Introduces crafters outside Japan to the wonderful crotchet techniques and charts that are so popular within the country.

Twenty-five-year-old Takako has enjoyed a relatively easy existence, until the day her boyfriend Hideaki, the man she expected to wed, casually announces he's been cheating on her and is marrying the other woman. Suddenly, Takako's life is in freefall. She loses her job, her friends, and her acquaintances, and spirals into a deep depression. In the depths of her despair, she receives a call from her distant uncle Satoru. An unusual man who has always...

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...

One winter, a priest takes in a furry tanuki and the two become friends, but when the tanuki tries to repay the priest, they both learn a lesson.

After running away from home to become a dancer in Tokyo, Yume struggles against the harsh realities of what it takes to achieve success. She works as a hostess in the red-light district while taking dance lessons, and refuses to abandon her ambitions. In Japanese with English closed captions.

"Seventeen-year-old Sophia has seven days left in Tokyo before she moves back to the United States, and she unexpectedly finds herself drawn to Jamie, a boy with whom she shares a heartbreaking history. Can their one short week of Tokyo adventures end in anything but good-bye?"-- Provided by publisher

15 amazing stitches, 7 simple lessons, and 25 glorious projects. Modern Japanese Crochet casts the classic stitches you think you know in a totally new light, showing them in ways that add striking textures and contrasts to handcrafted pieces. For the experienced needlework enthusiast, this book is a revelation-the perfect introduction to the unique Japanese style of crocheting and charted patterns. Clear instructions, schematics, and charts walk...

In a small back alley in Tokyo at a century-old coffee shop rumored to offer patrons the chance to travel back in time, four customers reevaluate their formative life choices. In a small back alley of 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 coffee-- and the chance to travel back in time. Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café...

Cho Norie, twenty-seven and originally from Taiwan, is working an office job in Tokyo. While her colleagues worry about the economy, life-insurance policies, marriage, and children, she is forced to keep her unconventional life hidden--including her sexuality and the violent attack that prompted her move to Japan. There is also her unusual fascination with death: she knows from personal experience how devastating death can be, but for her it is also...

Japanese knitting guru Hitomi Shida is known for combining different classic stitches to create unique new patters. In Japanese Knitting Stitch Bible she shares some of the best that Japanese needlework has to offer. Strikingly original stitches and variations on every classic stitch imaginable result in patters that form the basis of stylish new knitted garments. Featuring some rewardingly intricate cables, popcorn stitches, twisted stitches, edgings...