"Bring meaning and joy to all your days with this internationally bestselling guide to the Japanese concept of ikigai -- the happiness of always being busy -- as revealed by the daily habits of the world's longest-living people."--Amazon.com summary. According to the Japanese, everyone has an ikigai, a reason for living. And according to the residents of the Japanese village with the world's longest-living people, finding it is the key to a happier...

In a small back alley in Tokyo at a century-old coffee shop rumored to offer patrons the chance to travel back in time, four customers reevaluate their formative life choices. In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers coffee -- and the chance to travel back in time. Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café...

"Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers' style of dress and speech...

Twenty-five-year-old Takako has enjoyed a relatively easy existence, until the day her boyfriend Hideaki, the man she expected to wed, casually announces he's been cheating on her and is marrying the other woman. Suddenly, Takako's life is in freefall. She loses her job, her friends, and her acquaintances, and spirals into a deep depression. In the depths of her despair, she receives a call from her distant uncle Satoru. An unusual man who has always...

Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength...

The international breakthrough for one of Japan's most innovative filmmakers, who went on to make such other marvelous movies as Onibaba and Kuroneko. It follows a family whose home is on a tiny, remote island off the coast of Japan. They must row a great distance to another shore, collect water from a well in buckets, and row back to their island, a nearly backbreaking task essential for the survival of these people and their land.

A.J. LeWinter is an American scientist, for years an insignificant cog in America's complex defense machinery. While at an academic conference in Tokyo, LeWinter contacts the KGB station chief and says he wants to defect. He tantalizes the Russians with U.S. military secrets he claims to possess, but is his defection genuine? Neither the Russians nor the Americans are sure, and LeWinter is swept up in a terrifying political chess match of deceit and...

Examines the geography, history, people, and customs of the island nation of Japan, which is only about as big as California but has a population of over 125 million people.