Ralph F. McCarthy Books

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

Illustrated in film cartoon style to appeal to younger readers, this text contains eight traditional Japanese folk tales for young readers.This book contains following tales: The One-Straw MillionaireHow the Old Man Lost His WenSleepy TaroThe Ramshackle LeakIkkyu-sanThe God of PovertyThe Windy BrideHikoichi and the Tanuki

The Follow Up To In The Miso Soup, Piercing Confirms Ryu Murakami As The Master Of The Psycho-Thriller Every Night, Kawashima Masayuki Creeps From His Bed And Watches Over His Baby Girl S Crib While His Wife Sleeps. But This Is No Ordinary Domestic Scene. He Has An Ice Pick In His Hand, And A Barely Controllable Desire To Use It. Deciding To Confront His Demons, Kawashima Sets Into Motion A Chain Of Events Seeming To Lead Inexorably To Murder&

The shocking psycho-thriller behind the cult Japanese horror film

This collection of 14 tales - a half-dozen of which have never before appeared in English - is based on a Japanese collection of, as Dazai described them, "soliloquies by female narrators." Osamu Dazai was a master raconteur who plumbed - in an addictive, easy style - the absurd complexities of life in a society whose expectations cannot be met without sacrificing one's individual ideals on the altar of conformity. The gravitational pull of his prose is on full display in these stories. The collection includes the quietly brilliant long story "Schoolgirl" and shows the fiction of this 20th-century genius in a fresh light.