The Shadow of a Blue Cat

The Shadow of a Blue Cat
Author: Naoyuki Ii
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2011
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1564786412

Businessman Yuki Yajima is fifty-one years old. He and his wife, Asako, are the parents of two daughters: Ryo, seventeen, and Yuka, an infant of only two months. Asking himself why he's allowed himself to become a father again at his age, Yuki begins to remember his uncle, who died quite young--younger, indeed, than Yuki is now. Thinking of this man, whom the young Yuki idolized, and who first introduced the boy to authors like Kenzaburo Oe and the Marquis de Sade, serves as a strange tipping point: allowing a sense of chaos and complexity back into his otherwise well-heeled life. A rare work of fiction focused simply on a man of integrity--a dying breed, in novels--"The Shadow of a Blue Cat" meticulously renders his life and opinions as Yuki tries to find a middle path between the radicalism of his uncle's life and the quiet bourgeois home he's worked so hard to build.

Empire of Texts in Motion

Empire of Texts in Motion
Author: Karen Laura Thornber
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 610
Release: 2020-10-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684170516

By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output. Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.

The Blue Cat of Castle Town

The Blue Cat of Castle Town
Author: Catherine Cate Coblentz
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2017-07-18
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0486815277

"The blue cat is like a knight on a quest. His quest is to find a hearth to fit the song the river taught him and to teach the owner of the hearth to sing that song"--Jacket.

The Blue Cat of Castle Town

The Blue Cat of Castle Town
Author: Catherine Cate Coblentz
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2017-05-19
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0486822249

In a 19th-century Vermont hamlet, a little blue kitten falls under the spell of the song of the river and ventures off to share the song with the world. Newbery Honor winner.

Dawn to the West

Dawn to the West
Author: Donald Keene
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 716
Release: 1998
Genre: Japanese literature
ISBN: 9780231114387

The Cat and The City

The Cat and The City
Author: Nick Bradley
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2020-05-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1786499908

In Tokyo—one of the world's largest megacities—a stray cat is wending her way through the back alleys. And, with each detour, she brushes up against the seemingly disparate lives of the city-dwellers, connecting them in unexpected ways. But the city is changing. As it does, it pushes her to the margins where she chances upon a series of apparent strangers—from a homeless man squatting in an abandoned hotel, to a shut-in hermit afraid to leave his house, to a convenience store worker searching for love. The cat orbits Tokyo's denizens, drawing them ever closer. In a series of spellbinding, interlocking narratives—with styles ranging from manga to footnotes—Nick Bradley has hewn a novel of interplay and estrangement; of survival and self-destruction; of the desire to belong and the need to escape. Formally inventive and slyly political, The Cat and The City is a lithe thrill-ride through the less-glimpsed streets of Tokyo.

Blue Cat

Blue Cat
Author: Wendy A. Scott
Publisher: Gyldendal Uddannelse
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN: 9788700235489

Farewell to Prague

Farewell to Prague
Author: Desmond Hogan
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2013-06-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1564789799

Following a crippling depression and institutionalization, the writer "Desmond" wanders from his native Dublin around an increasingly unrecognizable Europe, and as far as the southern United States, assembling a patchwork of small stories, conversations, love affairs, memories, regrets, and confrontations: "the labyrinth of stories of people whose lives you touch . . . so that your mind becomes like a polychromatic Irish pub." Whether a series of tragic postcards, a cubist novel, or a memoir shorn of its connective tissue, A Farewell to Prague stands as Desmond Hogan's greatest achievement: a catalog of the moments that justify a life "or shine a light on its emptiness."

No World Concerto

No World Concerto
Author: A. G. Porta
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2013-04-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1564789632

Hailed by Spain's Revista Quimera as one of the top ten Spanish-language novels of the decade, alongside Bolaño's 2666, Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co., and Marías's Your Face Tomorrow, the many layers of The No World Concerto center around an old screenwriter, holed up in a shabby hotel in order to write a screenplay about his lover, a young piano prodigy who wants in turn to give up music and become a writer, and believes she may be in contact with creatures from another dimension. Shifting effortlessly between realities, The No World Concerto is a delightful and prismatic novel, and the first of A. G. Porta's books to appear in English, finally joining those of his early writing partner Roberto Bolaño.

King Goshawk and the Birds

King Goshawk and the Birds
Author: Eimar O'Duffy
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2017-07-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1628972580

Originally published in 1926, King Goshawk and the Birds is the first installment of O’Duffy’s Cuanduine trilogy, which also included The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1928) and Asses in Clover (1933). Set in a future world devastated by the development of capitalism, King Goshawk concerns the eponymous tyrant’s attempt to buy all of the wildflowers and songbirds in Ireland, and the attempt by a Dublin philosopher as well as a number of mythical heroes of Irish tradition to stop him.