Michael Emmerich Livres

Accompanying CD-ROM contains audio narrations of the stories.

Kei, who was left alone to raise her daughter after her husband disappeared twelve years ago, finds herself drawn to the seaside town of Manazuru, a place where she tries to unlock memories from her past.

The Lake showcases Banana Yoshimoto's signature vivid characters and nuanced prose while delving into darker themes. It follows a young woman in Tokyo who, after her mother's death, develops a romance with a man haunted by childhood trauma linked to a bizarre cult. Their journey leads to hope and healing by a serene lake.

'Vibrator' is the disturbing story of the road trip of two highly unlikely companions - a troubled young female journalist and a long-haul truck driver - who meet up in a 24-hour convenience store.

A dual-language edition of Japanese stories—many appearing in English for the first time This volume of eight short stories, with parallel translations, offers students at all levels the opportunity to enjoy a wide range of contemporary literature without having constantly to refer back to a dictionary. The stories—many of which appear here in English for the first time—are by well-known writers like Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, as well as emerging voices like Abe Kazushige, Ishii Shinji, and Kawakami Hiromi. From the orthodox to the cutting-edge, they represent a range of styles and themes, showcasing the diversity of Japanese fiction over the past few decades in a collection that is equally rewarding for beginning, intermediate, and advanced students of English or Japanese. Complete with notes, the stories make excellent reading in either language.

In cherished novels such as Kitchen and Goodbye Tsugumi , Banana Yoshimoto’s warm, witty, and heartfelt depictions of the lives of young Japanese have earned her international acclaim and best-seller status. Her insightful, spare vision returns in two novellas possessed by the ghosts of love found and lost. In Hardboiled, the unnamed narrator is hiking in the mountains on an anniversary she has forgotten about, the anniversary of her ex-lover’s death. As she nears her hotel—stopping on the way at a hillside shrine and a strange soba shop—a sense of haunting falls over her. Perhaps these eerie events will help her make peace with her loss. Hard Luck is about another young woman, whose sister is dying and lies in a coma. Kuni’s fiancé left her after the accident, but his brother Sakai continues to visit, and the two of them gradually grow closer as they make peace with the impending loss of their loved one. Yoshimoto’s voice is clear, assured, and deeply moving, displaying again why she is one of Japan’s, and the world’s, most beloved writers.