Kitchen

Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen juxtaposes two tales about mothers, transsexuality, bereavement, kitchens, love and tragedy in contemporary Japan. It is a startlingly original first work by Japan's brightest young literary star and is now a cult film. When Kitchen was first published in Japan in 1987 it won two of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, climbed its way to the top of the bestseller lists, then remained there for over a year and sold millions of copies. Banana Yoshimoto was hailed as a young writer of great talent and great passion whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of modern literature, and has been described as 'the voice of young Japan' by the Independent on Sunday.

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Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore

Esther Vincent

Making Kin aspires to be ecofeminist in nature, in terms of acknowledging the intersectional mode of relations between gender and other socially constructed markers of identity like race, class, culture and nation, and how these intersect with pertinent environmental issues. With a focus on a politics of relations, Making Kin contemplates the Singapore woman writer’s place on earth from the perspective of the domestic and private to re-centre the woman in the discourse of politics, environment, ecology and nation. It is our hope that with this anthology, women writers in Singapore may chart a new cartography on the map of Singapore’s literary scene, writing urgently about gender, place, nature, climate change and other critical environmental issues that they find themselves entangled in and empathetic towards.

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How Do You Live?

Genzaburo Yoshino

Anime master Hayao Miyazaki’s favorite childhood book, in English for the first time. First published in 1937, Genzaburō Yoshino’s How Do You Live? has long been acknowledged in Japan as a crossover classic for young readers. Academy Award–winning animator Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle) has called it his favorite childhood book and announced plans to emerge from retirement to make it the basis of a final film. How Do You Live? is narrated in two voices. The first belongs to Copper, fifteen, who after the death of his father must confront inevitable and enormous change, including his own betrayal of his best friend. In between episodes of Copper’s emerging story, his uncle writes to him in a journal, sharing knowledge and offering advice on life’s big questions as Copper begins to encounter them. Over the course of the story, Copper, like his namesake Copernicus, looks to the stars, and uses his discoveries about the heavens, earth, and human nature to answer the question of how he will live. This first-ever English-language translation of a Japanese classic about finding one’s place in a world both infinitely large and unimaginably small is perfect for readers of philosophical fiction like The Alchemist and The Little Prince, as well as Miyazaki fans eager to understand one of his most important influences.

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