How Do You Live?
By Genzaburo Yoshino & Bruno NavaskyPublisher Description
As featured in the Oscar-nominated Hayao Miyazaki film The Boy and the Heron: the coming-of-age novel How Do You Live? is a Japanese classic that became a New York Times bestseller.
After the death of his father, fifteen-year-old Copper must confront inevitable and enormous change, including the aftermath of his own betrayal of his best friend. Between episodes of Copper’s emerging story, letters from his uncle share knowledge and offer advice on life’s big questions. Like his namesake Copernicus, Copper looks to the stars and uses his discoveries about the heavens, earth, and human nature to answer the question of how he will live.
First published in 1937 in Japan, Genzaburō Yoshino’s How Do You Live? has long been an important book for Academy Award-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle). Perfect for readers of philosophical fiction like The Alchemist and The Little Prince, How Do You Live? serves as a thought-provoking guide for young readers as they grow up in a world both infinitely large and unimaginably small.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities359 Reviews
Susan Yang
Created 14 days agoRosemary
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Kat
Created 19 days agohithen sreelesh
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Carrie Joy
Created 24 days ago“I find it interesting that this book was such an influence on Hayao Miyazaki, because Miyazaki’s work contains deep, complex messages that are only voiced explicitly when the narrative has already set itself up to support, while this book is a series of small incidents which are philosophically expounded upon by a third party, making the lessons feel like… well, LESSONS. Good lessons to be sure, ones that are worth carrying for a lifetime and are always worth repeating… but lessons I know well already. Considering its historical context — it was originally intended as a moral guidebook for children in 1930s Japan — it does what it intends to do, and does it in a charming manner. But since the characters are meant to be allegorical stand-ins rather than fully fleshed out people, there is a distance to this book that may only be able to close in the readings of its target demographic: people between 10-14 who do not read very many books by choice.”About Genzaburo Yoshino
Bruno Navasky is a teacher and writer, whose work as a translator and editor includes Festival in My Heart: Poems by Japanese Children and Poem in Your Pocket for Young Poets, as well as translations published in The New York Times and The Paris Review. He was the founding editor of American Poet, the journal of the Academy of American Poets, where he now serves on the board of directors. He lives and works in New York City.
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