Clay Boutwell

Meet the kitsune. In Japanese folktales the fox is a shapeshifter. It can turn into a beautiful woman, pay you with money that turns out to be leaves, and make rain fall out of a clear sky. Most foxes are tricksters. One, with nine tails, is something far more dangerous. This fourth volume of...

Learn Japanese vocabulary while listening to the stories of Momotaro and Usagi to Kame (Tortoise and the Hare). For upper beginners of Japanese and higher....

Meet the oni. Horns on his head, a huge body, an iron club in his hand, and a great fondness for sake. Japanese children know him before they can read. He is the one who is "it" in a game of tag, and a harsh, cold person is said to be "like an oni." But the oni turns out to be far more...

The surest way to grow your Japanese is to read, and to listen to, something real. The Trolley Cart is Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's short story トロッコ (Torokko), written in 1922. An eight-year-old boy named Ryōhei watches the workers on a half-built railway near Odawara push their little open...

Meet Chiyo-ni. A morning glory has wound itself around her well bucket overnight. Rather than tear it off, she goes next door to borrow water. That single act, and the seventeen sounds she wrote about it, made her one of the most loved poets Japan has ever produced. Fukuda Chiyo-ni was born in...

Meet the kappa. Green, about the size of a small child, with a shell on its back and a dish of water balanced on its head. It turns up in warnings about swimming in rivers, in the name of a sushi roll, and in a proverb about how even an expert can come unstuck. This first volume of Learn...

Hikoichi is back. If you listened to Volume One, you already know him: the clever young man whose quick thinking always leaves somebody else standing there scratching their head. This volume brings three more tales, and in the last of them Hikoichi steps aside for a story of a very different...

Meet the tengu. Long nose, red face, the robes of a mountain ascetic, and a fan that raises a great wind. He guards the deep mountains, flies, disappears under a straw cloak, and taught the ninja everything they know. His name is also what a Japanese speaker reaches for when someone has grown...

Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl" is not a Japanese folktale. It is Danish, first published in 1845. But Japan took it in well over a century ago, and generations of Japanese children have grown up with it.

Two of Japan's darkest and most enduring folktales—and a full listening course built to make real Japanese finally click. A woodcutter and his son are caught in a blizzard and shelter in a mountain hut. In the night the son wakes to find a woman in a white kimono leaning over his sleeping...

Two of Japan's most beloved folktales—and more than two hours of guided listening built to make real Japanese finally click. An old man keeps a pet sparrow he loves like a child. His sharp-tongued wife has other feelings—and one afternoon, over a bowl of spilled starch, she does something...

Learn Japanese with Stories 4: The Mouse Bride and Ikkyū-san turns these two classic tales—stories every Japanese child grows up hearing—into a complete listening course for upper-beginner Japanese learners.

For beginning to intermediate students of Japanese. Listen and learn Japanese with two well-known Japanese folktales: "Inch-high Samurai" and "Kaguya-hime", the Moon Princess. This audiobook contains two full stories in Japanese (with English explanation - both line-by-line and as a translation)...

Carl Brooke, a scholar of ancient Near Eastern languages, now spends his twilight years chronicling the adventures of his youth as a leading member of the Agora Society, a society dedicated to the betterment of man....

An art critic is brutally murdered, and the subject of his last review is suspected. Did the artist do it, or was it one of the family members - all of whom had motive and opportunity? Find out....

Captain Barnwell, a longtime honorary member of the Agora Society, presents to the members a solved case one clue at a time. Three suspects. One murderer. Who is the murderer and why? Find out....

Edison, the most proper member of the Agora Society, hides a past he thought was long buried. The sudden appearance of a strange priest, however, reveals secrets that demand Edison honor an oath made long ago....

Murder and intrigue abound. At the center of it all appears a mysterious sheikh and his cursed ruby....

Kidnapped! An honorable man has gone missing. The sheriff dithers and every day brings death closer to a reality. It is late 1865. In the style of Arthur Conan Doyle, Clay Boutwell brings back the Agora Society and its premier scholar, Carl Brooke....

A string of thefts ends in a grisly murder. Certain evidence leads Captain Barnwell to suspect a former thief, Rutherford Nordlinger, as the culprit. Carl Brooke becomes personally involved as Nordlinger’s guilt is questioned....