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3.5 

How Do You Live?

By Genzaburo Yoshino & Bruno Navasky
How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino & Bruno Navasky digital book - Fable

Publisher 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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1217 Reviews

3.5
Slightly Smiling Face“I loved all the messages and ethical teachings of this boy learning to grow and to understand how small moments in life can be life changing. The messages may have been a bit spoon-fed but it may be due to the translation. The book was translated well and easy to read. I think this is a must read at any age and you really are left thinking at the end how do you live your life?”
Expressionless Face“I went in with great expectations, and I realized after finishing this book, that no matter what story it is, I should never expect too much because the end result will often be disappointing. Not like this book had much to offer either in terms of surprise, even if one went in without any expectation. It sells itself as a work that teaches ethics, philosophy, science, politics and some other aspects of life. But in my humblest opinion, it failed to give any meaningful lessons in all these fields. Most of them were pretty obvious, some others didn’t seem to offer any meaningful insight into life. For middle graders, they might be some novel ideas they haven’t had the opportunity to learn or witness in their lives yet, but even, being kind to others is something already taught at the tender age so at the end, they are not that important in my opinion. What made me dislike the book the most is probably chapter 9. Now I know what kind of regime Japan used to be before and during WWII, I know its citizens might not have access to the same knowledge we do in modern days, but even so, the idea presented in that chapter being about how western civilization helped the Third World through colonization, should not be recommended to middle graders, especially not to those from the western world, where the western superiority is already rampant. It doesn’t help either that the chapters followed each other in a way that seemed like that chapter 9 was the final lesson and the other chapters served as its build up. In his times, the book might have been a revolutionary work that taught ethics to kids when it wasn’t the norm to do so, but in modern days, the book has not the same value it had in those days due to its outdated content. So yeah, this book being one of Hayao’s favorites, I had lots of expectations for it, but I ended up being disappointed.”
Expressionless Face“Listen…. This book would have been a lot better without the uncles notes. He was rambling on for too many pages. I did not need a 5-6 pages Napoleon lesson.”

About Genzaburo Yoshino

Genzaburō Yoshino (1899-1981) was a Japanese writer and publisher. In 1935, he became director of a collection of educational books for young people. When the acclaimed writer Yūzō Yamamoto was unable to complete a book on ethics as part of the series, Yoshino stepped in and wrote How Do You Live?. Since its debut as a novel and guide to philosophy for young people, How Do You Live? has sold more than two million copies, and been re-edited and republished more than eighty times to reflect the changing times and culture in Japan. 

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.
 

Bruno Navasky

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