太宰 治

Details the life of a troubled young man from a well-off family from Japan's far north who is incapable of revealing his true self to others.

Osamu Dazai is one of the most famous--and infamous--writers of 20th-century Japan. A Shameful Life (Ningen shikkaku) is his final published work and has become a bestselling classic for its depiction of the tortured struggle of a young man to survive in a world that he cannot comprehend. Paralleling the life and death of Dazai himself, the delicate weaving of fact and fiction remorselessly documents via journals the life of Yozo, a university student who spends his time in increasing isolation and debauchery. His doomed love affairs, suicide attempts, and constant fear of revealing his true self haunt the pages of the book and reveal a slow descent into madness. This dark tale nevertheless conveys something authentic about the human heart and its inability to find its true bearing.

The novella that first propelled Dazai into the literary elite of post-war Japan. Essentially the start of Dazai's career, Schoolgirl gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language. Now it illuminates the prevalent social structures of a lost time, as well as the struggle of the individual against them--a theme that occupied Dazai's life both personally and professionally. This new translation preserves the playful language of the original and offers the reader a new window into the mind of one of the greatest Japanese authors of the 20th century.

When William Merrick of the U.S. Consulate in Hakodate Japan is tasked to rescue a group of shipwrecked Americans en route to the Shogunate Capital of Edo, he unwittingly becomes swept up in a deadly plot by a secretive faction whose aim is to overthrow the Old Order of the Tokugawa Shogunate whose dwindling 266 year rule is under threat from open rebellion and all out civil war. In a feudal land ruled by powerful Samurai Warlords divided by loyalties between their Emperor and Shogun, the balance of power and the future of an Empire rests with one man under The Setting Sun.