Prize Find Dept.

I keep an Amazon wish list of books on Japan which I periodically browse to see whether or not given titles have shown up cheap (i.e., as ex-library copies, which are usually only a couple of bucks even with shipping).  Several titles I'd been curious about have turned up, which I'll be writing about here shortly:

• The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa: A fairly atypical Yasunari Kawabata novel, from what I've read of his other books, and one which focuses on a time period in Japan that's rapidly becoming a fascination of mine: the Taisho era.  (We most recently saw a manga-fied version of same in Nightmare Inspector.)
  
• This Scheming World: Ihara Saikaku's cheerfully snide look at Edo-era commoners and their relationship with the almighty gold (and silver, and copper) coin.
  

There's more, but those are the big ones.  Asakusa will probably merit a full-blown review, since it just showed up this morning and I've been itching to read it.  (It is apparently a brand-new translation, only released in 2006 or so.)