Death of a Salaryman
Death of a Salaryman

Author: Fiona Campbell

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2011-02-15

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1407019430

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Kenji Yamada has a critical wife, a hated mother-in-law and what he thinks is a job for life until his fortieth birthday teaches him otherwise. Initially too embarassed to tell his family that he has been fired, Kenji first befriends a travelling salesman with a passion for Elvis before taking up gambling, but his wife's outrage soon brings an end to this and sends him on a roller-coaster of misadventures. Via a bizarre chain of happenstance - including being struck by lightning while wielding a golf club - Kenji somehow finds himself responsible for a weirdly believable game show... Fiona Campbell's novel is a sparkling debut with graphic-novel sharpness, humour and poignancy.

Death of a Salesman
Death of a Salesman

Author: Arthur Miller

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1998-05-01

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 110104215X

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The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity—and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room. "By common consent, this is one of the finest dramas in the whole range of the American theater." —Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times "So simple, central, and terrible that the run of playwrights would neither care nor dare to attempt it." —Time

Life for Sale
Life for Sale

Author: Yukio Mishima

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0525565159

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“A propulsive, madcap story” (The New York Times) about a salaryman who decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper after a botched suicide attempt. • "An outstanding writer not only of Japan, but of the world." —The Atlantic After salaryman Hanio Yamada puts his life up for sale, interested parties quickly come calling with increasingly bizarre requests. What follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots—even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the cross hairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate. By turns wildly inventive, darkly comedic, and deeply surreal, in Life for Sale Yukio Mishima stunningly uses satire to explore the same dark themes that preoccupied him throughout his lifetime.

The Salaryman's Wife
The Salaryman's Wife

Author: Sujata Massey

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2013-10-01

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0062325256

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Winner of the Agatha Award. "Sujata Massey blasts her way into fiction with The Salaryman's Wife, a cross-cultural mystery of manners with a decidedly sexy edge."-- Janet Evanonich Japanese-American Rei Shimura is a 27-year-old English teacher living in one of Tokyo's seediest neighborhoods. She doesn't make much money, but she wouldn't go back home to California even if she had a free ticket (which, thanks to her parents, she does.) She's determined to make it on her own. Her independence is threatened however, when a getaway to an ancient castle town is marred by murder. Rei is the first to find the beautiful wife of a high-powered businessman, dead in the snow. Taking charge, as usual, Rei searches for clues by crashing a funeral, posing as a bar-girl, and somehow ending up pursued by police and paparazzi alike. In the meantime, she attempts to piece together a strange, ever-changing puzzle—one that is built on lies and held together by years of sex and deception. The first installment in the Rei Shimura series, The Salaryman's Wife is a riveting tale of death, love, and sex, told in a unique cross-cultural voice.

Re-reading the Salaryman in Japan
Re-reading the Salaryman in Japan

Author: Romit Dasgupta

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0415683289

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This book uses the figure of the salaryman to explore masculinity in Japan by examining the salaryman as a gendered construct, and is one of the first to focus on the men within Japanese corporate culture through a gendered lens. Not only does this add to the emerging literature on masculinity in Japan, but given the important role Japanese corporate culture has played in Japan's emergence as an industrial power, Romit Dasgupta's research offers a new way of looking both at Japanese business culture, and more generally at important changes in Japanese society in recent years.

Tokyo Ueno Station (National Book Award Winner)
Tokyo Ueno Station (National Book Award Winner)

Author: Yu Miri

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-06-22

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0593187520

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WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo. Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics. Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.

Dealonomics
Dealonomics

Author: Kim Meredith

Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa

Published: 2013-12-18

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1770225587

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The global economy is a mess. Big business, aided by bad government, has spoilt the party for everyone, yet it is individuals and small companies that are really paying the price. With the depressed state of the economy, companies are not giving much in the way of increases, vacant positions are not being filled, and contracts are not being awarded or renewed. Employees and contractors have to work harder for the same, or even less, money. How can individuals, entrepreneurs, small business owners and even civil servants and homemakers make the best of a bad situation? Armed with the same expert level of dealmaking skills as the captains of industry, you, too, can substantially improve your personal wealth and financial future. This is dealonomics. Fun to read, easily accessible and with loads of practical examples, this book will equip you with the world-class dealmaking expertise you need to get the income you want. An essential read for everyone who wants to improve their income or financial position in today’s recession-prone world.

Depression in Japan
Depression in Japan

Author: Junko Kitanaka

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 069114205X

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Exploring how depression has become a national disease in Japan, this work shows how psychiatry has responded to the nation's ailing social order & how, in a remarkable transformation, the discipline has begun to overcome longstanding resistance to its intrusion in Japanese life.

Precarious Japan
Precarious Japan

Author: Anne Allison

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2014-02-04

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0822377241

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In an era of irregular labor, nagging recession, nuclear contamination, and a shrinking population, Japan is facing precarious times. How the Japanese experience insecurity in their daily and social lives is the subject of Precarious Japan. Tacking between the structural conditions of socioeconomic life and the ways people are making do, or not, Anne Allison chronicles the loss of home affecting many Japanese, not only in the literal sense but also in the figurative sense of not belonging. Until the collapse of Japan's economic bubble in 1991, lifelong employment and a secure income were within reach of most Japanese men, enabling them to maintain their families in a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Now, as fewer and fewer people are able to find full-time work, hope turns to hopelessness and security gives way to a pervasive unease. Yet some Japanese are getting by, partly by reconceiving notions of home, family, and togetherness.

What's Left of Me Is Yours
What's Left of Me Is Yours

Author: Stephanie Scott

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2020-06-23

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0385544715

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"Each chapter of this enrapturing novel is elegantly brief and charged with barely contained emotion." --New York Times Book Review A gripping debut set in modern-day Tokyo and inspired by a true crime, for readers of Everything I Never Told You and The Perfect Nanny, What's Left of Me Is Yours charts a young woman's search for the truth about her mother's life--and her murder. In Japan, a covert industry has grown up around the "wakaresaseya" (literally "breaker-upper"), a person hired by one spouse to seduce the other in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings. When Satō hires Kaitarō, a wakaresaseya agent, to have an affair with his wife, Rina, he assumes it will be an easy case. But Satō has never truly understood Rina or her desires and Kaitarō's job is to do exactly that--until he does it too well. While Rina remains ignorant of the circumstances that brought them together, she and Kaitarō fall in a desperate, singular love, setting in motion a series of violent acts that will forever haunt her daughter's life. Told from alternating points of view and across the breathtaking landscapes of Japan, Stephanie Scott exquisitely renders the affair and its intricate repercussions. As Rina's daughter, Sumiko, fills in the gaps of her mother's story and her own memory, Scott probes the thorny psychological and moral grounds of the actions we take in the name of love, asking where we draw the line between passion and possession.