Akira Minato has maintained a friendship with high schooler Shin, avoiding reciprocating the boy’s passionate advances toward him. But one day, Akira unintentionally breaks a promise he made to Shin, hurting him deeply. Shin then stops visiting the laundromat, upsetting Akira. How will their relationship ever recover!?

For Japan the existence of the 20th century was announced apocalyptically by the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. Whatever clothes the Emperor wore that day, they were useless to him now. And no sooner had the revelation of Western civilisation been so awesomely visited upon the Rising Sun than came the 21st century, gizmoid and insensible, surreal and plastic. In Reflex, 40 urban young artists and performers realise the manifestations of modern Japan through their own unique brand of self-portraiture. Superficially many of them seem simply weird - two gay Sumo wrestlers fighting in a bathhouse, for instance, thereby subverting the parameters of traditional, male-orientated Manga culture, or amateur photography of Geishas and phallic steam trains. But they are more than that. By identifying six distinct Japanese reflexes to the 21st century, namely the Kid Reflex, Naked Reflex, Manga Reflex, Group Reflex, Amateur Reflex and the Imaged Reflex, these artists have provided, in a myriad of self-representations, the concerns of young Japan, shocking to anyone ignorant of the pressures at work in their society. The amateur auteur seeking to explain; the group methodology seeking to conform; the liberated innocence of nakedness at odds with nudity; the mass-market phenomenon of a strictured teenage audience; the professional artist and above all, the powerful Manga culture - these are bewildering and fantastic concepts, illustrated by images both sublime and confusing. Reflex is a compilation by 40 contemporary Japanese artists, professional and amateur photographers, Manga illustrators and renegade artists in Japan. It is co-edited by Mark Sanders (Senior Editor for Another Magazine), KyoichiTsuzuki (artist and editor of the award-winning Roadside Japan), and Fumiya Sawa (consultant and co-curator on the Barbican Gallery's exhibition JAM: Tokyo - London).

This is the only translation of the work of this important haiku poet in English. Buson (1716-1783), along with Basho and Issa, is recognised as one of the three Japanese masters of the haiku. In addition to a large selection of haiku, the book also includes a selection of Buson's prose and a critical introduction.

This is a well-established international series that examines major areas of basic and clinical research within neuroscience (as well as emerging and promising subfields): neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neuroimaging, neurobiology, neuropharmacology, neuroendocrinology, neuropathology, neuropsychiatry, neurobehavior. This volume provides a thorough treatment of gene models of schizophrenia, presenting articles from leading contributors in this important area.

What happens when you include the family in the delivery of primary care? Do patients rehabilitate faster? How are prevention, treatment, and diagnosis affected? In Family Health Care, an interdisciplinary group of scholars addresses these questions and provides insight into the awakening interest in family-oriented care. This timely volume shows how recent changes in family life challenge traditional approaches to family-oriented care, examines models for training physicians to "think family," presents exemplars of family-oriented care, and provides models for intervention in applying family practice. The contributors also furnish an overview of research on family health care and discuss future directions in the methodology of family-oriented health care. Family Health Care is destined to become an indispensable resource for teachers and academics in family medicine and nursing, as well as specialists working in the field including social workers, psychologists, family therapists, and family/health care researchers. "It is a valuable book because it makes both theory and practice very accessible even to the reader who may not previously have considered these issues in any depth." --Health and Social Care "This text is well referenced with a helpful index. It provides a concise overview of relevant family systems theory, methodology, and approaches toward family therapy and research. The dialogue is thought provoking and, at times, controversial. . . . This book contributes importantly to one of the most critical issues in family medicine affecting our conceptual foundation, our self-perception, and our future."

The Book of Songs of Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani (AD 897-971) is the most extensive collection of anecdotes from pre-Islam Mecca, Medina, Damascus and Baghdad. Entertaining and informative, these gems have remained largely inaccessible to the Western readers. This new translation presents the complete collection of love stories and poems, biting satires, daring erotic encounters, bathroom humor and hilariously detailed descriptions of genitalia, sex toys and sex positions, along with stories praising and criticizing both homosexuality and heterosexuality-topics that set the tone for the Arabian Nights centuries later.

Whether your character is jumping for joy or grappling with an opponent, this book provides all the essential techniques to draw more lifelike action figures in the classic Japanese manga style. The comprehensive introduction first shows the reader the physical anatomy of male vs. female figures and gives important tips on proportions, perspective and small but often-overlooked details such as the relative differences between male and female hands, fingers and feet. Five subsequent chapters cover over 40 action poses in the following categories: Chapter 1: Action (e.g. running and jumping) Chapter 2: Martial Arts (e.g. punching and kicking) Chapter 3: Interacting (e.g. judo holds and high fives) Chapter 4: Weapons (e.g. swords and knives) Chapter 5: Reacting (e.g. dodging a punch or taking a punch) Each pose and movement is illustrated with a rough sketch outline followed by a highlighted manga drawing containing detailed annotations by the author. After studying the sketches, you practice the drawing techniques in a tracing section at the end of each chapter. Each chapter also provides professional tips on the use of color and shading for greater realism. Special sections contain information and tips on particular topics of interest, such as how to draw clothes, hair and facial expressions or how to create special effects. At the end of the book, an actual 6-page comic strip gives readers the opportunity to practice what they have learned by filling in the missing elements.

This book is the modern first treatment of experimental designs, providing a comprehensive introduction to the interrelationship between the theory of optimal designs and the theory of cubature formulas in numerical analysis. It also offers original new ideas for constructing optimal designs. The book opens with some basics on reproducing kernels, and builds up to more advanced topics, including bounds for the number of cubature formula points, equivalence theorems for statistical optimalities, and the Sobolev Theorem for the cubature formula. It concludes with a functional analytic generalization of the above classical results. Although it is intended for readers who are interested in recent advances in the construction theory of optimal experimental designs, the book is also useful for researchers seeking rich interactions between optimal experimental designs and various mathematical subjects such as spherical designs in combinatorics and cubature formulas in numerical analysis, both closely related to embeddings of classical finite-dimensional Banach spaces in functional analysis and Hilbert identities in elementary number theory. Moreover, it provides a novel communication platform for "design theorists" in a wide variety of research fields.

The deterioration of global sustainability, caused in large part by climate change, is the most serious issue facing humanity. Solving this difficult problem requires a drastic redesign of all aspects of society --technological, economic, and social. This book looks at how to achieve a more secure level of global sustainability and offers a range of recommendations to that end.

The book begins with a review of the current status of global sustainability. The relationship between globalization and sustainability is analyzed, together with arguments on the necessity of a paradigm shift in economic growth. The authors then discuss the need for major changes in socioeconomic development in terms of social common capital, contemporary social discipline, and economic valuation of the environment. They examine various strategies for achieving a sustainable society, including a basic strategy for mitigating climate change, a strategy of technology development toward global sustainability, and a post-2012 international policy framework. Finally, the book offers policy recommendations for achieving global sustainability.

Drawing attention to domestic space as the critical juncture between the global and the local, Home Away from Home is an innovative ethnography of the daily lives of middle-class Japanese housewives who accompany their husbands on temporary corporate job assignments in the United States. These women are charged with the task of creating and maintaining restful Japanese homes in a foreign environment so that their husbands are able to remain productive, loyal workers for Japanese multinationals and their children are properly socialized and educated as Japanese citizens abroad. Arguing that the homemaking components of transnational communities have not received adequate attention, Sawa Kurotani demonstrates how gender dynamics and the politics of the domestic sphere are integral to understanding national identity and transnational mobility.Kurotani interviewed and spent time with more than 120 women in three U.S. locations with sizable expatriate Japanese communities: Centerville, a pseudonymous Midwestern town; the New York metropolitan area; and North Carolina’s Research Triangle area. She highlights the contradictory situations faced by the transient wives. Their husbands’ assignments in the United States typically last from three to five years, and they frequently emphasize the temporariness of their situation, referring to it as a “long vacation.” Yet they are responsible for creating comfortable homes for their families, which necessitates producing a familiar and permanent environment. Kurotani looks at the dynamic friendships that develop among the wives and describes their feelings about returning to Japan. She conveys how their sense of themselves as Japanese women, of home, and of their relationships with family members are altered by their personal experiences of transnational homemaking.

The main idea of this book is, on the grounds of the differential-geometric structures of the (Ln, g)-spaces and the kinematics of vector fields to set the stage for the study of physical and gravitational physical interactions. In order to accomplish this task, the book is divided into three parts. Part one briefly reviews and introduces the problems of theoretical gravitational physics. Part two deals with the theory of differentiable manifolds with contravariant affine connections and metrics. The third part investigates the kinematics of vector fields over (Ln, g)-spaces.

Hailed as stimulus for the next generation of scientists by Scientific Computing, each volume in the highly acclaimed Manga Guide series teaches complex math and science topics with the aid of authentic Japanese manga comics. The latest in the series, The Manga Guide to Microprocessors, tackles microprocessors (the brain inside all computers), binary, microprocessor architecture, digital operations, even basic, low-level programming. Perfect for beginners, computer science students, or simply the computer-aficionado who wants a deeper understanding of the inner workings of microprocessors.