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This Scheming World

Author: Ihara Saikaku

Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Published: 2011-12-20

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 146290260X

This classic work of Japanese literature is considered the masterpiece of Japanese novelist Seken Munasanya. This Scheming World (Seken Munasanyo) was published in 1692, one year before the author’s death. It represents the culmination of Saikaku’s perceptive genius, and in structure, is one of the most consolidated of all his works. Most of the stories are told as incidents or episodes relating to New Year’s Eve, when in those days it was the custom to balance all debits and credits for the year. Saikaku portrays his characters with so lifelike a touch that, even though three centuries have passed since his time, it seems as if they were our contemporaries. Decidedly inclined towards the debtors, Saikaku has them slipping off to the homes of their favorite mistresses, leaving town on “sudden” business trips, or becoming actors for the day in order to deceive the ever–persistent year–end collectors. Some of his characters are successful, while some are beset by even more troubles in trying to avoid the collectors. The episodes are always frank, often with humor, and occasionally pathetic. But more than anything else, the seventeenth century day–to–day way of living by the commoners comes vividly to life.

This Scheming World

Author: Ihara Saikaku

Publisher: チャールズ・イー・タトル出版

Published: 2023-10-17

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9784805317105

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"The New Year's Eve is more precious than a thousand pieces of gold. It is the Great Divide between winter and spring, which none can pass over without copper and silver." --Ihara Saikaku Ihara Saikaku is regarded as Japan's first popular writer. The twenty lively stories in This Scheming World recount raucous events surrounding New Year's Eve--as crafty money lenders attempt to collect their money from equally crafty debtors. From the bawdy to the outrageous, these tales demonstrate how far 17th-century Japanese would go to avoid paying their debts--with hilariously unexpected and often disastrous results! These finely-crafted tales include stories of: Philanderers who slip off to hide in the homes of their mistresses Hustlers who leave town suddenly on "very important" business trips Connivers who become actors for a day to hide-in-plain-sight on stage Saikaku portrays his characters with such a deft and human touch that, even three centuries later, his stories still ring true. The new Introduction by Saikaku expert David J. Gundry explains how and why this entertaining work still resonates with modern readers today.

This Scheming World

Author: Saikaku Ihara

Publisher:

Published: 1973

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13:

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A Map of the World

Author: Jane Hamilton

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2010-12-15

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0307764060

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of the widely acclaimed The Book of Ruth comes a harrowing, heartbreaking drama about a rural American family and a disastrous event that forever changes their lives. "It takes a writer of rare power and discipline to carry off an achievement like A Map of the World. Hamilton proves here that she is one of the best." —Newsweek The Goodwins, Howard, Alice, and their little girls, Emma and Claire, live on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Although suspiciously regarded by their neighbors as "that hippie couple" because of their well-educated, urban background, Howard and Alice believe they have found a source of emotional strength in the farm, he tending the barn while Alice works as a nurse in the local elementary school. But their peaceful life is shattered one day when a neighbor's two-year-old daughter drowns in the Goodwins' pond while under Alice's care. Tormented by the accident, Alice descends even further into darkness when she is accused of sexually abusing a student at the elementary school. Soon, Alice is arrested, incarcerated, and as good as convicted in the eyes of a suspicious community. As a child, Alice designed her own map of the world to find her bearings. Now, as an adult, she must find her way again, through a maze of lies, doubt and ill will. A vivid human drama of guilt and betrayal, A Map of the World chronicles the intricate geographies of the human heart and all its mysterious, uncharted terrain. The result is a piercing drama about family bonds and a disappearing rural American life.

Comrade Loves of the Samurai

Author: Ihara Saikaku

Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Published: 2011-06-07

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1462900437

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In Comrade Loves of a Samurai, the theme of homosexual love between the samurai is explored. To the old Japanese such love among samurai was quite permissible. The sons of samurai families were urged to form homosexual alliances while youth lasted, and often these loves matured into lifelong companionships. Saikaku describes Japanese love scenes of all kinds with a frankness that has made him a favorite with expurgators, but he discusses different types of love with tenderness and compassion. The Songs of the Geisha included in this volume is a collection of geisha folk songs composed to be sung to the accompaniment of the shamisen. All of the songs have a charmingly nostalgic quality which fitted well with the time and the circumstances for which they were composed. They are intimately personal, expressing the feelings of the geisha towards their sympathetic listeners. Love, frustration, and the futility of hope are their main themes. These lyrics, for all their erotic symbolism, are restrained and tactful, and their erotic beauty must be felt rather than heard. Both books were originally privately published in London in 1928 as a two volume set entitled Eastern Love.

A World Too Near

Author: Kay Kenyon

Publisher: Pyr

Published: 2010-01-28

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1591028329

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In Bright of the Sky, Kay Kenyon introduced a milieu unique in science fiction and fantasy: The Entire, a five-armed radial universe that exists in a dimension without stars and planets and is parallel to our own universe. Stretched over The Entire is a lid of plasma, called the bright, which ebbs and flows, bringing day and twilight. Under the vast canopy of the bright live many galactic species, copied from our own universe. Former star pilot Titus Quinn loves The Entire, but now he must risk annihilating it by destroying the fortress of Ahnenhoon. To sustain a faltering Entire, Ahnenhoon's great engine will soon reach through the brane separating the universes and consume our own universe in a concentrated ball of fire. Quinn sets off on a journey across The Entire armed with the nan, a small ankle bracelet containing nanoscale military technology that can reduce Ahnenhoon and its deadly engine to chaos. He must pursue his mission even though his wife is held prisoner in Ahnenhoon and his own daughter has sent the assassin MoTi to hunt him down. As he traverses the galactic distances of The Entire, he learns more of the secrets of its geography, its fragile storm walls, its eons-long history, and the factions that contend for dominance. One of these factions is led by his daughter, who though young and a slave, has at her command a transforming and revolutionary power. As Quinn wrestles with looming disaster and approaches the fabled concentric rings of Ahnenhoon's defenses, he learns that in the Entire, nothing is what it appears. Its denizens are all harboring secrets, and the greatest of these is the nature of the Entire itself.

The Age of Silver

Author: Ning Ma

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-11-24

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0190606576

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The Age of Silver advances a "horizontal" method of comparative literature and applies this approach to analyze the multiple emergences of early realism and novelistic modernity in Eastern and Western cultural spheres from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Naming this era of economic globalization the Age of Silver, Ning Ma emphasizes the bullion flow from South America and Japan to China through international commerce, and argues that the resultant transcontinental monetary and commercial co-evolutions stimulated analogous socioeconomic shifts and emergent novelistic realisms. The main texts addressed within include The Plum in the Golden Vase (China), Don Quixote (Spain), The Life of an Amorous Man (Japan), and Robinson Crusoe (England). These Eastern and Western narratives indicate from their own geographical vantage points commercial expansions' stimulation of social mobility and larger processes of cultural destabilization. Their realist tendencies are underlain with politically critical functions and connote "heteroglossic" national imaginaries. This horizontal argument realigns novelistic modernity with a multipolar global context and reestablishes commensurabilities between Eastern and Western literary histories. The Age of Silver challenges the unilateral equation between globalization and modernity with westernization, and foregrounds a polycentric mode of global early modernity for pluralizing the genealogy of world literature and historical transcultural relations.

A Peculiar Peril

Author: Jeff VanderMeer

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

Published: 2020-07-07

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0374308896

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A Peculiar Peril is a head-spinning epic about three friends on a quest to protect the world from a threat as unknowable as it is terrifying, from the Nebula Award–winning and New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer. Jonathan Lambshead stands to inherit his deceased grandfather’s overstuffed mansion—a veritable cabinet of curiosities—once he and two schoolmates catalog its contents. But the three soon discover that the house is filled with far more than just oddities: It holds clues linking to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley has stormed back to life on a magic-fueled rampage across a surreal, through-the-looking-glass version of Europe replete with talking animals (and vegetables). Swept into encounters with allies more unpredictable than enemies, Jonathan pieces together his destiny as a member of a secret society devoted to keeping our world separate from Aurora. But as the ground shifts and allegiances change with every step, he and his friends sink ever deeper into a deadly pursuit of the profound evil that is also chasing after them.

The Samurai

Author: Shūsaku Endō

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780811213462

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Considered one of the late Shusaku Endo's finest works, THE SAMURAI seamlessly combines historical fact with a novelist's imaginings. Set in the period preceding the Christian persecutions in Japan recorded so memorably in Endo's SILENCE, this book traces the steps of some of the first Japanese to set foot on European soil.

Forest World

Author: Margarita Engle

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-08-29

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1481490591

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From Young People’s Poet Laureate and award-winning author Margarita Engle comes a lively middle grade novel in verse that tells the story of a Cuban-American boy who visits his family’s village in Cuba for the first time—and meets a sister he didn’t know he had. Edver isn’t happy about being shipped off to Cuba to visit the father he barely knows. Why would he want to visit a place that no one in Miami ever mentions without a sigh? Yet now that travel laws have changed and it’s a lot easier for divided families to be reunited, his mom thinks it's time for some father-son bonding. Edver doesn’t know what this summer has in store, but he’s definitely expecting to meet a sister he didn’t know existed! Luza is a year older and excited to see her little brother, until she realizes how different their lives have been. Looking for anything they might have in common, they sneak onto the internet—and accidentally catch the interest of a dangerous wildlife poacher. Edver has fought plenty of villains in video games. Now, to save the Cuban jungle they love, he and Luza are going to have to find a way to conquer a real villain!