The Cake Tree in the Ruins
The Cake Tree in the Ruins

Author: Akiyuki Nosaka

Publisher: Pushkin Collection

Published: 2019-05-14

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1782274197

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Intensely moving stories that tell of the absurd violence of war, and tenderly depict the animals and children caught in its vortex. In 1945, Akiyuki Nosaka watched the Allied firebombing of Kobe kill his adoptive parents, and then witnessed his sister starving to death. The shocking and blisteringly memorable stories of The Cake Tree in the Ruins are based on his own experiences as a child in Japan during the Second World War. They are stories of a lonely whale searching the oceans for a mate, who sacrifices himself for love; of a mother desperately trying to save her son with her tears; of a huge, magnificent tree which grows amid the ruins of a burnt-out town, its branches made from the sweetest cake imaginable. Profound, heartbreaking and aglow with a piercing beauty, they express the chaos and terror of conflict, yet also how love can illuminate even the darkest moment.

The Whale that Fell in Love with a Submarine
The Whale that Fell in Love with a Submarine

Author: Akiyuki Nosaka

Publisher: Pushkin Children's Books

Published: 2015-08-04

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 1782690271

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A whale falls in love with a military submarine, and dies courting her; a mother caught in a fire following a bombing gives all her body's water to save her son, and her desiccated form turns into a kite; a wolf rescues a sick child abandoned by her parents, only to die himself at the hand of men. However, bunkers can also become real homes, a small Japanese girl and an American POW briefly understand each other and a miraculous tree feeds starving children... This is war, no doubt, but told by someone who understands how children truly experience war and its aftermath - the bombings and parents' deaths, the life of orphans who roam the streets, the starvation and blind violence in a society beyond destruction. Akiyuki Nosaka remembers what it was like to be a child caught in war-torn Japan in 1945, and he retells his experiences in this collection of powerful and beautifully expressive stories for children.

The Pornographers
The Pornographers

Author: Akiyuki Nozaka

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2012-11-28

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0307828034

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Subuyan—frantically busy not quite successful professional pornographer of Osaka—is at heart a simple man who wants only to make world a little happier. He is a pornographer with a dream, doing his small best to alleviate the sorrows of mankind, as least insofar as they afflict the wealthy man and large corporations who are his clients (a humanistic point of view not shared by his chief cameraman, Banteki, who is a firm believer in Art for Art’s Sake). Burdened by the eternal problems of the small business man (shoddy workmanship, equipment breakdowns, the difficulty of finding decent help, customers who won’t pay their bills), Subuyan and Bantaki struggle to maintain their moral and aesthetic standards in an immoral and careless world. With ironic humor and a sharp compassion, The Pornographers follows its oddly endearing hero through a succession of tragicomic encounters—with the rich and sometimes treacherous clients to whom he purveys a bewildering diversity of artifacts and entertainments; with the synthetic schoolgirls he recruits from among Osaka’s thirteen Veteran Virgins; with infuriating technical problems (tape recorders more sensitive to the interference of ham radios than to the sounds of love-making in the adjoining apartment); with idiot film actors incapable of following the simplest script. But Subuyan’s cheerful humanism prevails against all frustrations—in a novel that is rich in comic invention, unflinching in its acceptance of life, a brilliant modern extravaganza in a classic tradition.

Cake
Cake

Author: Joyce Magnin

Publisher: Zonderkidz

Published: 2012-12-25

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0310733359

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More than frosting filled those cakes... Wilma Sue seems destined to go from one foster home to the next—until she is sent to live with sisters and missionaries, Ruth and Naomi. Do they really care about Wilma Sue, or are they just looking for a Cinderella-style farmhand to help raise chickens and bake cakes? As Wilma Sue adjusts to her new surroundings and helps deliver “special” cakes, Wilma Sue realizes there’s something strange going on. She starts looking for secret ingredients, and along the way she makes a new friend, Penny. When Penny and her mother hit a rough patch, Naomi decides to make her own version of cake—with disastrous results. Then tragedy strikes the chickens, and all fingers point to Wilma Sue—just when she was starting to believe she could at last find a permanent home with Ruth and Naomi. Will the sisters turn her out, or will she discover what it feels like to be truly loved?

Grave of the Fireflies
Grave of the Fireflies

Author: Alex Dudok de Wit

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-04-08

Total Pages: 105

ISBN-13: 1838719253

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On its release in 1988, Grave of the Fireflies riveted audiences with its uncompromising drama. Directed by Isao Takahata at Studio Ghibli and based on an autobiographical story by Akiyuki Nosaka, the story of two Japanese children struggling to survive in the dying days of the Second World War unfolds with a gritty realism unprecedented in animation. Grave of the Fireflies has since been hailed as a classic of both anime and war cinema. In 2018, USA Today ranked it the greatest animated film of all time. Yet Ghibli's sombre masterpiece remains little analysed outside Japan, even as its meaning is fiercely contested - Takahata himself lamented that few had grasped his message. In the first book-length study of the film in English, Alex Dudok de Wit explores its themes, visual devices and groundbreaking use of animation, as well as the political context in which it was made. Drawing on untranslated accounts by the film's crew, he also describes its troubled production, which almost spelt disaster for Takahata and his studio.

Fruit of the Drunken Tree
Fruit of the Drunken Tree

Author: Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2018-07-31

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 0385542739

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Seven-year-old Chula lives a carefree life in her gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside her walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar reigns, capturing the attention of the nation. “Simultaneously propulsive and poetic, reminiscent of Isabel Allende...Listen to this new author’s voice—she has something powerful to say.” —Entertainment Weekly When her mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city’s guerrilla-occupied neighborhood, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona’s mysterious ways. Petrona is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the rip tide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction. As both girls’ families scramble to maintain stability amidst the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy. Inspired by the author's own life, Fruit of the Drunken Tree is a powerful testament to the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.

Ice
Ice

Author: Anna Kavan

Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics

Published: 2025-04-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1805330993

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“A haunting story of sexual assault and climate catastrophe, decades ahead of its time” – The New Yorker This literary science fiction classic details the hallucinatory hunt for a white-haired girl, through a frozen, post-apocalyptic landscape Anticipating climate fiction and the New Weird literary genre, while garnering fans from Doris Lessing and J.G. Ballard to China Miéville and Patti Smith since it was first published in 1967, this fantasia about predatory male sexual behavior during an apocalyptic climate catastrophe reads as though author Anna Kavan had seen the future. Ice is slowly covering the entire globe; as the glacial tide creeps forward, the fabric of society begins to break down. Through this chaotic landscape, a nameless narrator hunts for the white-haired girl he once loved - or perhaps wishes to annihilate. Battling a powerful enemy known only as the Warden, he travels through nightmarish and ever-shifting scenes, where the object of his obsession remains constantly just out of reach. She is guarded by the Warden and by a cruel older woman who wishes her ill – but each time the narrator seems poised to rescue her the encroaching ice wreaks violence on her fragile body, or his own base nature sends him hurtling onward in his kaleidoscopic pursuit. Again and again the girl appears, but inevitably she eludes him. This dystopian classic, the last book Anna Kavan published in her lifetime, renders her apocalyptic vision of environmental devastation and possessive violence in unforgettable, propulsive, oneiric prose.

The New Cambridge History of Japan: Volume 3, The Modern Japanese Nation and Empire, c.1868 to the Twenty-First Century
The New Cambridge History of Japan: Volume 3, The Modern Japanese Nation and Empire, c.1868 to the Twenty-First Century

Author: Laura Hein

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-05-31

Total Pages: 945

ISBN-13: 1108169198

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This major new volume presents innovative recent scholarship on Japan's modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. An international team of leading scholars offer accessible and thought-provoking essays that present an expansive global vision of the archipelago's history from c. 1868 to the twenty-first century. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens, capturing international attention ever since. These Japanese efforts to reshape global hierarchies powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan's shores. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, this volume highlights Japan's distinctive and fast-changing history.