How Do You Live?

How Do You Live?

The inspiration for The Boy and the Heron, the major new Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli film

Summary

The inspiration for The Boy & The Heron, the major new Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli film and Golden Globe Award winner 2024

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

'In How Do You Live?, Copper, our hero, and his uncle are our guides in science, in ethics, in thinking. And on the way they take us, through a school story set in Japan in 1937, to the heart of the questions we need to ask ourselves about the way we live our lives. We will experience betrayal and learn about how to make tofu. We will examine fear, and how we cannot always live up to who we think we are, and we learn about shame, and how to deal with it. We will learn about gravity and about cities, and most of all, we will learn to think about things - to, as the writer Theodore Sturgeon put it, ask the next question' - from the foreword by Neil Gaiman

Reviews

  • An important, worthwhile and surprisingly of-the-moment novel ... as timely now as it was in 1937
    Asian Review of Books

About the author

Genzaburo Yoshino

Genzaburo Yoshino (1899-1981) was a writer, editor and journalist. In 1935, the writer Yamamoto appointed him editor-in-chief of the 16-book series: A Library for Young Japanese Nationals. How Do You Live? is the final book in this series, bringing in themes of Marxism, antimilitarism and Buddhism.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more