Books like The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, she plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace. Across the Pacific a novelist living on a remote island discovers artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox and is pulled into Nao's drama and her unknown fate. (Bestseller)

IN THE year 1799, Captain Amasa Delano, of Duxbury, in Massachusetts, commanding a large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor, with a valuable cargo, in the harbour of St. Maria- a small, desert, uninhabited island towards the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili. There he had touched for water...Please Note: This book is easy to read in true text, not scanned images that can sometimes be difficult to decipher. The Microsoft eBook has a contents page linked to the chapter headings for easy navigation. The Adobe eBook has bookmarks at chapter headings and is printable up to two full copies per year. Both versions are text searchable.

From the Introduction... Although The Book of the City of Ladies was written more than half a millenium ago, it is filled with potent observations for our times. The querelle des femmes the woman question in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France—articulated its arguments in much the same way as today's debate about the equality of women. Here, in The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine intersperses her tales of formidable and exemplary heroines of the past with down-to-earth remarks about the wrongs done to women by society's attitudes and opinions. Her tone is not shrill, but forbearing; her comments trenchant; she never whines. She indicts men, Portia-like, from a position of superior benevolence, enacting the drama of women's greater moral qualities by refusing the line of violence or suppliant weakness. Christine de Pizan was born in a court and she was an adept of courtly ways; her strategy in her attack is courteous, and her courtesy, with its appearance of frankness, even artlessness, conceals a fair bit of cunning, and a deal of rage.

Having grown up as an orphan of the streets while sixteenth-century Japan is being ravaged by civil war, Saru seeks to help a samurai rescue his wife from imprisonment by a warlord so they can all flee to a more peaceful life.

"The sensitive and modest daughter of a mid-ranking court poet, Murasaki Shikibu staves off loneliness with her active imagination, telling stories about the dashing Prince Genji to her close friends. At first, they are their private entertainment, but soon Genji's amorous adventures are leaked to the public and Murasaki is thrust into the life of a kind of eleventh-century Japanese celebrity. She is compelled by a charismatic regent to accept a position at court regaling the empress with her stories. At court, Lady Murasaki becomes caught in a vortex of high politics and sexual intrigue, which begins to reflect itself in her masterpiece, The Tale of Genji."--BOOK JACKET.

When the orphaned Daiyu leaves her home in the provinces to seek shelter with her cousins in Beijing, she is drawn into a world of opulent splendor presided over by the ruthless, scheming Xifeng and the prim, repressed Baochai. As she learns the secrets behind their glittering facades, she is tangled in a web of intrigue reaching all the way to the Emperor's Palace, and finds herself no longer able to distinguish friend from foe.

Bjartus is a sheep farmer hewing a living from a blighted patch of land in Iceland. After 18 years of servitude to a master he despises, all he wants is to raise his flocks unbeholden to anyone. Nothing, not inclement weather, not his wives, not his family will come between him and his goal of financial independence. Only Asta Solillja, the child he brings up as his daughter, can pierce his stubborn heart. But she too wants to live independently - and when Bjartus throws her from the house on discovering she is pregnant, her more temperate determination is set against his stony will.

Until she was thirteen, Maimie Pinzer's life was not very different from that of other Jewish girls growing up in Philadelphia at the beginning of the century. Then, with the brutal murder of her father, growing conflict with her mother, and her subsequent arrest for running away from home, her life was drastically altered. She spent the next few years in prisons, reformatories, and hospitals eventually becoming a prostitute and morphine addict. In 1910, while recovering from drug addiction, Maimie began a correspondence with a distinguished Bostonian, Fanny Quincy Howe. Her struggles to survive had brought Maimie into contact with a variety of people whose miseries and hopes she depicted with a writer's gift. Maimie's gripping letters offer an unprecedented autobiographical account of the life of a poor working woman in the first quarter of this century. With the intervention of a kind social worker and the support of Fanny Howe, Maimie was able to leave prostitution and learn secretarial skills. She worked to become "respectable" and eventually used her small earnings to aid other young women like herself. And - as Ruth Rosen's new afterword reveals - her later life seems to have contained both the security she sought and a touch of glamor.

Out of the life and work of Lady Murasaki, the author of, the world's first novel, The Tale of Genji, Liza Dalby has woven an exquisite and irresistible fiction that with rich, nuanced authenticity and lyrical drama, brings an elaborate past world to vivid life.The sensitive and modest daughter of a mid-ranking court poet, Murasaki Shikibu staves off loneliness with her active imagination, telling stories about the dashing Prince Genji to her close friends. At first, they are their private entertainment, but soon Genji's amorous adventures are leaked to the public and Murasaki is thrust into the life of a kind of 11th century Japanese celebrity. She is compelled by a charismatic regent to accept a position at court regaling the empress with her stories. At court, Lady Murasaki becomes caught in a vortex of high politics and sexual intrigue, which begins to reflect itself in her stories. In this way, she comes to write her masterpiece, The Tale of Genji. But this is much more than just an elegantly plotted historical novel. The Tale of Murasaki is a beautiful work of literary archaeology. Dalby, the only Westerner to have become a geisha and the author of the definitive book, Geisha, subtly reconstructs the fashions, sensibilities, manners, and preoccupations of 11th-century Japan. The result is a vivid portrait of a woman and her times, the most splendid in Japanese history. In The Tale of Murasaki, Dalby transports her readers to an exotic world and time and wraps them in a story that speaks clearly across the centuries. It is a dazzling literary achievement and a truly unique and wonderful reading experience.From the Hardcover edition.

A retelling, based on seventh-century B.C. Assyrian clay tablets, of the wanderings and adventures of the god king, Gilgamesh, who ruled in ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in about 2700 B.C., and of his faithful companion, Enkidu.

Tanka, a classical Japanese verse form like haiku, has experienced a resurgence of interest among twentieth-century poets and readers. Arguably the central genre of Japanese literature, the 31-syllable lyric made up the great majority of Japanese poetry from the ninth to the nineteenth century and was the inspiration for such poetry as haiku and renga. Tanka has begun to attract considerable attention in North America in recent years. Modern Japanese Tanka is the first comprehensive collection available in English. Tanka retains the aesthetic sensibilities that circumscribe Japanese culture, but just as Japan has changed during this tumultuous century, tanka has undergone equally radical shifts. Responding to artistic and social movements of the West, tanka has incorporated influences ranging from Marxism to Avant-Garde. Modern Japanese Tanka includes four hundred poems by twenty of Japan's most renowned poets who have made major contributions to the history of tanka in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With his graceful, eloquent translations, Makoto Ueda captures the distinct voices of these individual poets, providing biographical sketches of each as well as transliterating Japanese text below each poem. His introduction gives an excellent overview of the development of tanka in the last one hundred years.

Series of fairy tales about a young girl (Kaguya-hime) found inside a hollow bamboo stem