本片是日本电影天皇黑泽明对梦的勾画，全片共有八个梦境，分别是：太阳雨、桃园、风雪、隧道、乌鸦、红色富士山、垂泪的魔鬼和水车之村。这八个梦几乎贯穿了人类生活的所有主题，战争与和平、社会与人生。在不同的梦境里有着不同的场景，配合不同的色彩，把人类所面对的所有主题一一呈现。

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem--ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor's mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeeper's shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away. "The Housekeeper and the Professor "is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

In this fascinating document, one of Japan's best known--and controversial--writers created what might be termed a new literary form. It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end fits into none of them.
At one level, it may be read as an account of how a puny, bookish boy discovered the importance of his own physical being; the "sun and steel" of the title are themselves symbols respectively of the cult of the open air and the weights used in bodybuilding. At another level, it is a discussion by a major novelist of the relation between action and art, and his own highly polished art in particular. More personally, it is an account of one individual's search for identity and self-integration. Or again, the work could be seen as a demonstration of how an intensely individual preoccupation can be developed into a profound philosophy of life.
All these elements are woven together by Mishima's complex yet polished and supple style. The confession and the self-analysis , the philosophy and the poetry combine in the end to create something that is in itself perfect and self-sufficient. It is a piece of literature that is as carefully fashioned as Mishima's novels, and at the same time provides an indispensable key to the understanding of them as art.
The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal. The book is therefore a moving document, and is highly significant as a pointer to the future development of one of the most interesting novelists of modern times.

Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy.

The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down.

As their parallel odysseys unravel, cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghost-like pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since World War II. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle - one of many which combine to create an elegant and dreamlike masterpiece.

* Murakami's new book Novelist as a Vocation is available now *

'Wonderful... Magical and outlandish'
Daily Mail


'Hypnotic, spellbinding' The Times

'Cool, fluent and addictive' Daily Telegraph

《三国演义》又名《三国志演义》、《三国志通俗演义》，是我国小说史上最著名最杰出的长篇章回体历史小说。 《三国演义》的作者是元末明初人罗贯中，由毛纶，毛宗岗父子批改。在其成书前，“三国故事”已经历了数百年的历史发展过程。在唐代，三国故事已广为流传，连儿童都很熟悉。随着市民文艺的发展，宋代的“说话”艺人，已有专门说三国故事的，当时称为“说三分”。元代出现的《三国志平话》，实际上是从说书人使用的本子，虽较简略粗糙，但已初肯《三国演义》的规模。罗贯中在群众传说和民间艺人创作的基础上，又依据陈寿《三国志》及裴松之注中所征引的资料（还包括《世说新语》及注中的资料），经过巨大的创作劳动，写在了规模宏伟的巨著——《三国志通俗演义》全书24卷，240回。后来经过毛纶，毛宗岗父子批改，形成我们现在所见的《三国演义》120回版

由于人文出版社选取的毛批版本和明嘉靖版的《三国志通俗演义》颇有出入，将拥刘抑曹的思想发展到一个几乎病态的角度，且大量地删除了原文中赞扬曹操一方人物的诗词和评论，所以给世人造成一种三国演义打击曹操、歌颂刘备的错误印象，且该批改版将刘备一方无限神化，甚至将诸葛亮准备将魏延烧死在上方谷这样的情节统统删除，将诸葛说成是一个完美近乎神人的形象，这是大家阅读时候值得注意的地方。

由于该版本选用的是毛批改版，而且没有将毛家父子的批语选入，就会给人造成一种错觉，认为该版本和毛批本是不相同的，其实本书和毛批本完全一致，不过是删除了批语部分，加入了编者的注脚。请读者朋友们阅读时注意