DigitalKu Library

Another classic folklore re-imagined into an original fairy-tale by Xuemei Han, “The Enchanted Chinese Brush Pen” is a universal story of personal imagination and social responsibility. A poor boy in ancient Asia discovers an enchanted brush pen has the power to create anything he draws. Instead of seeking personal wealth, he uses this rare gift as a tool to do good deeds and help others. But he quickly learns that some are jealous of his gift and desire it to bring them riches. The young artist must risk his life and freedom to protect his honor and the purity of the brush pen from corrupt forces.

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The Narrow Road to the Deep North (奥の細道) is a major work by the Japanese poet, Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694). The text is written in the form of a travel diary, and it was penned as he made an epic and dangerous journey on foot through feudal Japan. While the poetic work became seminal of its own account, the poet’s travels in the text have since inspired many people to follow in his footsteps and trace his journey for themselves. In one of its most memorable passages, Basho suggests that “every day is a journey, and the journey itself home.” (Japanese Audio Reader: Kasumi Kobayash)

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Ancient guardians battle to preserve history and protect Creation from being rewritten by the forces of darkness.

It began before the concept of time had any meaning.  An evil lord and his dominions sought to rule all Creation.  Exiled on a formless Earth when the rebellion crushed, their prize of the Secret of Time was lost for millennia.  The saga stretches from ancient times to the year 2018 as it chronicles the adventures of the secret beings that walk among humanity. Their ongoing war of the past holds the fate of Earth, Creation, and the Infinite Beyond forever.

Xuemei Han is known for bringing her stories for children to life with unique and inspirational hand drawn illustrations. Her internationally award winning style is an innovative blend of traditional Chinese cultural paintings and Japanese Manga comics. This magical combination has been the perfect match for a new generation of young readers interested in fables and fantasy stories from Asia.

Now Xuemei trades colors for text to paint pictures with words in her first novel. Princess Pea and the Hunt for the Golden Tickle Belly is an original fable set in a land of make-believe, where a young girl challenges an evil queen for the freedom of her kingdom.

In the tradition of his “Everyday Dalian” photobook, the Municipal Government of Dalian originally commissioned SongLi to produce his second photography book about the city. The intended purpose was as an international promotion for the 2009 Davos World Economic Summit.

However, SongLi evolved that inspirational vision into a new and unique visual expression with the timeless book, “A Walk Across Dalian.” This rare artistic perspective offers a photographic guide to the city unlike anything done before. Based on his 2008 Coast-To-Coast Trek across the city of Dalian, this journey of images shows the city through the eyes of a resident foreign expert. It also offers a personal introduction to the history and culture of the famous and historical seaport.

James Allan recounts his misadventures in Northeast Asia during the 1894-95. After gambling away his fortune in Monte Carlo Allan signs up as a sailor and sets out for the seas. He eventually finds himself aboard the freight ship “Columbia” smuggling military cargo to China at the time of the county’s ill-fated conflict with the Japanese Empire.

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The Russo-Japanese War grew out of the rival imperial ambitions of the Russian Empire and Japanese Empire over Manchuria and Korea. Harry Collingwood provides a personal narrative of this conflict, that served as a prelude for the following two World Wars of the Twentieth Century.

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In 1904-1905, Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton was the military representative of the Indian Army serving with the Japanese Army in Manchuria. Among the several military advisors from Western countries, he was the first to arrive in Japan after the start of the war. As the earliest, he would be recognized as the dean of multi-national observers in this conflict.

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A photographic book that commemorates the Geisha (spelled Geysha in the 1890s) community of Tokyo. These iconic images capture an insight into an ancient Japanese cultural tradition.

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The city of Dalian has always held secrets. Its foreign colonization and occupation brought external cultures and languages to Northeast China. Great Britain, Russia, and Japan took turns dominating the region for nearly a century, influencing local folklore and religious superstitions. When the city was finally returned to native hands, China experienced numerous waves of political and social upheaval. These events made local ghost stories a taboo subject. This compilation is the first historic research of supernatural events and sightings in Dalian from 1858 to 1958. It also combines vintage colonial images with the modern photographic vision of SongLi.

When Allied forces parachute wooden decoy soldiers over wartime Germany, a pagan terror is stirred after centuries of sleep.

Even the Romans ignored the legends and put little faith in the oral superstitions. It was a mistake many would come to regret. Soon after the great army defeated the barbarian tribes, a mysterious plague descended upon its victorious soldiers. The few crazed survivors could only exclaim that the forest was alive before diving into fugue mental state. And as civilizations rose and fell and rose again, the forest and its secrets slumbered, occasionally sampling fresh prey. Until the bloodshed of warfare proved too great a temptation for its hunger to avoid. As the soldiers suffered against their own carnage, they soon discover a darker force had awoken with an inhuman thirst.

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In 1590 the Hojo clan was defeated during the Battle of Odawara by the Taiko Hideyoshi. As a result of the victory, the Hojo provinces were awarded to the warlord Tokugawa Iyeyasu. In the years of continued harsh warfare that followed, the castles of these captured areas became the setting of terrible and mysterious disasters for the Tokugawa clan, who would rule all of Japan as Shogun.

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This collection of stories takes the reader on a journey into the soul of Japan and enters into the spirit of Buddhism. The accumulation of experience over numerous lifetimes and rebirths is a central theme, as the Japanese belief of reincarnation directly shapes their thinking and culture. This edition was written a hundred years ago by Lafcadio Hearn, the author credited with opening up Meji Era Japan to the world through his insightful books.

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The Rashomon Effect is the effect of the subjectivity of perception on recollection, by which observers of an event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it. – Karl G. Heider

After crash landing on a desolate moon, a lone astronaut must defend his sanity by destroying an alien life form. In the process he opens a door to an alternative reality and falls deeper into madness. Jumping between dimensions and sanity he is required to help a team of ancient explorers stabilized fractures in space-time that threaten to obliterate the future, while stalling an alien invasion poised to exterminate humanity.

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A deep and spiritually revealing series of articles about Christian wisdoms and beliefs, with a focus on understanding scriptural meanings. The first in series by Pastor John Stemmons, from the Amazing Grace Church in Fujisawa, Japan.

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Another classic folklore re-imagined into an original fairy-tale by Xuemei Han, “The Radish and the Girl with Long Hair” takes the reader on a fantastic journey to a distant Asian land. Farmers had moved near the high mountain to live because it provided everything they needed to prosper. But the fertile soil mysteriously turns barren. Crops wither and the people suffer from lack of water. One day while searching for food on the high mountain, a young girl with long hair makes a fantastic discovery. A magic radish stands as gatekeeper of a treasure that will save the land. However, before she can reveal the secret that will free her village, Long Hair Girl is captured by the god of the mountain.

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A former colony briefly founded by Russia but later developed over two generations by Japan, Dalian has always been a strategic hub for control of Northeast China. SongLi’s photography collection about the city and its population has won multiple international awards. Each image captures the richness and color of the modern-day Manchurian metropolis, documenting its transition over six years. The “slice of life” presentation, a hallmark style of SongLi, offers a new depth to the environments and people living in this historic port. These pictures also present an original artistic and realistic view of a community shaped by the turbulent legacy of its foreign occupation, and the aftermath of the bitter Chinese Civil War, to emerge as one of the leading cities in the country.

This book also comes with a foreword by Phil Borges. The humanitarian photographer is famous for his signature black and white portraits with hand tinted skin tones of endangered cultures around the world.

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ISBN: 0-9763168-5-4

An original fairy-tale inspired by true events from the 1960s, “Brave Little Mongolian Sisters” is the heroic tale of two young nomadic girls in Northern Asia. Blossom and Jade provided for their sick parents by raising their poor family’s sheep herd. Living in the desolate wilderness, the animals offered their only source of income. One winter their hard life becomes even more desperate, when the frail girls and their flock are attacked by an evil and hungry witch. The sisters struggle against many hardships and the icy elements to protect their sheep, and defy the menacing threat that continues to chase them.

Xuemei Han brings this childrens’ story to life with her unique and inspirational hand drawn illustrations. Her internationally award winning style is an innovative blend of traditional Chinese cultural paintings and Japanese Manga comics. This magical combination is the perfect match for a new generation of young readers interested in fables and fantasy stories from Asia.

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Ben Tao is the avatar of a fired programmer who hacks Second Life. His goal is to profit from a false intellectual property claim. However, instead of changing the creation date for the items he has stolen, he is actually sending them back in time to the creation of the 3D world. This software exploit opens a wormhole of conflicting realities that unfold in a disjointed nightmare. Ben quickly finds himself controlled by an entity who robs him of all free will. Or is he just going insane? As the digital and real worlds merge in his mental interchange, he uncovers a secret that affects all of humanity. From this bleak future, Ben has only one chance to escape.

anima (n.) Psychology. Jung’s term for the feminine part of a man’s personality. Often contrasted with “animus.” The part of the psyche that is directed inward, and is in touch with the subconscious. Often contrasted with “persona.” ORIGIN 1920s: from Latin, literally “mind, soul.”

Second Life® and Linden Lab™ are trademarks or registered trademarks of Linden Research, Inc. No infringement is intended.

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ISBN: 978-0-9763168-9-3
ASIN: B00361FBAO

Okakura Kakuzo devoted his life to teaching, art, Zen, and the preservation of Japanese art and culture. He was an ambassador, professor and popular writer during his long and influential career. At the time of his death, Okakura was the curator of the Chinese and Japanese Art Collection at the Boston Museum.

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This is a collection of ghost stories based on Chinese old tales and legends. They are rich in atmosphere, authentic in tone, and almost without exception very good stories. They are an interesting contrast to Western lore, since ghosts in China are not evil but remain behind to fulfill their duty. This collection was written a hundred years ago by Lafcadio Hearn, the author credited with opening up Meji Era Japan to the world through his insightful books.

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China’s period of isolation is over. To understand its future, look to its recent past. A century ago, China was considered a theatre of the greatest movement taking place on the face of the globe. Efforts of all other developing nations shrink to insignificance – for it was not political, but social. Its object was not a changed dynasty, nor a revolution in the form of government, but the promise of nothing short of the complete renovation of the oldest, most populous, and most conservative of empires. Is there a people in either hemisphere that can afford to look on with indifference to the development of China? These words still ring true all these decades later.

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James Creelman became the first American journalist to interview the Pope, accompanied the Japanese in their war with China in Manchuria, visited Tolstoy at his home in Russia, got wounded in the Philippines as a correspondent in the Spanish-American War (he was taunting the Spanish after the Americans had seized their flag), pow-wowed with Sitting Bull, and reported on the death of President McKinley at the hands of an assassin. With the sharp, clipped writing of a master journalist, Creelman tells the story of his times, and of the part he played in that story.

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This book from 1909 describes the development of change within old, conservative, exclusive China by the three great transforming forces of the modern world – Western trade, Western politics and Western religion. These forces are producing stupendous changes in China with its sluggish reform policies. The full significance of these changes both to China and to the world cannot be comprehended now. There is something fascinating about a nation numbering nearly one-third of the human race slowly and majestically giving way to its old dogma and embracing the influence of new and powerful revolutionary forces. No other movement of our age is so colossal with more meaning.

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Steampunk Chronicles: The Blockade Runners

During the American Civil War a young patriot must break through the Federalist blockade in the harbor of Charleston to rescue a young girl held prisoner by the Confederates.

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Steampunk Chronicles: The Underground City

A deep sub-terrain mine that had been abandoned for decades becomes the location for an underground adventure of mysterious and unexplainable happenings.

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Steampunk Chronicles: Off On A Comet

A comet touches the Earth in its flight and collects a few small chunks of it. Some forty people of various nations and ages are condemned to a two-year-long journey on the comet. They form a mini-society and cope with the hostile environment of the comet.

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Steampunk Chronicles: The Master of the World

A series of unexplained events occur across the Eastern United States. These happenings manifest when objects move with such great speed that they become nearly invisible. The phenomena holds a deadly fate for all of mankind.

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Steampunk Chronicles: 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas

The story of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus as seen from the perspective of Professor Pierre Aronnax.

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Steampunk Chronicles: The Mysterious Island

Another Victorian era adventure upon the vintage seas, where man must fight against both technology and the forces of nature.

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Steampunk Chronicles: The World Set Free

The story foretells the effects of nuclear weapons decades prior to their usage in warfare. Scientists of the Victorian era were well aware that the slow natural radioactive decay of elements like radium.

While the rate of energy release was negligible, a theoretical trigger could activate the total amount for a huge release of energy. The theory was the basis for the dystopian adventure.

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Steampunk Chronicles: When the Sleeper Wakes

A dystopian story about a man who sleeps for two hundred and three years, waking up in a completely transformed London. Because of compound interest on his bank accounts, he has become the richest man in the world. A fanatical socialist and author of prophetic writings, the main character awakes to see his dreams realized, and the future revealed to him in all its horrors and mutations.

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Steampunk Chronicles: The War of the Worlds

The fictional 1901 invasion of Earth by aliens from Mars. These being have advanced technology like Heat-Rays, chemical weapons, and three-legged mechanical fighting machines.

After defeating the human resistance the Martians devastate much of eastern England, before being unexpectedly killed by terrestrial diseases to which they have no immunity.

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Steampunk Chronicles: The Invisible Man

An obscure scientist invents a way to render skin, bones, and blood invisible, and tries the formula on himself. Now he can go anywhere and menace anyone sight unseen. The only problem is that he cannot become visible again and he has gone quite murderously insane as a result.

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Steampunk Chronicles: The War in the Air

A world of aerial combat envisioned a decade prior to World War I. Bert Smallways, a forward-thinking young man, steps from his simple life into a life and death adventure at high speed high above the Earth.

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Steampunk Chronicles: The Time Machine

A dreamer obsessed with traveling through time builds himself a machine and travels over 800,000 years into the future. The known world has been transformed and human society has finally learned to live in apparent harmony and bliss. But as the Traveler stays in this realm of the future he discovers a terrible secret. The human population is merely livestock for a hidden subterranean class of mutants.

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Steampunk Chronicles: The Time Machine – Japanese Edition

A dreamer obsessed with traveling through time builds himself a machine and travels over 800,000 years into the future. The known world has been transformed and human society has finally learned to live in apparent harmony and bliss. But as the Traveler stays in this realm of the future he discovers a terrible secret. The human population is merely livestock for a hidden subterranean class of mutants.

NOTE: The Japanese language version follows the standard publishing layout of reading right to left. Therefore, the reader begins at the back of the book.

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During a stay of some months in China during 1909, Margaret E. Burton had an opportunity to see the educational system of the country for women. She was greatly impressed, and compiled profiles of some of the most notable female figures she came to know. It was a time of an emerging New China in which women were trying to break free of centuries of tradition and enslavement by means of education. This book details their efforts to mould both their personal future and their country’s.

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Murasaki Shikibu’s epic-length novel, The Tale of Genji, probes the psychological, romantic and political workings of mid-Heian Japan. The novel earned Murasaki Shikibu notoriety even in the early 11th century, some six hundred years before the printing press made it available to the masses. Court society, which served as the subject of the novel, sought out chapters. Ladies-in-waiting and courtiers even pilfered unrevised copies, according to legend. Some thousand years later, the novel continues to delight an enthusiastic audience. Murasaki Shikibu and her creation Genji have achieved National Treasure status in Japan and admiration all over the world. The tale spreads across four generations, splashed with poetry and romance and heightened awareness to the fleeting quality of life. Murasaki Shikibu’s tale of love, sex, and politics explores a complex web of human and spiritual relationships.

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Herbert Allen Giles (1845-1935) was a British linguist who modified a Mandarin Chinese Romanization system established by Thomas Wade earlier, resulting in the Wade-Giles Chinese transliteration system. Giles was a diplomat to China (1867-1892) who later became a Chinese professor at Cambridge. This book “The Civilization of China” is his classic detailed history of China, beginning in the Feudal Age and continues until 1911, long before the Communist Revolution.

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Hearn offers another look into a side of Japan that no longer exists, lost in modern history. Yet his observations gave the Western world its first look at this mysterious and misunderstood culture. This second series also contains many stories that transcend time and remain an insightful and intriguing. A must read for anyone interested in Japanese history and society.

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In 1903, Princess Der Ling became First Lady-in-Waiting to Tzu-Hsi, the Empress Dowager, who was fascinated by the young woman’s travels and experiences in places the Empress would never see. Der Ling served her Empress for two years inside the walls of Gu Gong, Peking’s Forbidden City, a walled palace built in the year 1407, and which had been the seat of government for 24 Chinese emperors. Her intimate observations of court life under the Empress Dowager, aunt to China’s last emperor, P’u Yi, allow a rare look into life in a time and place still shrouded in mystery, into the last years of imperial Chinese rule, and most importantly, into the character of the remarkable woman who ruled China for more than 40 years.

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This collection of 17 old stories from Japan was collected and translated by the well-known ethnographer, Lafcadio Hearn, and first published in English in 1904. The tales are old folk stories that deal with ghosts and the spirit world. Many feature the theme of spirits who take human form to disguise their true nature. They are spooky, old-fashioned stories which remain as intriguing today as when they were first written.

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These stories follow Hearn’s particular interests of Japanese folklore and the vanishing culture of which he found himself a part in post-Meji Japan. Each story is a slice of life focusing on Japanese character, morals and feelings. This is what the Japanese people care about, what they think is important, what is inside.

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Yei Theodora Ozaki’s classic Japanese fairy tales are showcased in this new compilation. Featured are twenty-two favorite tales that introduce the vivid world of Japanese fantasy. It is a landscape of ghouls, goblins, and ogres. Of sea serpents and sea kings. Kind and magical animals. Demons and dragons, princes and princesses. A must read for anyone interested in Japanese myths and legends.

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Hearn’s book is incredibly insightful and thorough, offering a history of the various forms of Shinto, Buddhism, Confucianism and other folk-practices that shaped the national character of Japan. It also details Japanese interactions and culture, and most interesting are his speculations of Japanese culture, and where it would go in his pre-WWII era. Unfortunately, some of his worst fears were realized.

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Much of the collection focuses on how incense relates to ghosts in terms of the Shinto and Buddhist religion. In addition, there is a mix of true stories and Japanese lore as they relate to the world of the dead.

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Hearn offers a look into a side of Japan that no longer exists, lost in modern history. Yet his observations gave the Western world its first look at this mysterious and misunderstood culture. This first series contains many stories that transcend time and remain an insightful and intriguing. A must read for anyone interested in Japanese history and society.

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Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford (1837-1916), Lord Redesdale, was in the British Foreign Service as a young man. He was assigned to the legation in Japan for several years and acquired a life-long fascination with Japanese culture. This book has been a standard source of information about Japanese folklore and customs since its original publication in 1871 and has been in print ever since.

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Written nearly one thousand years ago, these diaries continue to intrigue modern readers. Authored by three Ladies of the Royal Court in Japan, they show not only Imperial life, but also life in Japan before its traditional fourteenth-century image. These diaries were written centuries before the Shogun or samurai developed into the powerful military class that divided all of Japan, and plunged it into a long and bloody civil war. The events detailed are therefore very different in context to how the Western World views Old Japan. These accounts are also some of the oldest records in not only Japanese history, but in written history.

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