anchors a diverse assortment of dwellings, cafes, and shops--often tangled in electric lines. The artist mixes styles and tags his pictures with wry comments and observations. Realistically rendered advertisements or posters of pop stars contrast with cartoon sketches of iconic objects or droll vignettes, like a housewife walking her pet pig, a Godzilla statue in a local park, and an urban fishing pond that charges 400 yen per half hour. This very personal guide to Tokyo is organized by neighborhood with hand-drawn maps that provide an overview of each neighborhood, but what really defines them is what caught the artist's eye and attracted his formidable drawing talent. Florent Chavouet begins his introduction by observing that, "Tokyo is said to be the most beautiful of ugly cities." With wit, a playful sense of humor, and the multicolor pencils of his kit, he sets aside the question of urban ugliness or beauty and captures the Japanese essence of a great city in this truly vital portrait.

Tokyo Hearts - a Japanese Love Story

Author: Renae Lucas-Hall
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781781487693
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
Haruka and Takashi are devoted to shopping and going out in Tokyo. She loves her Louis Vuitton handbags, Hermes scarves and Louboutin shoes. He enjoys eating out and looking through the department stores in Ginza and Shibuya. Together they make a cute couple but love is never easy. Takashi's world starts to turn upside down when he realises Haruka has started seeing Jun, her wealthy ex-boyfriend from Kyoto. When Haruka travels to Kyoto to meet up with Jun and his mother, a series of earthquakes hit Tokyo and Takashi is injured. Haruka is unable to contact him and it looks like she'll never see Takashi again, the boy who truly loves her. Filled with cultural significance, this story will appeal to readers who have an interest in Japan and the mind-set of the Japanese people. 10% of the profit from the sales of the paperback 'Tokyo Hearts: A Japanese Love Story' in 2012/13 is donated to the Japan Society Tohoku Earthquake Relief Fund. www.renaelucashall.com"

Strange Weather in Tokyo

Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640090177
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize, Strange Weather in Tokyo is a story of loneliness and love that defies age. Tsukiko, thirty–eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, "Sensei," in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him "Sensei" ("Teacher"). He is thirty years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship develops from a perfunctory acknowledgment of each other as they eat and drink alone at the bar, to a hesitant intimacy which tilts awkwardly and poignantly into love. As Tsukiko and Sensei grow to know and love one another, time's passing is marked by Kawakami's gentle hints at the changing seasons: from warm sake to chilled beer, from the buds on the trees to the blooming of the cherry blossoms. Strange Weather in Tokyo is a moving, funny, and immersive tale of modern Japan and old–fashioned romance.

A Tokyo Romance

Author: Ian Buruma
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101981423
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
A classic memoir of self-invention in a strange land: Ian Buruma's unflinching account of his amazing journey into the heart of Tokyo's underground culture as a young man in the 1970's When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a distant land. A sensitive misfit in the world of his upper middleclass youth, what he longed for wasn’t so much the exotic as the raw, unfiltered humanity he had experienced in Japanese theater performances and films, witnessed in Amsterdam and Paris. One particular theater troupe, directed by a poet of runaways, outsiders, and eccentrics, was especially alluring, more than a little frightening, and completely unforgettable. If Tokyo was anything like his plays, Buruma knew that he had to join the circus as soon as possible. Tokyo was an astonishment. Buruma found a feverish and surreal metropolis where nothing was understated—neon lights, crimson lanterns, Japanese pop, advertising jingles, and cabarets. He encountered a city in the midst of an economic boom where everything seemed new, aside from the isolated temple or shrine that had survived the firestorms and earthquakes that had levelled the city during the past century. History remained in fragments: the shapes of wounded World War II veterans in white kimonos, murky old bars that Mishima had cruised in, and the narrow alleys where street girls had once flitted. Buruma’s Tokyo, though, was a city engaged in a radical transformation. And through his adventures in the world of avant garde theater, his encounters with carnival acts, fashion photographers, and moments on-set with Akira Kurosawa, Buruma underwent a radical transformation of his own. For an outsider, unattached to the cultural burdens placed on the Japanese, this was a place to be truly free. A Tokyo Romance is a portrait of a young artist and the fantastical city that shaped him. With his signature acuity, Ian Buruma brilliantly captures the historical tensions between east and west, the cultural excitement of 1970s Tokyo, and the dilemma of the gaijin in Japanese society, free, yet always on the outside. The result is a timeless story about the desire to transgress boundaries: cultural, artistic, and sexual.