A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha. Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she...

"Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists had a different view. This 'Bomber Mafia' asked:...

"A new tour de force from the bestselling author of Free Food for Millionaires, for readers of The Kite Runner and Cutting for Stone. PACHINKO follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan....

Uzumasa, Japan's Hollywood, has produced many beloved jidaigeki period films, but would not be the same without the kirareyaku, actors who never see the limelight. This story of the end of their era is told with melancholy and soul.

Sixty-one years ago, the United States and Japanese armies met on Iwo Jima. Decades later, hundreds of letters are unearthed from that stark island's soil. The letters give faces and voices to the men who fought there, as well as the extraordinary general who led them. Leading the defense is Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. With little defense other than sheer will and the volcanic rock of the island itself, Gen. Kuribayashi's unprecedented tactics...

Although Butoh is often viewed as Japan's equivalent of modern dance, in actuality it has little to do with the rational principles of modernism. Butoh is a theater of improvisation which places the personal experiences of the dancer on center-stage. The dancer is used as a medium to his or her inner life, but not for the portrayal of day to day existence. A Dionysian dance of nudity, eroticism, and sexuality, Butoh's scale of expression ranges from...

No woman in the three-hundred-year history of the karyukai has ever come forward in public to tell her story—until now. "Many say I was the best geisha of my generation," writes Mineko Iwasaki. "And yet, it was a life that I found too constricting to continue. And one that I ultimately had to leave." Trained to become a geisha from the age of five, Iwasaki would live among the other "women of art" in Kyoto's Gion Kobu district and practice the...

This festival favorite documentary gets at the heart of a cultural phenomenon driven by an obsession with young female sexuality and internet popularity. This ever growing phenom is told through Rio, a bona fide "Tokyo Idol" who takes us on her journey to fame. We meet her "brothers", a group of adult middle aged male super fans who devote their lives to following her--in the virtual world and in real life. With her provocative look into the Japanese...

"Japan is a fascinating and beautiful nation of mountains, hot springs, forests, and gleaming, ultramodern cities. Made up of four main islands and thousands of smaller ones, the long narrow East Asian country is just slightly smaller than California. The Japanese name for their country, Nippon, means "sun's origin," because the Japanese once believed that the sun shines first on Japan. From their point of view, of course, this is true every morning...