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...

A Japanese boy learns of Christmas when his mother decorates a pine tree with paper cranes.

When the Imperial Household Council refuses to approve the marriage of her parents, eighteen-year-old Izumi decides to become the perfect princess to help win the council's consent, but will she sacrifice her own heart in order to secure her parents' happiness?

After John Blackthorne shipwrecks in Japan, he makes himself useful to a feudal lord in a power struggle with another and becomes a samurai.

A fictionalized autobiography in which eleven-year-old Yoko escapes from Korea to Japan with her mother and sister at the end of World War II.

Yasuko Hanaoka thought she had escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day, the situation quickly escalates and Togashi ends up dead. Yasuko's next-door-neighbor Ishigami offers his help, not only disposing of the body, but plotting the cover-up as well.

After Jiro encounters a life-like garden statue of a tall bird, he falls asleep and dreams of the story his mother once told him about a grateful crane.

"Cain Lemaire is an ex-Secret Service agent from New Orleans. With help from his sister who's working in Japan, Cain takes a job in Tokyo as head of security detail for a very successful and important CEO. Cain ends up tangling with the yakuza (Japanese mafia) and unraveling a sex slavery ring"--

The Japanese gold treasure lost since World War II; a girl for whom betrayal is the inevitable way of life; a high-level economic conference which must be aborted; a CIA operative seasoned in all things except the double cross-these are the principal elements in this intense and informed novel of government underworlds today.

The novel's narrator is Haruko, Empress of Japan. In 1959, at the age of twenty-four, she marries the Crown Prince, becoming the first non-aristocratic woman to enter the longest-running, most hermetically sealed-off and mysterious monarchy in the world. Met with cruelty and suspicion by the Empress and her minions, controlled at every turn, Haruko suffers a nervous breakdown and loses her voice. Yet she recovers and perseveres, holding tight to the...