Shogo Oketani

Leza Lowitz

**Winner of the 2013-2014 Asian/Pacific American Award for Young Adult Literature** **2015 Sakura Medal Nominee** **Shortlisted for the 2014 SCBWI Crystal Kite Award** **Nominated for the Cybils Young Adult Bloggers Literary Award** Seventeen-year-old Jet Black is a ninja. There's only one problem—she doesn't know it. Jet has never lived a so-called normal life. Raised by her single Japanese mother on a Navajo reservation in the Southwest, Jet's life was a constant litany of mysterious physical and mental training. For as long as Jet can remember, every Saturday night she and her mother played "the game" on the local mountain. But this time, Jet is fighting for her life. And at the end of the night, her mother dies and Jet finds herself an orphan—and in mortal danger. Fulfilling her mother's dying wish, Jet flies to Japan to live with her grandfather, where she discovers she is the only one who can protect a family treasure hidden in her ancestral land. She's terrified, but if Jet won't fight to protect her world, who will? Stalked by bounty hunters and desperately attracted with the man who's been sent to kill her, Jet must be strong enough to protect the treasure, preserve an ancient culture and save a sacred mountain from destruction. In Jet Black and the Ninja Wind, multiple award-winning author, poet and translator team Leza Lowitz and Shogo Oketani make their first foray into young adult fiction with a compulsively readable tale whose teenage heroine must discover if she can put the blade above the heart—or die trying.

Jet Black and the Ninja Wind

Japanese characters served up with histories and cultural clues to help you decorate your skin/body/life with just the right word!

Japanese Character Collection

Kanji Box

In mid-1960s Tokyo, Japan, where the aftereffects of World War II are still felt, eight-year-old Kazuo lives an ordinary life, watching American television shows, listening to British rock music, and dreaming of one day seeing the world.

Kazuo's World, Tokyo, 1965

J-Boys

Kazuo Nakamoto's life in inner-city Tokyo is one of tea and tofu, of American TV and rock 'n' roll. Kazuo is nine. It is the mid-1960s, just after the Japan Olympics, and Kazuo dreams of being a track star. He hangs out with his buddies, goes to school, and helps with household chores. But Kazuo's world is changing. This bittersweet novel is a deft portrait of a year in a boy's life in a land and time far away, filled with universal concerns about fitting in, escaping the past (in this case World War II's lingering devastation), and growing up. J-Boys author Shogo Oketani is a writer and novelist who grew up in Tokyo in the mid-1960s.

Shogo Oketani

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