Authors:
Murakami, Haruki “1Q84. Book 3” is the last book of the trilogy. It continues to tell the story of Tengo and Aomame and the reader finally gets the answer the the main “Q” – as in “question” – will the two main characters meet?
Authors:
Kim, Youngha “Whatever Happened to the Guy Stuck in the Elevator” describes a morning in which everything goes wrong for the story’s first person protagonist, a young, single, apartment- dwelling businessman. His razor breaks after he has shaved only half of his face, and he is forced to take the stairs down from his 15th floor apartment because the elevator is jammed. On the 5th floor he discovers a man stuck in the elevator and promises to get help. He finds no one at the security window, so he asks people waiting with him for the bus if he can use their cell phones to call 911. More
Authors:
Iwasaki, Mineko, Brown, Rande This book can be divided into two parts. The first part is about young girl who grew up in a house with her parents and other family members. According to the author, years she spent with her family was the best ones in her life. Her family was big and she even didn‘t see some of her sisters because they were living in geisha house. It was like that because family had difficulties with money. Mineko saw how her brother died near their house but despite that it was the place where she felt the most happiest she ever was. Still at age of five she left her parent‘s house and never came back. More
Authors:
Murakami, Haruki “Dance Dance Dance” is the sixth novel by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami first published in 1988.
The novel follows the surreal misadventures of an unnamed protagonist who makes a living as a commercial writer. The protagonist is compelled to return to the Dolphin Hotel, a seedy establishment where he once spent the night with a woman he loved, despite the fact he never even knew her real name. She has since disappeared without a trace, the Dolphin Hotel has been purchased by a large corporation and converted into a slick, fashionable, western-style hotel. More
Authors:
Murakami, Haruki The name of novel „After Dark“, written by a Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, was an allusion to an authors favourite jazz music piece “Five Spot After dark”, which leads characters through labyrinths of loneliness and roads of self-knowledge.
“After Dark” – it’s a short novel in which we can see the characters’ lives during the witching hours between midnight and dawn. The main characters are two sisters – Eri, who is going through an existence crisis and Mari, who is searching the meaning of life. Besides the two main characters there are also some others, who seem not to be related with two main girls at all: chubby motel manager and her maid, a Chinese prostitute which was savagely assaulted by a client, and a jazz musician who claims that he met Mari at some point in the past. Although it seems, that people, who have such different lives have no opportunity to meet one another in real life but the secrets that haunt them draw them together more powerfully than the different lives that might keep them apart. These secrets might either restore their lives or destroy them forever. More
Authors:
Nakagawa, Rieko “No! No! Nursery school!” it’s a storybook for children, which consists of seven short but instructive stories about the everyday life of children in kindergarten “Tulip”. In the kindergarten children are divided into two groups – “Star” and “Bell”. The first group is for the children who have a lot of time before attending school, while the second group is for the children who will soon go to elementary school. Little ones joke around; play with one another while facing childish every day troubles. We can feel the growing competition between these two groups. The main character of the story is the boy named Siger who belongs to a “Bell” Group. The childish curiosity leads the boy into a wide range of adventures, which are described in “No! No! Nursery school!”. The storybook consists of seven separate parts: “Kindergarten “Tulip” ”, “Whale Hunt”, “Tikotiana”, “Teddy Kogus”, “Wolf”, “Trip to the mountains”, and “No! No! Nursery school!“. More
Authors:
Ihara Saikaku Five women, five love stories. “Five Women Who Loved Love” is a book which follows five determined women lives who were so bold as to seek love and pleasure, in spite of social attitudes about such things. The five heroines are Onatsu, already wise in the ways of love by the age of sixteen; Osen, a faithful wife until unjustly accused of adultery; Osan, a Kyoto beauty who falls asleep in the wrong bed; Oshichi, willing to burn down a city to meet her samurai lover; and Oman, who has to compete with handsome boys to win her lover\’s affections. The heroines are not always admirable women, and their loves are not always beautiful, some of them are little more than aggressive pleasure seekers… More
Authors:
Min, Anchee “Becoming Madame Mao” is psychological, historical novel published in 2001. In it writer tells a sad, exciting and tragic life story of second-rate actress who was abandoned by her parents and who swung from one romance to another when finally becomes a wife of Mao Dzedung. This is a story about women who betrayed and was betrayed by others and also about a women who all her life strived to fulfill her desire. In this novel, while writing by first or third person, character of heroine is revealed: ambitious, admirable and determined but at the same time vindictive, violent as well as jealous. While carrying out Cultural Revolution and especially while wanting to become the head of China after death of her husband, women eliminated all her enemies who stood in her way extremely those who humiliated her before or did not let finish her “role”. Madame Mao, also called “White-boned demon”, all her life behaved as she was acting in a play, always on the stage. More
Authors:
Chiew-Siah Tei The end of XIX century, Plum Blossom village, China.Mingzhi, the oldest grandson of master Chai, has his all life planned ahead of him from the moment he was born – he is meant to become a mandarin. Since childhood the boy is immersed in Chinese traditional writing culture and philosophical studies, but the hunger for different kind of knowledge is not foreign to him, too. He is more than willing to study Confucianism, calligraphy and other arts. In the school Mingzhi is the best student. In addition he also wants to learn of the world that is behind the guarded walls of customs and traditions of Chinese culture boundaries. Pity, but the boy is forced to spend his childhood and adolescent years in a secluded world of his family, where his grandfather is regulating all the lives and matters while bumping his dragon staff. Maturing teenager starts to despise the rotten life of the mansion – instead of rice cultivating opium poppies, harsh and cruel behavior with the servants, around the mansion lurking shadows of treachery and insidiousness. More
Authors:
Min, Anchee Red Azalea is an autobiography of Anchee Min. The book is divided into three parts which are about author’s life during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of China. In the book, Min openly tells a story of her life in which sexual freedom is freely questioned as a powerful political statement. The author accurately describes a society of the Chinese Communist country.
The first part of the book tells us about Anchee Min’s childhood in Shanghai where she honestly talks about the use of political propaganda in society, especially children who are taught to be perfect revolutionaries of the Party as a sign of loyalty to Chairman Mao. Min loved singing Madame Mao’s operas and knew them all as well as she read and knew all quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. She was accepted as a member of the Little Red Guard and also appointed as a head of this social movement. More