Inside this Instaread Summary & Analysis of The Japanese Lover: • Summary of book • Introduction to the Important People in the book • Analysis of the Themes and Author's Style

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...

"From the author of the international bestseller Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this book follows four new customers who hope to travel back in time in a little Japanese café. In a back alley in 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 something else besides coffee--the chance to travel back in time. With faces both familiar and new, Tales from the...

The 85-year-old Jiro Ono is considered by many to be the world's greatest sushi chef. He is the proprietor of a 10-seat sushi-only restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station. Despite its humble appearances, it is the first restaurant of its kind to be awarded a prestigious 3-star Michelin review, and sushi lovers from around the globe make repeated pilgrimages, calling months in advance and shelling out top dollar for a coveted seat...

Make classic sushi along with more artful and exotic rolls with this illustrated sushi cookbook. In this sushi making book, Japanese cooking expert Yumi Umemura offers eighty-five recipes that combine sushi rice with ingredients ranging from its time-honored partners to unexpectedly delicious ingredients-such as Thai fish sauce, sun-dried tomatoes, cooked meats like roast beef or chicken and French ratatouille-that infuse Japanese sushi with an unexpected...

"In this witty and exuberant collection of linked stories, Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millenia-old tradition of Japanese folktales-shapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wells-and wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them. A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable...

If you're an avid noodle lover--or ready to graduate from perennial favorite Ramen Noodles--look no further! Experienced Asian cookbook author Maki Watanabe provides all her secret recipes and tips for creating delicious Asian noodle dishes at home with minimal fuss and time. These 86 noodle recipes cover the Asian cuisines best known for their noodle dishes: Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. They include all the classics that are already...

Required to attend summer school after moving to Chicagoland, thirteen-year-old manga-lover Megan Yamamura needs help from twelve-year-old computer genius Raf to escape the maniacal principal's mind-control experiment.

"Bottoms up, beer lovers! Announcing a second edition of the ultimate reader- and drinker-friendly guide to the world's ales and beers: The Beer Bible, the book that won an IACP Award, and that John Holl of Beer Edge called "The only book you need to understand the world's most popular beverage." Now with 25% all-new material, The Beer Bible: Second Edition approaches its subject the same way beer lovers do-by style, just like a pub menu. More than...

Whiskey lovers will devour this fresh and comprehensive guide to everything there is to know about the world's whiskeys, including Scotch and bourbon as well as Tennessee, Irish, Japanese, and Canadian whiskeys. You'll learn about the types of whiskey and the distilling traditions of the regions where they are made, how to serve and taste whiskeys to best appreciate and savor them, how to collect and age whiskey for great results, and much more. There...