Harumi Kuriahara is a superstar in Japan, similar to Delia Smith here. Like Delia, her recipes are not very complicated and surprisingly mostly made up of ingredients it would be easy to find anywhere (but I am in London).
I've wanted this book for a while and when I saw it in Oxfam at the quarter of the price I finally got to bring it home. This is how I get most of my books, just go to a charity shop in a fancy neighbourhood and you'll get all the good recipe books by famous chefs.
Day two of the soup diet:
It's actually fairly difficult to find nice, seasonal, vegetarian soup recipes in books because most authors want to do something different and delicious to distinguish their recipe and that usually means the addition of chicken or bacon. But Harumi has one, so here we go (chicken stock can be substituted for veg, obviously)
Unlike a Western method for making soup all of the components are cooked separately and then combined in the stock at the last minute. I would never usually do this, firstly because it's a pain to blanch, drain and rinse things separately and also because I would have assumed that cooking things together would enrich the flavour. But this actually makes a lot of sense, the noodles don't make the soup murky with their starch and the spinach doesn't make broth green. 
What you get is a relatively clear soup with pretty circles of sesame oil on the surface, the taste is very clean and fresh. Its also worth getting a dining room chair to stand on to get the white pepper off the high shelf instead of using every day black, you can taste the difference.
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