PIE International Inc has announced the publication of "Man'y? Luster," a 392-page art book which includes over 80 well-selected poems from the "Man?y?shu." The original format published in February 2002 is now in a reasonable price and size. The English text author, Ian Hideo Levy, has traveled to and fro between Japan and the U.S. since he moved to Japan for the first time in 1967. He has lectured in Japanese literature at Princeton and Stanford University. He won the National Book Award in 1982 for translating the "Man?y?shu" into English, and he gained attention in Japan for his first novel ?Seijoki no Kikoenai Heya? published in 1992, which won the Noma Literary Award for New Writers. This book is a selection of the best poems from the "Man?y?shu," combined with beautiful photos taken by Hakudo Inoue, Japan?s leading photographer of landscapes. The beautiful book design created by Kazuya Takaoka - an award-winning art director in the field of book design and graphic design - will appeal not only to lovers of Japanese literature but also to readers who have an appreciation for the arts. About the "Man?y?shu. The "Man?y?shu" is Japan?s first anthology of poetry. It is possibly the greatest single collection of lyric poetry in classical world literature. As its name, literally ?The collection of Ten Thousand Leaves? suggests, this work is the summation, the totality of poetic expression from the first golden age of Japanese culture. Shortly after the turn of the eighth century A.D., Japan saw the rise of a sophisticated and cosmopolitan urban center, the great capital of Nara. And yet the sensibility of the courtiers who lived among the temples and palaces which lined Nara?s broad avenues was informed by a legacy of animism, a sense that nature itself, in all its details, was somehow magically alive. The "Man?y?shu" includes the works of hundreds of poets, from emperors to beggars. The range of expression is extremely broad. There are ritual poems in celebration of the emperor and stately public ?laments? on imperial demise. Alongside these are intensely private expressions of love and erotic longing; poems of travel in which the courtier leaves behind the ?firmly pillared? capital for the wilderness; poems of urban wit and sophistication; and poems in which the animistic richness of nature is transformed into verbal landscapes of breathtaking power and beauty. Many of the poems display rich visual imagery, a dynamic, at times almost kinetic, use of natural phenomena as the material of expression. All of nature was source of visual metaphor. This makes these ancient works eminently translatable ? the core of sensibility seems ?contemporary.? There is a luster to these 1,300-year-old Japanese poems which looks as if they had been written yesterday.