Stone Bridge Press

This ground-breaking collection from Tomoka Shibasaki, author of the acclaimed novel Spring Garden, pushes the short story to a new level.

In these stories of human connection in a contemporary, alienated world, people come together to share pieces of their lives, then part. We meet the women who share a house after the outbreak of war before going their separate ways once it is over; the man who lives in a succession of rooftop apartments; the diverging lives of two brothers who are raised as latch-key kids by factory workers; the old ramen restaurant that endures despite the demolition of all surrounding buildings; people who watch a new type of spaceship lift off from a pier that once belonged to an island resort; and more.

These 34 tales from all over the planet have the compulsive power of news reports, narrated in a crisp yet allegorical style.

Winner of the Yomiuri Prize.

Winner of the 2024-2025 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

Recipient of the 2022-23 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation.

Introducing Tatsuhiko Shibusawa—Japan’s Italo Calvino—in this fantastical tale of a Japanese prince who encounters both beauty and danger on a pilgrimage to India.

A fantasy set in the ninth century, Takaoka’s Travels recounts the adventures of a Japanese prince-turned-monk on a pilgrimage to India. As Prince Takaoka and his companions pass through faraway lands, the rules of the ordinary world are upended, and they find curiosities and miracles wherever they go. The travelers encounter strange creatures--a white ape who guards a harem of bird-women, beasts who feed on dreams, a dog-headed man who can see hundreds of years into the future. On the high seas, their ship is boarded by ghostly pirates and driven back by supernatural winds, and still they push on. At every turn, Prince Takaoka is drawn to the beauty around him, whether it takes the form of a perfectly shaped pearl or a giant blood-red flower, but such beauty proves to be extremely dangerous. Seductive and mysterious, offering high adventure yet deeply human, this is a novel that transcends all expectations.

With an afterword by translator David Boyd.

"Impressive, exhaustive, labyrinthine, and obsessive—The Anime Encyclopedia is an astonishing piece of work." —Neil Gaiman

With over 10,000 entries nothing comes close . . . from classics to hidden gems, all the anime you love is finally at your fingertips.

This 3rd edition of The Anime Encyclopedia brings the landmark reference work up to date with six additional years of information on Japanese animation, its practitioners and products, as well as incisive thematic entries on anime history and culture. Even the most diehard anime fans will come away with new facts about their favorite anime and hidden gems to watch.

More than just generic listings, these reviews have snark, intelligence, and a discerning point of view. Data-obsessed fans will relish the extensive credits, online links, and cross-references, and parents and librarians will appreciate the content advisories.

Included in The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023

Stories from a Japanese master of transformative fiction, where reality, myth, and human foibles meet shifting dimensions of gender, biology, and destiny.

From the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo comes this otherworldly collection of eight stories, each a masterpiece of transformation, infused with humor, sex, and the universal search for love and beauty—in a world where the laws of time and space, and even species boundaries, don’t apply. Meet a shape-shifting con man, a goddess who uses sex to control her followers, an elderly man possessed by a fox spirit, a woman who falls in love with her 400-year-old ancestor, a kitchen god with three faces in a weasel-infested apartment block, moles who provide underground sanctuary for humans who have lost the will to live, a man nurtured through life by his seven extraordinary sisters, and a woman who is handed from husband to husband until she is finally able to return to the sea.

Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize

Caught between two cultures, award-winning author Hiromi Ito tackles subjects like aging, death, and suffering with dark humor, illuminating the bittersweet joys of being alive.

The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about what it means to live and die in a globalized society.

Ito has been described as a “shaman of poetry” because of her skill in allowing the voices of others to flow through her. Here she enriches her semi-autobiographical novel by channeling myriad voices drawn from Japanese folklore, poetry, literature, and pop culture. The result is a generic chimera—part poetry, part prose, part epic—a unique, transnational, polyvocal mode of storytelling. One throughline is a series of memories associated with the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the “thorns” of human suffering.

60 years of observation: an American journalist’s memoir about Tokyo’s modern urban transformation, its criminal underworld and, oh yes, baseball.

Tokyo Junkie is a memoir that plays out over the dramatic 60-year growth of the megacity Tokyo, once a dark, fetid backwater and now the most populous, sophisticated, and safe urban capital in the world.

Follow author Robert Whiting (The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, You Gotta Have Wa, Tokyo Underworld) as he watches Tokyo transform during the 1964 Olympics, rubs shoulders with the Yakuza and comes face to face with the city’s dark underbelly, interviews Japan’s baseball elite after publishing his first best-selling book on the subject, and learns how politics and sports collide to produce a cultural landscape unlike any other, even as a new Olympics is postponed and the COVID virus ravages the nation.

A colorful social history of what Anthony Bourdain dubbed, “the greatest city in the world,” Tokyo Junkie is a revealing account by an accomplished journalist who witnessed it all firsthand and, in the process, had his own dramatic personal transformation.

A unique behind-the-scenes look at Japanese business and how the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki were introduced to the world.

This highly entertaining business memoir describes what it was like to work for Japan’s premiere animation studio, Studio Ghibli, and its reigning genius Hayao Miyazaki. Steve Alpert, a Japanese-speaking American, was the “resident foreigner” in the offices of Ghibli and its parent Tokuma Shoten and played a central role when Miyazaki’s films were starting to take off in international markets. Alpert describes hauling heavy film canisters of Princess Mononoke to Russia and California, experiencing a screaming Harvey Weinstein, dealing with Disney marketers, and then triumphantly attending glittering galas celebrating the Oscar-winning Spirited Away. 

His one-of-a-kind portraits of Miyazaki and long-time producer Toshio Suzuki, and of sly, gruff, and brilliant businessman Yasuyoshi Tokuma, capture the hard work and artistry that have made Ghibli films synonymous with cinematic excellence. And as the lone gaijin in a demanding company run by some of the most famous and influential people in modern Japan, Steve Alpert tackles his own challenges of language and culture. No one else could have written this book.

Introducing the works of a major Chinese writer—liberal, cosmopolitan, and lyrically exotic—once banned but now embraced, and newly "discovered" in the West.

Xu Xu 徐訏 (1908-1980) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s. His popular urban gothic tales, his exotic spy fiction, and his quasi-existentialist love stories full of nostalgia and melancholy offer today’s readers an unusual glimpse into China’s turbulent twentieth century.

These translations--spanning a period of some thirty years, from 1937 until 1965--bring to life some of Xu Xu’s most representative short fictions from prewar Shanghai and postwar Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The Afterword illustrates that Xu Xu’s idealistic tendencies in defiance of the politicization of art exemplify his affinity with European romanticism and link his work to a global literary modernity.

A vital resource for students of Buddhism and Japanese Culture, revised and expanded.

Buddhism has permeated Japanese life and thought so deeply that knowledge of it is essential for a true understanding of any aspect of Japanese culture. This dictionary, with nearly five thousand entries on Buddhist terms, personal names, ceremonies, texts, and sects, will be of special interest to scholars and students of literature. Most entries have been drawn from such classics as Shasekishu Kokon chomonju, Hojoki, Makura no soshi, Tsurezure-gusa, Heike monogatari, and Taiheiki.

Hisao Inagaki (d. 2021) received a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and was a professor at Ryukoku University in Kyoto.

The true story of a half-Chinook, half-Scot adventurer who entered feudal Japan in 1848 and helped pave the way for its modernization.

How Japan, after 250 years of self-imposed isolation, began the process of modernization is in part the story of Ranald MacDonald. In 1848 this half-Scot, half-Chinook adventurer from the Pacific Northwest landed on an island off Hokkaido. Although promptly arrested and imprisoned for seven months in Nagasaki, the intelligent, well-educated MacDonald fascinated the Japanese and became one of their first teachers of English and Western ways.

Based on primary research in Japan and North America, this book chronicles the events leading to MacDonald's journey and his later struggle to obtain recognition at home.

Tenryu-ji: One of Kyoto's most revered Zen temples and a monument to Japanese history, viewed through its monks, gardens, prayers, and art.

This illustrated study of Tenryuji, ranked number one among the five great Zen temples of Kyoto and a major destination for tourism and worship, weaves together history, design, culture, and personal reflection to reveal the inner workings of a great spiritual institution.

Looking at Tenryuji's present as a mirror to its past, and detailing the famous pond and rockwork composition by renowned designer Muso Soseki, Norris Brock Johnson presents the first full-length "biography" of a Zen temple garden.

Of special interest to scholars and students of Zen classics, a glossary of specialized vocabulary to aid understanding and practice.

Over the course of Zen's development in China and Japan, the sayings and episodes of the masters have formed a huge collection of literature. Designed to put these writings within easy reach of serious students for inspiration and understanding, this glossary provides 5,500 entries on Zen terms, names of persons, texts, idiomatic expressions, references to Chinese classics, general Buddhist terms, and even particles and other parts of speech considered important in grasping the original intent and meaning.

Hisao Inagaki received a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and is a professor at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Japan.

The little-known true story of how a flamboyant circus promoter helped introduce Japan to the West in the late 19th century.

"Professor" Risley (Richard Risley Carlisle) introduced the Western circus to Japan in 1864. Three years later, this former acrobat gave many in the West their first glimpse of Japan when he took his "Imperial Japanese Troupe" of acrobats and jugglers on a triumphant tour of North America and Europe. Over the next few years, the Troupe performed before presidents, monarchs, and ordinary citizens.

Frederik L. Schodt argues compellingly that such early popular entertainments helped stir a curiosity about all things Japanese that eventually led to japonisme, The Mikado, and, in our time, the boom in manga and anime. Schodt's depiction of Risley and his troupe is enlivened by portraits of the circus demimonde and supported by nineteenth-century photographs, posters, and drawings, many in color.

His accounts of these first meetings between Westerners and Japanese shed new light on how different cultures meet, mingle, and influence each other. Descriptions of crowds, dazzling routines, and superstar troupe performers like the famous Little All Right are a delightful revelation to anyone interested in Asia, the circus, and popular entertainment.