Pines and Plains Libraries

In 1948, a nineteen-year-old pearl diver's dreams of spending her life combing the waters of Japan's Inland Sea are shattered when she discovers she has leprosy. By law, she is exiled to an island leprosarium, where she is stripped of her dignity and instructed to forget her past. Her name is erased from her family records, and she is forced to select a new one. To the two thousand patients on the island of Nagashima, she becomes Miss Fuji. Although...

An affecting portrait of interracial love in post-war Japan Pearl S. Buck's The Hidden Flower centers on the relationship between a Japanese student and an American soldier stationed in post-war Japan. The Japanese student's father worked in the United States as a doctor, but had to flee to Kyoto to avoid imprisonment in an internment camp. The American soldier has inherited his family's estate in Virginia, where interracial marriage is forbidden....

A recent bestseller in England, this bittersweet story of love and betrayal set in the Far East will be a Masterpiece Theatre miniseries airing in October. In 1903 a 20-year-old Scots girl sails to China to marry a British attache, but soon horrifies the British community by having an affair with a young Japanese count.

The tale of a young woman who moves to Tokyo after the death of her mother, hoping to get over her grief and start a career as a graphic artist.

Nitta Sayuri, a young Japanese woman who was taken from her home at the age of nine and sold into slavery as a geisha, discovers a rare opportunity for freedom when the outbreak of World War II forces an end to the only life she has ever known.