Fiction - World Literature - Japan

FROM JAPAN'S GREATEST CRIME WRITER: Yokomizo's iconic detective Kosuke Kindaichi returns in this stand-alone murder mystery featuring a luxurious family estate beset by madness, scandal, and a terrifying curse "Plenty of golden age ingredients... with a truly ingenious solution." -- Guardian, Best New Crime...

Isaku is a nine-year-old boy living in a remote, desperately poor fishing village on the coast of Japan. His people catch barely enough fish to live on, and so must distill salt to sell to neighboring villages. But this industry serves another, more sinister...

A light, humorous, amiably peopled, and tender novel about found families, the people who shape our lives, and the complexities of non-traditional family ties.  Yuko has had four different surnames and been brought up in several families. The parental figures in her life, despite...

An unsettling, poignant debut novella about unusual connections fostered by the covid pandemic, perfect for fans of sharp literary fiction that reflects and confronts our world It's early 2020, and with the world in chaos as covid spreads, two lonely people, both seeking to...

It's hard to believe there could be a more enjoyable novel than Scattered All Over the Earth--Yoko Tawada's rollicking, touching, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship and climate change--but surprising her readers is what Tawada does best: its sequel, Suggested in the Stars, delivers exploits...

The highly anticipated new novel. When a young single woman in Tokyo decides she's ready to sell anything--even her womb--to escape the precarity of her life, an agency pairs her with a wealthy couple desperate to have a child. The match seems made in...

When a young single woman in Tokyo decides she's ready to sell anything--even her womb--to escape the precarity of her life, an agency pairs her with a wealthy couple desperate to have a child. The match seems made in heaven. She even looks a...

Quién imaginaría que la cura perfecta ronronea? En un oscuro callejón de Kioto se esconde la Clínica Kokoro, un lugar envuelto en misterio al que solo llegan quienes más lo necesitan. Su peculiar tratamiento consiste en "prescribir" gatos, una solución que desconcierta a los...

From one of the most significant contemporary Japanese writers, a haunting, dazzling novel of loss and rebirth "Yuko Tsushima is one of the most important Japanese writers of her generation." --Foumiko Kometani, The New York Times I was puzzled by how I had changed....

A fictional writer in his thirties named Osamu Dazai has just mailed his publisher an awful manuscript, filling him with dread and shame. Wandering along a river in a nearby park in suburban Tokyo, he meets a high-school dropout and the two get into...

An anthology of the greatest stories by modern Japanese masters (including previously overlooked women writers)! Fourteen distinct voices are assembled in this one-of-a-kind anthology tracing a nation's changing social landscapes. Internationally renowned writers like Yasunari Kawabata, Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Junichi Watanabe are joined by...

"An amazing, beautiful book . . . It shows how one dog's dignified presence can bring connection and love to a fractured world." ―Cat Warren, New York Times bestselling author of What the Dog Knows One dog changes the life of everyone who takes...

Follow the seashell path along Tokyo Bay until you get to the Chibineko Kitchen, where a traditional Japanese meal can summon anyone you choose from your past, but only for as long as it continues to steam . . . --for fans of Before...

"Wonderful . . . A cozy, emotional gem . . . Each chapter is a quiet, healing moment, filled with food, memory and the comfort of cats." --The Seattle Times Your table awaits at the Chibineko Kitchen, where a soul-nourishing meal in the company...

The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan's bestselling and most celebrated authors. From Akutagawa Prize-winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a trio of novellas about love, motherhood, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures contain a hairline crack of cruel...

From the National Book Award winning author, an extraordinary, ground-breaking, epic multi-generational novel about a Korean family living under Japanese occupation. In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have had...

"Akutagawa displays an insightful and keenly creative intelligence in prose so lucid its sophistication is hardly visible." --Chris Power, The Guardian Japan's master storyteller Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892 - 1927) wrote more than 150 short stories. Widely regarded as "the Father of the Japanese short...

12 haunting, uniquely crafted short stories about loss and memory from a revered Japanese-Argentine author, available in English for the first time. "Her stories are a transformative experience... Kamiya makes simple what for others is impossible to express." --Clarín In 12 stories of exquisite...

The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba--the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age--is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift...

A woman turns herself into a forest after long being co-opted to serve as the subject of her husband's novels--this surrealist fable challenges traditional gender attitudes and exploitation in the literary world Nowatari Rui has long been the subject of her husband's novels, depicted...