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Ichigensan is a novel which can be enjoyed on many levels - as a delicate, sensual love story, as a depiction of the refined society in Japan's cultural capital Kyoto, and as an exploration of the themes of alienation and prejudice common to many environments, regardless of the boundaries of time and place.Unusually, it shows Japan from the eyes of both an outsider and an 'internal' outcast, and even more unusually, it originally achieved this through sensuous prose carefully crafted by a non-native speaker of Japanese. The fact that this best-selling novella then won the Subaru Prize, one of Japan's top literary awards, and was also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize is a testament to its unique narrative power.The story is by no means chained to Japan, however, and this new translation by Takuma Sminkey will allow readers world-wide to enjoy the multitude of sensations engendered by life and love in an alien culture.

Hoodening is an ancient calendar custom unique to East Kent, involving a wooden horse's head on a pole, carried by a man concealed by a sack. The earliest reliable record is from 1735, but other than Percy Maylam's seminal work "The Hooden Horse", published in 1909, little serious research has gone into the tradition. George Frampton has rectified this, by taking Maylam as a starting point then cross-referencing dozens of newspaper reports, census records and other accounts to build a comprehensive picture of who the Hoodeners were, why (and where) they did it, how it related to other folk traditions, and why the custom appeared to die out from time to time. He then goes beyond Maylam to look at the 'demise' of Hoodening in around 1921, its widely heralded 'revival' in 1966, and discovers that this narrative is in fact quite misleading, as several Hooden Horses were still active throughout that period. He includes descriptions of the current teams, and supplies plentiful appendices detailing past participants, places visited, songs performed, events on Hoodening's timeline, and the horses themselves. Full indices make it easy for modern Men and Maids of Kent to check whether their ancestors might have been involved, and detailed references make this an invaluable resource for social historians too.

Hiroshima is synonymous with the first hostile use of an atomic bomb. Many people think of this occurrence as one terrible event in the past, which is studied from history books.Shimako Murai and other 'Women of Hiroshima' believe otherwise: for them, the bomb had after-effects which affected countless people for decades, effects that were all the more menacing for their unpredictability - and often, invisibility.This play, based on a true story, tells the tale of two such people: on the surface successful modern women, yet each bearing underneath hidden scars as horrific as the keloids that disfigured Hibakusha on the days following the bomb.

Surprisingly, one of the best sources of information on life in Margate in the early 19th century was a little town in Australia. Stewart Viney had attended school and later worked in Margate, living just a few doors away from where the artist Turner was staying with his mistress Mrs Booth, but then joined the Bendigo Gold Rush. Finding only mixed fortune there, he progressed into journalism and produced many fascinating articles about the place where he had grown up and the people who had surrounded him. These have been fortunately rediscovered and edited into a single volume of great interest to local people and social historians alike.