Sustained by dreams of glorious martyrdom, a seventeenth-century Portuguese missionary in Japan ministers to the outlawed Christians until Japanese authorities capture him and force him to watch the torture of his followers, promising to stop if he will renounce Christ. The story of a seventeenth-century Portuguese priest in Japan at the height of the persecution of the Christian community.

"In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, an aging survivor of the atom bomb confronts his memories"--Provided by publisher.

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...

When Ernst Stavro Blofeld blasts into eternity the girl whom James Bond has married only hours before, the heart, the zest for life, goes out of Bond. Incredibly, from being a top agent of the Secret Service, he goes to pieces, is even on the verge of becoming a security risk. M is persuaded to give him one last chance -- an impossible mission far removed from his usual duties, and Bond leaves for Japan.

In the aftermath of a major earthquake, eleven-year-old Maya overcomes her own fear to help others at home and in northeast Japan, where a tsunami caused great damage. Includes author's note about the facts behind the story.

"In the 1960s 17 people die of cyanide poisoning at a large party at the Aosawas, owners of a prominent clinic in an ancient castle city on the coast of the Sea of Japan. The only survivor is their teenage daughter Hisako, blind, beautiful, admired by all, but soon suspected of masterminding the crime." --

Hoping to outpace her grief in the wake of her father's suicide, Marina has come to the small, rural Japanese town of Shika to teach English for a year. But in Japan, as she soon discovers, you can never really throw away your past ... or anything else, for that matter.

"In Japan, a covert industry has grown up around the "wakaresaseya" (literally "breaker-upper"), a person hired by one spouse to seduce the other in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings. When Sato hires Kaitaro, a wakaresaseya agent, to have an affair with his wife, Rina, he assumes it will be an easy case. But Sato has never truly understood Rina or her desires and Kaitaro's job is to do exactly that - until he does it too well. While...

Eikichi Onizuka becomes a teacher and has three students who try to make his job difficult.