Ozu's Tokyo Story

Ozu's Tokyo Story

Author: David Desser

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-04-13

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 9780521484350

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Ozu's Tokyo Story is generally regarded as one of the finest films ever made. Universal in its appeal, it is also considered to be 'particularly Japanese'. Exploring its universality and cultural specificity, this collection of specially commissioned essays demonstrates the multiple planes on which the film may be appreciated. The introduction outlines Ozu's career as both a contract director of a major studio and as a singular figure in Japanese film history, and also analyses the director's cinematic style, particularly his narrative strategies and spatial compositions. Other essays situate Ozu's cinema in its relationship to Hollywood film-making: his relationship to aspects of Japanese tradition, situating the film within artistic modes, religious systems and beliefs, and socio-cultural and familial formations. Also included is an analysis of how Ozu has been misunderstood in Western criticism.


Tokyo Story

Tokyo Story

Author: Yasujirō Ozu

Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, Inc.

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13:

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On the 100th anniversary of the great director's birth, a book celebrating his greatest film.


The Book of Tokyo

The Book of Tokyo

Author: Hideo Furukawa

Publisher: Comma Press

Published: 2015-06-12

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13:

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A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network… A young woman is accompanied home one night by a reclusive student, and finds herself lured into a flat full of eerie Egyptian artefacts… A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive… At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time… The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’


I Live in Tokyo

I Live in Tokyo

Author: Mari Takabayashi

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 36

ISBN-13: 9780618494842

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A look at Japanese life and customs through the eyes of a Tokyo schoolgirl.


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.


Last Mission to Tokyo

Last Mission to Tokyo

Author: Michel Paradis

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 150110473X

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A narrative account of the Doolittle Raids of World War II traces the daring Raiders attack on mainland Japan, the fate of the crews who survived the mission, and the international war crimes trials that defined Japanese-American relations and changed legal history.


Tokyo Vice

Tokyo Vice

Author: Jake Adelstein

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-10-13

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0307378942

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NOW A MAX ORIGINAL SERIES. A riveting true-life tale of newspaper noir and Japanese organized crime from an American investigative journalist who "pulls the curtain back on ... [an] element of Japanese society that few Westerners ever see" (San Francisco Examiner). Jake Adelstein is the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, where for twelve years he covered the dark side of Japan: extortion, murder, human trafficking, fiscal corruption, and of course, the yakuza. But when his final scoop exposed a scandal that reverberated all the way from the neon soaked streets of Tokyo to the polished Halls of the FBI and resulted in a death threat for him and his family, Adelstein decided to step down. Then, he fought back. In Tokyo Vice he delivers an unprecedented look at Japanese culture and searing memoir about his rise from cub reporter to seasoned journalist with a price on his head.


Strange Weather in Tokyo

Strange Weather in Tokyo

Author: Hiromi Kawakami

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2017-11-01

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1640090177

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Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize, Strange Weather in Tokyo is a story of loneliness and love that defies age. Tsukiko, thirty–eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, "Sensei," in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him "Sensei" ("Teacher"). He is thirty years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship develops from a perfunctory acknowledgment of each other as they eat and drink alone at the bar, to a hesitant intimacy which tilts awkwardly and poignantly into love. As Tsukiko and Sensei grow to know and love one another, time's passing is marked by Kawakami's gentle hints at the changing seasons: from warm sake to chilled beer, from the buds on the trees to the blooming of the cherry blossoms. Strange Weather in Tokyo is a moving, funny, and immersive tale of modern Japan and old–fashioned romance.


Hachiko

Hachiko

Author: Pamela S. Turner

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2009-04-06

Total Pages: 37

ISBN-13: 054753096X

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Imagine walking to the same place every day, to meet your best friend. Imagine watching hundreds of people pass by every morning and every afternoon. Imagine waiting, and waiting, and waiting. For ten years. This is what Hachiko did. Hachiko was a real dog who lived in Tokyo, a dog who faithfully waited for his owner at the Shibuya train station long after his owner could not come to meet him. He became famous for his loyalty and was adored by scores of people who passed through the station every day. This is Hachiko’s story through the eyes of Kentaro, a young boy whose life is changed forever by his friendship with this very special dog. Simply told, and illustrated with Yan Nascimbene’s lush watercolors, the legend of Hachiko will touch your heart and inspire you as it has inspired thousands all over the world.


Iva

Iva

Author: Mike Weedall

Publisher: Luminare Press

Published: 2020-05-08

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9781643882918

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It is 1941, the start of Word War II. Wishing only to pursue her dreams of attending medical school at UCLA, Iva Toguri reluctantly visits her sick aunt in Japan. The start of the war traps her there. When she refuses to renounce her American citizenship, the Japanese government denies her a food ration card. Soon her mother's family evicts her, and she struggles to survive. Forced to accept a job with Radio Tokyo, she refuses to participate in propaganda broadcasts despite unending pressure by Army management. Relief comes with the war's end, but the extreme politics back in the United States and continuing racial prejudice against Japanese-Americans makes Iva a target. Mistakenly identified as Tokyo Rose, she is charged with treason, leading to a trial that grips the nation.