Collection: Shop Asian

This fascinating history tells the story of the people of Japan, from ancient teenage priest-queens to teeming hordes of salarymen, a nation that once sought to conquer China, yet also shut itself away for two centuries in self-imposed seclusion.

First revealed to Westerners in the chronicles of Marco Polo, Japan was a legendary faraway land defended by a fearsome Kamikaze storm and ruled by a divine sovereign. It was the terminus of the Silk Road, the furthest end of the known world, a fertile source of inspiration for European artists, and an enduring symbol of the mysterious East. In recent times, it has become a powerhouse of global industry, a nexus of popular culture, and a harbinger of post-industrial decline.

With intelligence and wit, author Jonathan Clements blends documentary and storytelling styles to connect the past, present and future of Japan, and in broad yet detailed strokes reveals a country of paradoxes: a modern nation steeped in ancient traditions; a democracy with an emperor as head of state; a famously safe society built on 108 volcanoes resting on the world's most active earthquake zone; a fast-paced urban and technologically advanced country whose land consists predominantly of mountains and forests.

Among the chapters in this Japanese history book are:

• The Way of the Gods: Prehistoric and Mythical Japan
• A Game of Thrones: Minamoto vs. Taira
• Time Warp: 200 Years of Isolation
• The Stench of Butter: Restoration and Modernization
• The New Breed: The Japanese Miracle

Ghost Of is a mourning song, not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space.

A lyrical narration and luminous illustrations tell an uplifting intergenerational story of kindness and confidence, loss and remembrance, with resonance for any child who feels other-than.

"Sora means 'seashell' in Korean," her mother said. "Halmoni always said finding a perfect shell is like receiving a wonderful gift. That's why she suggested we name you Sora."

Every summer, when Sora's Halmoni, or grandmother, visits from South Korea, the two of them take the bus to the beach to search for seashells. While Sora likes to take all of them back with her, Halmoni always leaves the prettiest shell for someone else to find and treasure. As summer turns to fall, Halmoni returns home and Sora starts kindergarten, where some of the kids tease her about her "weird" name. One day, Sora's parents receive a sad call about her grandmother, and Sora feels more lost than ever about who she is and how she fits in. But when her parents reveal the origin of her name, Sora channels a newfound pride and, inspired by Halmoni, combats her peers' hurtful comments by sharing her shells with everyone in her class. This story, told by Helena Ku Rhee and illustrated by Stella Lim, based on art by Ji-Hyuk Kim, speaks to the prevailing power of kindness and will resonate with anyone who's been made to feel different.

The family from Dim Sum for Everyone! is back for a new outing- building and flying their own kite!

The wind is blowing. It is a good day for kites! The whole family makes a trip to the local craft store for paper, glue, and paint. Everyone has a job: Ma-Ma joins sticks together. Ba-Ba glues paper. Mei-Mei cuts whiskers while Jie-Jie paints a laughing mouth. Dragon eyes are added and then everyone attaches the final touch . . . a noisemaker! Now their dragon kite is ready to fly.

Kite Flying celebrates the Chinese tradition of kite making and kite flying and lovingly depicts a family bonded by this ancient and modern pleasure.

Seventeen years after the original Cardcaptor Sakura manga ended, CLAMP returns with more magical clow card adventures!

There's No Going Back

Every dream creates another Clear Card. As if keeping pace with Sakura's growing powers, the mysteries surrounding her and Akiho keep multiplying, too--including the history between Yuna D. Kaito and Akiho's mother. The lights are dimmed, the curtain raised, and the story--one written long ago--is finally about to begin...

Create your own kawaii world with Pic Candle and Kawaii Doodle Class!

The Japanese word kawaiitranslates to "cute," and this how-to book is chock-full of super-adorable images of tacos, sushi, smoothies, clouds, rainbows, cacti, doodle monsters, Christmas trees, lipsticks, teacups, and more for your adoration.

Popular kawaii artist Zainab Khan--known for her YouTube channel, Pic Candle--gives you simple step-by-step illustrations and instructions for drawing 75 supercute characters, organized into these fun categories:

• Adorable Food & Drinks
• Lovable Nature
• Cheerful Doodle Monsters
• Everyday Cute
• Charming Holiday Decorations

She also shares captivating search-and-find puzzles that you can also use as coloring pages, and inspiration boards that show you how to give your characters different facial expressions and zany accessories.

If you know Pic Candle, then you already love her cute, simple drawings, and no doubt want to doodle right along with her. Now is your chance! Thanks to this adorable crash course in doodling all things kawaii, soon you will be enhancing your notebooks, stationery, artwork, and anything else you can put a marker to--you'll just need a little help from Kawaii Doodle Class!

Also available from Pic Candle's Kawaii Doodle series, doodle to your heart's content with: Kawaii Doodle Cuties, Kawaii Doodle World, Mini Kawaii Doodle Class, and Mini Kawaii Doodle Cuties.

From the Subtle Asian Baking community comes Modern Asian Baking at Home, must-have recipes for beloved sweet and savory treats found across Asia.

*Winner of the 2023 Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Food Culture in the First Book category*
*Author Kat Lieu was a finalist for the 2023 IACP Digital Media Award for her Instagram account @subtleasian.baking*

Explore new ingredients, surprising techniques, and fun textures through lush photography and rewarding recipes that include exciting yet familiar contemporary bakes with innovative Asian twists. The results are unforgettable delights like miso-mochi brownies and spicy gochujang flourless chocolate cake. There's even a recipe for homemade boba!

This is the perfect cookbook for anyone nostalgic for Asian desserts as well as hobbyist and avid home bakers interested in using vibrant ingredients like miso, matcha, pandan, and soy sauce to expand their repertoires. No passport is needed when you can easily create and experience popular Asian sweets and one-of-a-kind Asian-influenced drinks, custards, cakes, and frozen treats at home.

Recipes include:

• Quick Microwave Mochi
• Fluffy Japanese Pancakes
• Lemony Matcha Macarons
• Tangzhong Milk Bread
• Vietnamese Egg Dalgona Coffee

Steam, fry, boil, and bake your way through this straight-from-the-heart collection of recipes!

This book is #veryasian

Every relationship has its bumps. For this couple, it's interstellar.

From the creator of Snailogy and Death: Rescheduled comes a sexy supernatural story about being out on your own, finding your dream apartment and discovering that your new place is haunted by a handsome spectral stranger from another dimension. Sure, he can't see you and you can't touch him, but who said every relationship starts out perfectly?

Freaking Romance is for fans of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, This One Summer and Bloom.

This volume collects episodes 1-21 of the supernatural hit WEBTOON comic.

Maruo punches his way into the monstrous world of Ayashimon yakuza with dreams of becoming a manga protagonist!

When the Enma Syndicate's chairman dies, Japan's supernatural underworld is turned on its head, leaving gangs of ayashimon poised on the brink of war. Urara, the late chairman's daughter, has plans to come out on top, and she's found an unlikely ally to help make it happen--Maruo, a human who dreams of being a manga hero.

Between monstrous enemies and super-powered battles, Maruo's finally living the life he's always dreamed of. But can his inhuman strength overcome Doppo Akari's heat-stealing flames? And even if he does defeat the first opponent to ever drive him into a corner, how are one bodyguard and his boss supposed to win an open war against the Enma Syndicate?

All-new adventures featuring the beloved characters from the hit Nintendo video games!

Four Inklings get caught up in the Splatoon Turf Wars!

The Battle Stamp Rally begins! It combines all the hardest pieces of the Turf War, the Ranked Battle, and the Salmon Run stages! How will Goggles and his friends do in this inkredible new challenge?!

"A fascinating cultural history" (People) of how Japan adopted and ultimately revived traditional American fashion

A strange thing has happened over the last two decades: the world has come to believe that the most "authentic" American garments are those made in Japan. From high-end denim to oxford button-downs, Japanese brands such as UNIQLO, Kamakura Shirts, Beams, and Kapital have built their global businesses by creating the highest-quality versions of classic American casual garments--a style known in Japan as ametora, or "American traditional."

In Ametora, cultural historian W. David Marx traces the Japanese assimilation of American fashion over the past 150 years. Now updated with a new afterword covering the last decade, Ametora shows how Japanese trendsetters and entrepreneurs mimicked, adapted, imported, and ultimately perfected American style, dramatically reshaping not only Japan's culture but also our own.

Jun and Hong were scions of a once great southern Chinese family. Each other's best friend, they grew up in the 1930s during the final days of Old China before the tumult of the twentieth century brought political revolution, violence, and a fractured national identity. By a quirk of timing, at the end of the Chinese Civil War, Jun ended up on an island under Nationalist control, and then settled in Taiwan, married a Nationalist general, and lived among fellow exiles at odds with everything the new Communist regime stood for on the mainland. Hong found herself an ocean away on the mainland, forced to publicly disavow both her own family background and her sister's decision to abandon the party. A doctor by training, to overcome the suspicion created by her family circumstances, Hong endured two waves of "re-education" and internal exile, forced to work in some of the most desperately poor, remote areas of the country.

Ambitious, determined, and resourceful, both women faced morally fraught decisions as they forged careers and families in the midst of political and social upheaval. Jun established one of U.S.-allied Taiwan's most important trading companies. Hong became one of the most celebrated doctors in China, appearing on national media and honored for her dedication to medicine. Niece to both sisters, linguist and East Asian scholar Zhuqing Li tells her aunts' story for the first time, honoring her family's history with sympathy and grace. Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden is a window into the lives of women in twentieth-century China, a time of traumatic change and unparalleled resilience. In this riveting and deeply personal account, Li confronts the bitter political rivals of mainland China and Taiwan with elegance and unique insight, while celebrating her aunts' remarkable legacies.

This fresh look at artist Takashi Murakami takes on the "monstrous" themes of rampant consumerism, human fallibility, and the perils of life in the digital fast lane, in works from the past decade

One of Japan's leading contemporary artists, Takashi Murakami (b. 1962) is known for a wide-ranging practice that encompasses not only fine art but fashion, consumer products, curation, and entertainment. Founder of the Superflat movement, Murakami makes art that is larger than life, boldly colored, and buoyant, with a Pop sensibility that draws inspiration from anime and manga.

But beyond the happy flowers and kawaii characters that have defined Murakami's career lurk darker manifestations: the sharp-toothed, multi-eyed monsters that have increasingly become the artist's vehicle for expressing the effects of rampant consumerism, human fallibility, and the perils of life in the digital fast lane. This book explores these themes in works from the last decade, presenting a disquieting vision of monsterized beings born in an era of unprecedented environmental, political, and social turmoil.

Conversations with Murakami and essays by Laura W. Allen, Hiroko Ikegami, and Masako Shiba deconstruct what monsters mean to the artist and reflect on new directions in Murakami's sculpture and the genesis of his recent NFT projects. The book features lavish color illustrations, a plastic jacket, dyed edges, and four gatefolds.

Published in association with the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Exhibition Schedule:

Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
(September 15, 2023-February 12, 2024)

A yakuza enforcer becomes the gang world's biggest K-pop stan in this cult comedy manga that went from webcomic to sleeper hit in Japan! Perfect for fans of Way of the Househusband, Phantom of the Idol, or Spy x Family.

Named one of the Best New Comics of 2023 by New York Public Library!

Ken Kanashiro is one of the top lieutenants in the feared yakuza outfit the Washio Clan. He lives his life by the code of the Japanese underworld, where nothing is more important than loyalty, and ties between soldiers and their aniki are sacred bonds. Ken's never had time for hobbies... until the boss's only daughter Megumi drags him to a K-pop concert, and he sees the glittering, charismatic Jun for the first time. Smitten like a new recruit on his first job, Ken plunges into fandom with the solemnity and passion only a true man who walks the way of the yakuza could muster.

Don't miss this cult hit comedy manga, which went from online sensation to print bestseller!

Yotsuba is going to school...almost! Fuuka says at school you read and write and do tests! A test is where you write your name at the top and answer questions. Yotsuba got alllll the questions right, so Fuuka gave her a perfect score! And, and, you get to paint with big-girl paints like Ena, wear a backpack, make picture books, and collect pretty rocks! School is gonna be great! ...Right?

Color pop-manga girls and their adorable animal friends in this quirky coloring book from acclaimed artist Camilla d'Errico.

Drawn in Camilla d'Errico's signature Pop Surrealism, manga-inspired style, this adult coloring book includes 80 black-and-white images of wide-eyed girls with their furry, feathered, and scaly friends printed on non-bleed paper--all that's missing is your creative touch! In Pop Manga Beauties and Beasties Coloring Book you'll find charming full-page illustrations, with select drawings on patterned backgrounds for extra mesmerizing fun. Take these black-and-white beauties and beasties and bring them to life.