This is the story of Sensei Reese Rigby's journey into Isshin-ryu karate-do from beginner white belt to ninth-degree black belt grandmaster, starting with his school of fourteen students in 1973 and growing to approximately three hundred karate students and an additional one hundred combined cardio kickboxing and tai chi students in 2012. In writing this book, Sensei Rigby wanted to share his story with his students, family, and others who are interested in a martial arts journey. This book is a tribute to his Isshin-ryu instructors, Grandmaster Angi Uezu and Grandmaster Tom Lewis, and his tai chi instructor, Sifu Diane Cannon.

Bringing together novelist Osamu Dazai’s best autobiographical shorts in a single, slim volume, Self-Portraits shows the legendary writer at his best—and worst “Art dies the moment it acquires authority.” So said Japan’s quintessential rebel writer Osamu Dazai, who, disgusted with the hypocrisy of every kind of establishment, from the nation’s obsolete aristocracy to its posturing, warmongering generals, went his own way, even when that meant his death—and the death of others. Faced with pressure to conform, he declared his individuality to the world—in all its self-involved, self-conscious, and self-hating glory. “Art,” he wrote, “is ‘I.’” In these short stories, collected and translated by Ralph McCarthy, we can see just how closely Dazai’s life mirrored his art, and vice versa, as the writer/narrator falls from grace, rises to fame, and falls again. Addiction, debt, shame, and despair dogged Dazai until his self-inflicted death, and yet despite all the lies and deception he resorted to in life, there is an almost fanatical honesty to his writing. And that has made him a hero to generations of readers who see laid bare, in his works, the painful, impossible contradictions inherent in the universal commandment of social life—fit in and do as you are told—as well as the possibility, however desperate, of defiance. Long out of print, these stories will be a revelation to the legions of new fans of No Longer Human, The Setting Sun, and The Flowers of Buffoonery.

Nambin: The Call By: James L. Mayle Nambin: The Call is the first of author James L. Mayle’s thrilling fantasy series, Nambin. In this Shonnen Manga novel, Mayle is able to depict friendship, hard work, and victory through his characters and the world of Nambin, but more than that, there’s also much multi layered nuance. It’s about moving forward, finding home, finding love, becoming comfortable in your own skin, good and evil, and badass battles. Mayle originally began Nambin as a form of self-medication. He was going through some tough times, and writing helped take him away to another world. Soon, it became a literal and figurative escape. Mayle hopes his readers find happiness through the story and are able to escape to the world of Nambin just as he had when writing it. The world can be a very dark place, and Mayle wants Nambin to be a light. He wants his readers to know things do get better, you just have to believe and push forward.

In the tradition of Taoist philosophers and Zen masters, Steve Hoeft tells the stories he learned from his Toyota Production System (TPS) master teachers. Sometimes enigmatic, sometimes funny, but always powerful and enlightening, these stories of continuous improvement and Lean implementation are organized around the Toyota House framework. After

Do you ever skip dinner to finish that "impossible" level? Have you ever tossed your keyboard out the window after losing a game, or swung your controller around because you lost that power up? Would you like to learn a little bit about the underground world of emulation? If you answered yes to any of the above, this book was meant for you. With an insider's look at how people interact with the games and with each other, Radford Castro's tales of gaming are almost as fun as playing the games themselves.

Perth in the 1950s. After being caught wearing his mother's yellow dress, young Victor had to hide any tendency towards gender inappropriate behaviour. But his interest in dancing and theatre (and mooning over Rudolph Nureyev on the telly) were bound to make the facade collapse at some point. Emerging sexuality and the sense of not being 'at home' in his body, let alone the world, ran alongside a search for meaning that brought him eventually to a spiritual awakening under the young guru Maharaji...Part family tragedy, part existential comedy, The Boy in the Yellow Dress is a warts-and-all account of exile and the subsequent journey homewards that is less about finding a respectable place in the world than an intimate connection with the ultimate source of being. If ever a memoir captured the Zeitgeist, it's this one... Wise, funny, surprising at every turn... More than a portrait of growing up gay, it chronicles the wild search for meaning of an entire generation.Amanda Lohrey (2012 Patrick White Award Winner)

This book examines the professional identities of a highly influential group of English language teachers in Japan: Japanese university English teachers. It focuses on how relatively new teachers develop their professional identities, how gender impacts the professional identities of female professors, and how teaching practices and beliefs reflect personal and professional identity.

Early Light gathers three tales by Osamu Dazai, author of the wildly popular No Longer Human Early Light offers three very different aspects of Osamu Dazai's genius: the title story relates his misadventures as a drinker and a family man in the terrible fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII. Having lost their own home, he and his wife flee with a new baby boy and their little girl to relatives in Kofu, only to be bombed out anew. "Everything's gone," the father explains to his daughter: "Mr. Rabbit, our shoes, the Ogigari house, the Chino house, they all burned up," "Yeah, they all burned up," she said, still smiling. "One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji," another autobiographical tale, is much more comic: Dazai finds himself unable to escape the famous views, the beauty once immortalized by Hokusai and now reduced to a cliche. In the end, young girls torment him by pressing him into taking their photo before the famous peak: "Goodbye," he hisses through his teeth, "Mount Fuji. Thanks for everything. Click." And the final story is "Villon's Wife," a small masterpiece, which relates the awakening to power of a drunkard's wife. She transforms herself into a woman not to be defeated by anything, not by her husband being a thief, a megalomaniacal writer, and a wastrel. Single-handedly, she saves the day by concluding that "There's nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive."

This book presents the stories of 20 women from Bradford between the ages of 14 and 80. It offers an intricate mosaic of the experiences, views and hopes of these women and in so doing emphasises the power of people's lives to aid deeper debate and understanding and gives voice to an important and often marginalised group.

Growing up in a time between wars, Sam Hamada finds that the culture of his native Japan is never far from his heart. Sam is rapidly learning the code of the samurai in the late 1930s on the lush Hawaiian Islands, where he is slowly coming into his own as a son and a man. But after Sam strikes out for California, where he meets Keiko, the beautiful young woman destined to be the love of his life, he faces crushing disappointment---Keiko's parents take her back to Japan, forcing Keiko to endure their attempts to arrange her marriage. It is a trial complicated by how the Japanese perceive her---as too Americanized to be a proper Japanese wife and mother---and its pain is compounded by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which ignites the war that instantly taints Sam, Keiko, and their friends and family as enemies of the state. Sam himself is most caught between cultures when, impressed by his knowledge of Japanese, the U.S. Army drafts and then promotes Sam, sending him on a secret mission into a wartime world of madness where he faces the very real risk of encountering his own brother in combat. From the tragedies of the camps through to the bombing of Hiroshima, where Sam's mother and siblings live, Sam's very identity both puts his life at risk and provides the only reserve from which he can pull to survive. In this beautifully written historical epic about a boy in search of manhood, a girl in search of truth, and two peoples divided by war, Sam must draw upon his training, his past, and everything he has learned if he's ever to span his two cultures and see Keiko, or his family, again.