Japan

A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses... Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those...

Hidden down a quiet alley in Tokyo, there’s a small, unassuming café that has been serving coffee for over a century. But beneath its cozy surface lies a magical secret: this café allows a select few to travel back in time. The rules are...

Paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own.It tells the story of three...

From the bestselling author of Strange Pictures comes another sensation from Japan’s master of unsettling mysteries. In Strange Houses, Uketsu transforms the very walls around us into a maze of terror, where warped floor plans and hidden rooms conceal a conspiracy too sinister to...

Straight from Japan’s top feline expert comes a delightful, practical, and irresistibly illustrated guide to understanding your cat’s every move. Is your cat’s tail standing tall? That’s a friendly hello. Quivering? Pure joy. But if it’s swishing side to side like a furry metronome?...

A cat a day keeps the doctor away… Hidden within an old building at the end of a narrow Kyoto alley, the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul reveals itself only to those who are truly struggling—and ready for help. This enigmatic clinic offers an...

A runaway bestseller in Japan, Strange Pictures delivers a chilling new vision of horror where innocence and dread collide. For fans of Hidden Pictures and Junji Ito, this debut from the enigmatic YouTube sensation Uketsu transforms simple drawings into doorways to unspeakable truths. A...

From the bestselling author of Strange Houses and Strange Pictures comes an entrancing new novel built around eleven unsettling buildings — and one devastating secret. A secluded hut deep in the woods.A house marked by murder.A concealed room.A forgotten shrine.A home consumed by fire.A...

After the 2011 tsunami, a Hello Kitty lunchbox washes up on the shore of a remote Canadian island. Inside, novelist Ruth discovers a diary written by Nao, a sixteen-year-old girl in Tokyo grappling with deep loneliness, bullying, and thoughts of ending her life. Before...

The cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer, and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true story There are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in the Tokyo Detention...

From Genki Kawamura, producer of the Japanese animated blockbuster Your Name, comes a timeless story of loss, love, and the journey to discover what truly matters in life. A young postman’s world is upended when a doctor delivers a devastating diagnosis: he has only...

This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of a butler named Stevens. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to...

The moving international sensation about new beginnings, human connection, and the joy of reading. Hidden in Jimbocho, Tokyo, is a booklover's paradise. On a quiet corner in an old wooden building lies a shop filled with hundreds of second-hand books. Twenty-five-year-old Takako has never...

Hailed as a bold foray into new literary territory, Kawakami’s novel is told in the voice of a 14-year-old student who subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy chooses to suffer in complete resignation. The only person...

Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties, living and working alone in Tokyo. Isolated and withdrawn, her only regular human contact is her lively editor, Hijiri—her opposite in nearly every way. One day, pausing in front of a shop window, Fuyuko...

Welcome back to the Kokoro Clinic—a place with no fixed address, yet somehow always discovered by those who need healing most. Here, the simple but profound prescription of a cat continues to mend emotional wounds in ways nothing else can. This enchanting sequel introduces...

Hotel Iris is a dark, seductive novel about a lonely young woman and the unsettling relationship that draws her away from the life she knows. Seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk of her family’s fading seaside hotel in Japan. Her world is small, quiet,...

Collection 1. Thirty-eight years after World War III, Neo-Tokyo has risen from the ashes of the old city: a neon-drenched metropolis bordered by irradiated wastelands where criminals, cultists, and street gangs rule the night. Among them are childhood friends and rivals Kaneda and Tetsuo,...

Confined to a care home on the outskirts of Tokyo, Shaka lives with a congenital muscle disorder that limits her physical movement—she uses a ventilator to breathe and an electric wheelchair to get around. But while her body may be restricted, her mind is...

A dazzling new collection of short stories--the first major new work of fiction from the beloved, internationally acclaimed, Haruki Murakami since his #1 best-selling Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear...

 A Novel of Obsession From the author of the international bestseller Butter comes a chilling and perceptive novel about obsession, female friendship, and the slow unraveling of two lives. Eriko’s life looks perfect—from her prestigious job at a Japanese trading firm to her spotless...

Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.He is a brilliant math professor with a peculiar problem--ever since a traumatic head injury,...

A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family...

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day comes an inspired sequence of stories as affecting as it is beautiful.   With the clarity and precision that have become his trademarks, Kazuo Ishiguro...

What’s the one dish you’d do anything to taste just one more time? Down a quiet backstreet in Kyoto exists a very special restaurant. Run by Koishi Kamogawa and her father Nagare, the Kamogawa Diner serves up deliciously extravagant meals. But that's not the...

From Akutagawa Prize–winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a trio of unsettling novellas that explore love, motherhood, fertility, and obsession — and the quiet cruelty that can hide within even the gentlest human acts. In one story, a solitary teenage girl becomes fixated on her...

A newly translated collection of short stories by Yukio Mishima, drawn from the final decade of his life in the 1960s. This selection offers a rare and intimate look into the mind of one of Japan’s most provocative and enduring literary figures. In the title...

In the far future, humanity is nearly extinct. Scattered across the planet in small tribes, people live under the watchful care of mysterious "Mothers." Some children are born from laboratories using the cells of dolphins and rabbits; others draw sustenance from light and water...

Inspired by the unforgettable dishes seen in Hayao Miyazaki’s most beloved films. Since 1985, Studio Ghibli has captivated audiences with its enchanting tales of adventure, wonder, and heart—and some of the most mouthwatering animated meals ever drawn. Now, you can recreate the magic at...

The Sea of Fertility #1. It is 1912 in Tokyo, and the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders—rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political...

From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore: A magnificent coming-of-age story steeped in nostalgia, “a masterly novel” (The New York Times Book Review) blending the music, the mood, and the ethos that were the sixties with a young man’s hopeless and heroic...

Schoolgirl marks the beginning of Dazai’s literary career and quickly gained attention for its sharp irony and inventive language. Today, it offers a vivid glimpse into the social structures of its time, while exploring the enduring tension between the individual and society—a theme that...

With the publication of Kitchen, her dazzling English-language debut, Banana Yoshimoto quickly established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Japanese literature. This beloved book pairs two interconnected stories that explore grief, love, and the quiet power of home in the...

Set on the slopes of Mount Hakodate in northern Japan, Café Donna Donna is famous not only for its beautiful harbor view, but also for its mysterious ability to let visitors travel through time. In Before Your Memory Fades, the third installment in the...

The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism. Unable to speak aloud, Naoki used an alphabet grid to painstakingly construct his thoughts, letter by letter. The result is a book that answers the questions so many have wanted to ask but never knew...

Sweet Bean Paste is a quietly moving novel about unlikely friendships, second chances, and the small joys that give life meaning. Sentaro, a lonely man with a criminal record, runs a modest dorayaki (sweet bean pancake) stand with little passion—until an elderly woman named...

After salaryman Hanio Yamada puts his life up for sale, interested parties quickly come calling with increasingly bizarre requests. What follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots—even a vampire. For someone who just wants to...

At Café Funiculi Funicula, time travel comes with a catch—but that hasn’t stopped people from returning, hoping for one last chance to reconnect. Within its quiet walls, where coffee is served with care and a single seat grants a journey to the past, lives...

"What are you looking for?" That’s the question posed by Tokyo’s most mysterious librarian, Sayuri Komachi—a woman with a remarkable gift: she seems to know exactly what each visitor truly needs, and the perfect book to guide them there. A tired shop assistant dreaming...

In eight unforgettable sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the extraordinary lives of these women, from their arduous journeys by boat, to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; from their experiences raising children who would later...

In this charming and emotionally resonant follow up to the internationally bestselling Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Satoshi Yagisawa paints a poignant and thoughtful portrait of life, love, and how much books and bookstores mean to the people who love them. Set again in...

Thirteen-year-old Noboru is a member of a gang of highly philosophical teenage boys who reject the tenets of the adult world - to them, adult life is illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental. When Noboru's widowed mother is romanced by Ryuji, a sailor, Noboru is thrilled....

Nobel Prize recipient Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece, a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan. At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante...

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing – and ideally, very little thinking. She is sent to a nondescript office building...

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic,...

In a time of hardship, artist Masuji Ono refused to paint mere beauty. Instead, he devoted his work to the imperialist cause that carried Japan into World War II. Now older, Ono lives in the war’s shadow. As he reflects on his youth and...

Rising star Mieko Kawakami reaches new heights in this fast-paced, electrifying novel — a Japanese Breaking Bad — in which a group of friends fight for freedom, independence, and survival in 1990s Tokyo, a city increasingly split between haves and have-nots. Each of them...

This elegant clothbound edition features Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Lecture in Literature, delivered at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on December 7, 2017. Awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature for the emotional depth and precision of his fiction, Ishiguro reflects in this lecture on...

A collection of darkly playful, genre-defying stories from Aoko Matsuda. Blending surrealism, sharp humor, and incisive social critique, Matsuda explores themes like sexism, media violence, and the gendered aesthetics of technology with a style that is both daring and disarmingly funny. In these inventive...

Tsuruko, the eldest sister of the once-wealthy Makioka family, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her husband prepares to move their household to Tokyo, where that name means nothing. Sachiko compromises valiantly to secure the future of her younger...