In the vast Asian world, Kito Aya's diary has enjoyed unstoppable success: published in the late 1980s in Japan, it has sold over a million copies. A crowded audience for the first-person story of a fifteen-year-old girl who inspired and enchanted an entire continent. Aya talks about ten years of her life, she talks about adolescence and the beginning of adulthood, a life like many others, but without perspective, an existence undermined by illness, that's the difference. And here is enclosed the power of these pages: in the rebellion, in the irony, in the fragility that turns into strength, which make Aya a symbol, a cult figure. Because, beyond her particular condition, she managed to shout in a clear voice what it means to grow up, and to count how many tears it takes to face defeats.
About the book
Heartbreaking story of a girl who is diagnosed with a rare and degenerative disease.
One thousand paper cranes to achieve your heart’s desire.
1945, Hiroshima: Ichiro is a teenage boy relaxing at home with his friend Hiro. Moments later there is a blinding fl ash as the horrifi c nuclear bomb is dropped. With great bravery the two boys fi nd Hiro’s fi veyear-old sister Keiko in the devastated and blasted landscape. With Hiro succumbing to his wounds, Ichiro
is now the only one who can take care of Keiko. But in the chaos Ichiro loses her when he sets off to fi nd help.
Seventy years later, the loss of Keiko and his broken promise to his dying friend are haunƟ ng the old man’s fading years. Mizuki, his grandaughter, is determined to help him. As the Japanese legend goes, if you have the patience to fold 1,000 paper cranes, you will fi nd your heart’s desire; and it turns out her grandfather has only one more origami crane to fold...
Narrated in a compelling mix of straight straight narrative,
free verse and haiku poems, this is a haunting and powerful novel of courage and survival, with full-page illustrations by Natsko Seki.
About the book
Like all stories about the atomic bomb, this was also very touching. I always want to know more about the subject and have an innate desire to know what happened in those first moments.
On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of north-east Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,500 people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned. It was Japan’s greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo, and spent six years reporting from the disaster zone. He met a priest who performed exorcisms on people possessed by the spirits of the dead. And he found himself drawn back again and again to a village which had suffered the greatest loss of all, a community tormented by unbearable mysteries of its own.
What really happened to the local children as they waited in the school playground in the moments before the tsunami? Why did their teachers not evacuate them to safety? And why was the unbearable truth being so stubbornly covered up?
Ghosts of the Tsunami is a classic of literary non-fiction, a heart-breaking and intimate account of an epic tragedy, told through the personal accounts of those who lived through it. It tells the story of how a nation faced a catastrophe, and the bleak struggle to find consolation in the ruins.
About the book
This is a touching book about Great East Japan Earthquake, it tells the true story of the Japanese population immediately after the tsunami that devastated the northeastern coast. It focuses on one school in particular, the only one where pupils have died. Yes, because among the 378 students who died, it seems that only those of this school are direct victims of the tsunami while they were at school (the others were at home or were going home with their parents). The book is about this disaster, the decisions made by the adults in the school that led to the death of the children, about the old men of the village versus the young wives who wanted to go and get the children and run overground, but being old they have experience with earthquake and the school is a safe place, it is built against earthquakes (but not against tsunamis) and about the parents of the children overpowered by the wave and of the surviving children, those who want to forget the tragedy to move forward and those who want justice.
An evocative journey that from the districts of Tokyo reaches the most remote places in Japan, to discover authors from the most diverse eras: from the court lady Murasaki Shikibu, author of the Genji monogatari, against the background of the twin cedars of Mount Hatsuse, to the iconoclast Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, with its corner of the Six Paths, in Kyoto, where the well that leads to the underworld is hidden. And then of course Mishima Yukio, Kawabata Yasunari and Tsushima Yuko, who summarize the contradictions of the century that has just ended, and the poets of the last decades. Twenty-eight stages that touch both the places made famous by a literary quote, and others less known: the pond inside the University of Tokyo described by Natsume Soseki, the underground bar in Shinjuku made famous by Murakami Haruki, the extreme edge of the Ryukyu , Hiroshima risen from its ashes, the island of Sado refuge of the crested ibis… The constant intertwining of history, contemporary reality and the resulting poetic and literary representation gives rise to an original cultural geography of a civilization with inimitable characters.
About the book
The book is about some Japanese places which are the main location of other literal works or places where certain tales were written. All seasoned with long philosophical digressions on the authors. At the end, the author talks about writers and their works.
１リットルの涙
