The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper and Other Short Stories from Japan, Rebecca Otowa (Tuttle, March 2020)
The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper and Other Short Stories from Japan, Rebecca Otowa (Tuttle, March 2020)

From the unique standpoint of an American woman who married into a Japanese family and has lived in Japan for more than thirty years, Rebecca Otowa weaves enchanting tales of her adopted home that portray the perspective of both the Japanese and the foreigner on the universal issues that face us all—love, work, marriage, death, and family conflict.

Geishas and the Floating World: Inside Tokyo's Yoshiwara Pleasure District, Stephen Longstreet, Ethel Longstreet, Stephen Mansfield (intro)
Geishas and the Floating World: Inside Tokyo’s Yoshiwara Pleasure District, Stephen Longstreet, Ethel Longstreet, Stephen Mansfield (intro) (Tuttle, March 2020)

Stephen and Ethel Longstreet bring the reader on an in-depth tour of the original and most infamous red-light district in Japan—the Yoshiwara district of old Tokyo.

Introduction to Zen Training, Omori Sogen, Sayama Daian & Michael Kangen (foreword), Trevor Leggett (intro)
Introduction to Zen Training, Omori Sogen, Sayama Daian & Michael Kangen (foreword), Trevor Leggett (intro) (Tuttle, February 2020)

An Introduction to Zen Training is a translation of the Sanzen Nyumon, a foundational text for beginning meditation students by Omori Sogen—one of the foremost Zen teachers of the 20th century.

Pop Flies, Robo-Pets, and Other Disasters, Suzanne Kamata, Tracy Bishop (illus)
Pop Flies, Robo-Pets, and Other Disasters, Suzanne Kamata, Tracy Bishop (illus) (One Elm Books, March 2020)

Thirteen-year-old Satoshi Matsumoto spent the last three years living in Atlanta where he was the star of his middle-school baseball team—a slugger with pro potential, according to his coach. Now that his father’s work in the US has come to an end, he’s moved back to his hometown in rural Japan.

The Complete Story of Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Paper Cranes, Sue DiCicco, Masahiro Sasaki Tuttle, (March 2020)
The Complete Story of Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Paper Cranes, Sue DiCicco, Masahiro Sasaki (Tuttle, March 2020)

In this middle-reader book, author Sue DiCicco and Sadako’s older brother Masahiro tell her complete story in English for the first time—how Sadako’s courage throughout her illness inspired family and friends, and how she became a symbol of all people, especially children, who suffer from the impact of war.

Art, Cult and Commerce: Japanese Cinema Since 2000, Mark Schilling, Tomoki Watanabe (illus) (Awai Books, November 2019)
Art, Cult and Commerce: Japanese Cinema Since 2000, Mark Schilling, Tomoki Watanabe (illus) (Awai Books, November 2019)

From popular genre films to cult avant-garde works, this book is an essential guide to Japan’s vibrant cinema culture. It collects two decades of the best of Mark Schilling’s film writing for Variety, Japan Times, and other publications.

The Tibetan Suitcase: A Novel, Tsering Namgyal Khortsa (Blackneck Books, November 2019)
The Tibetan Suitcase: A Novel, Tsering Namgyal Khortsa (Blackneck Books, November 2019)

We all belong somewhere: a place of our birth, the origin of our being. But there are those who belong to nowhere, an existence without a motherland, or circling in-between, as if in bardo. The Tibetan Suitcase is a story of the peripatetic life of the protagonist, an Indian-born Tibetan.

The Goldfish, Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi, Emma Dai’an Wright (illus) (Emma Press, October 2019)
The Goldfish, Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi, Emma Dai’an Wright (illus) (Emma Press, October 2019)

The Goldfish is a sumptuous, surreal exploration of femininity. The poet inhabits the voice of a goldfish through a series of linguistically experimental poems which plunge us into the glass bowl and invite us to gaze out.

The Original Meaning of the Yijing: Commentary on the Scripture of Change, Zhu Xi. Joseph A Adler (trans, ed) (Columbia University Press, November 2019)
The Original Meaning of the Yijing: Commentary on the Scripture of Change, Zhu Xi, Joseph A Adler (trans, ed) (Columbia University Press, November 2019)

The Yijing (I Ching), or Scripture of Change, is traditionally considered the first and most profound of the Chinese classics. Originally a divination manual based on trigrams and hexagrams, by the beginning of the first millennium it had acquired written explanations and a series of appendices attributed to Confucius, which transformed it into a work of wisdom literature as well as divination. Over the centuries, hundreds of commentaries were written, but for the past thousand years, one of the most influential has been that of Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who synthesized the major interpretive approaches to the text and integrated it into his system of moral self-cultivation.

Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts: The Pandit Collection, Hartmut Buescher (NIAS Press, November 2019)
Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts: The Pandit Collection, Hartmut Buescher (NIAS Press, November 2019)

This new catalogue describes the holdings of the so-called Pandit Collection held at the Royal Library, Copenhagen. A diverse collection of more than 1,200 Sanskrit texts, it comprises codices ranging in length from several hundred folios to a single folio, or a manuscript fragment, often produced by educated (or in other cases by less educated) scribes.