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This is a fresh and surprising account of Japan's culture from the 'opening up' of the country in the mid-nineteenth century to the present.It is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's modernizers and nationalists, but with resistance, conflict, distress. We encounter writers of dramas, ghost stories and crime novels where modernity itself is the tragedy, the ghoul and the bad guy; surrealist and avant-garde artists sketching their escape; rebel kamikaze pilots and the put-upon urban poor; hypnotists and gangsters; men in desperate search of the eternal feminine and feminists in search of something more than state-sanctioned subservience; Buddhists without morals; Marxist terror groups; couches full to bursting with the psychological fall-out of breakneck modernization. These people all sprang from the soil of modern Japan, but their personalities and projects failed to fit. They were 'dark blossoms': both East-West hybrids and home-grown varieties that wreathed, probed and sometimes penetrated the new structures of mainstream Japan.

Part memoir, part reflection, this book brings to life central Europe during the last ten years of the Cold War. It begins in Trieste in 1979 where the embers of the Habsburg Empire still burnt brightly, and then moves to the darker, claustrophobic world of Vienna in 1985. It recreates the farce and tragedy of the last days of communism.

During a quiet spell in June, Maigret's called to investigate the disappearance of a reputable businessman. When a body's discovered near the famous Pore Lachaise cemetery, Maigret struggles to find any clues to the perpetrator and loses his temper when his own reputation is threatened by the case.

When a tramp is recovered from the Seine after being badly beaten, Maigret must delve into the man's personal circumstances to figure out just who wanted to kill him.

"Maigret is shocked to find himself accused of a crime, and must fight to prove his innocence and save his reputation."--Back cover.