telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. but for the first chronicle in the japanese vernacular, a tale of flowering fortunes (eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. the health of the community was at stake. flowering tales is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late heian society, a golden age of court literature in women's hands. takeshi watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by the tale of genji, inspired eiga's new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace.

tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, watanabe shows how eiga's female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of the tale of genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. these reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers' journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. flowering tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered.

the battle of leyte gulf was the greatest naval engagement in history. the battle was four separate actions, none of which were fought in the gulf itself, and the result was the destruction of japanese naval power in the pacific. this book is a detailed and comprehensive account of the fighting from both sides. it provides the context of the battle, most obviously in terms of japanese calculations and the search for "a fitting place to die" and "the chance to bloom as flowers of death." using japanese material never previously noted in western accounts, h. p. willmott provides new perspectives on the unfolding of the battle and very deliberately seeks to give readers a proper understanding of the importance of this battle for american naval operations in the following month. this careful interrogation of the accounts of "the last fleet action" is a significant contribution to military history.