“The poet David Mura brings an intriguing perspective to the New World quest for enlightenment from this ancient and ascendant culture” (The New York Times). Award-winning poet David Mura’s critically acclaimed memoir Turning Japanese chronicles how a year in Japan transformed his sense of self and pulled into sharp focus his complicated inheritance. Mura is a sansei, a third-generation Japanese-American who grew up on baseball and hot dogs in a Chicago suburb where he heard more Yiddish than Japanese. Turning Japanese chronicles his quest for identity with honesty, intelligence, and poetic vision, and it stands as a classic meditation on difference and assimilation and is a valuable window onto a country that has long fascinated our own. Turning Japanese was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of an Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Book Award. This edition includes a new afterword by the author. “A dizzying interior voyage of self-discovery and splintered identity.” —Chicago Tribune “There is brilliant writing in this book, observations of Japanese humanity and culture that are subtly different from and more penetrating than what we usually get from Westerners.” —The New Yorker “Turning Japanese reads like a fascinating novel you can’t put down . . . Mura’s story is a universal one, and one that is accessible to everyone, even those whose experience in the U.S. is not that of a person of color.” —Asian Week “[Mura] paints a portrait of Japan that is rich and satisfying . . . a refreshingly kindly and tolerant study, a powerful antidote to the venomous anti-Japanese mood that seems, distressingly, to be seizing some corners of the American mind.” —Conde Nast Traveler

Gou ni itte wa, gou ni shitagae, runs an old Japanese proverb: Obey the customs of the village you enter. Just don’t overdo things. It may already be too late for Cricket Collins, a recent Ivy League graduate who travels to Osaka for his first real job as an English instructor. The time is late 1970s, with Japan quickly becoming the new find-yourself region that India was to the backpack set in the 1960s. From pachinko parlors to paper cranes, tea ceremonies to translation problems, everything is entrancing to Cricket, at first, as he throws himself headfirst into a two-thousand-year-old culture. But soon he gets fired from his teaching job at Kansai Gakuin for petty theft, and on a brief trip to Korea he becomes embroiled in a sexual misadventure with painful after-effects. Spinning slowly out of orbit in his free-floating expatriate existence, he starts to lose touch with family, friends, and reality. It isn’t until he returns home to America that he begins to turn Japanese with a vengeance. Turning Japanese is as much about the allure of a foreign culture as it is about the divided existence of an expat and the terrors of ones own mind. Be careful of breaking down the barriers between two cultures: the breakdown you create may be your own.

The Devil Wears Prada meets Lost in Translation in this irresistible new novel from L. A. Woman author Cathy Yardley Meet Lisa Falloya, an aspiring half-Japanese, half-Italian American manga artist who follows her bliss by moving to Tokyo to draw the Japanese-style comics she's been reading for years. Leaving behind the comforts of a humdrum desk job and her workaholic fiancée, Lisa has everything planned---right down to a room with a nice Japanese family---but hasn't taken into account that being half-Asian and enthusiastic isn't going to cut it. Faced with an exacting boss and a conniving "big fish" manga author, Lisa risks her wedding, her friends, and her fears for a shot at making it big.

Mari, a mixed-race Japanese American, has for many years felt disconnected from the culture of her mother. Immersed in the pan-asian diaspora of San Jose, Mari searches for cultural and romantic connections. It doesn't take long for Mari to find new loves, and a new job—at a hostess bar for Japanese expats, in a bid to learn the Japanese language and culture. Turning Japanese: Expanded Edition includes all new story pages that bring fresh insight and a new resolution to this classic of comics memoir for our times.

This first original graphic novel in an exciting new series is based on the popular hit television show, "Degrassi: The Next Generation." It presents two "off screen" stories, shown from a different perspective, tying both the show and the book together.

This collection of essays offers a sustained, theoretically rigorous rethinking of various issues at work in film and other media adaptations. The essays in the volume as a whole explore the reciprocal, intertextual quality of adaptations that borrow, rework, and adapt each other in complex ways; in addition, the authors explore the specific forces

Traces American writers whose roots are in all parts of Asia, including China, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East.

A diary of the World Cup 2006 in Germany in verse form. Peter Goulding gives a day by day account of matches and rest days as they happened, all done in his inimitable style.

Bill Brabham, a recently divorced and unemployed financial manager from Texas, is a man down on his luck. With nothing left to lose except possibly a few years of his life, he takes a high-risk, high-reward job cleaning up at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. While in Japan, his luck drastically changes, and everything starts to go right for him. Unfortunately, his new-found luck seems to be coming at the expense of those around him. His investigation into this phenomenon puts him in the middle of a dangerous criminal conspiracy where he must contend with everything from the Yakuza to a sassy teenage girl with a penchant for role-playing.