Japanese, Chinese, Korean & Other Literature Books

The Setting Sun is a gorgeous and deeply sensible story of the changing of Japanese tradition after World War II, all from the lens of a heroine going through her own changes offset by the challenges of modernity. Timeless and lyrical, it's a story...

An intimate look at writing, running, and the incredible way they intersect, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is an illuminating glimpse into the solitary passions of one of our greatest artists.While training for the New York City Marathon,...

In The Possessed, Witold Gombrowicz, considered by many to be Poland’s greatest modernist, draws together the familiar tropes of the Gothic novel to produce a darkly funny and playful subversion of the form. With dreams of...

A mysterious stranger named Chichikov arrives in a small provincial Russian town and proceeds to visit a succession of landowners, making each of them an unusual and somewhat macabre proposition. He offers to buy the rights to the dead serfs who are...

Written from 1904 through 1906, Soseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle-class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a...

(Available after 3-20 days) A woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that requires no reading, no writing - and ideally, very little thinking.She is sent to an office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of...

Tsukiko is in her late 30s and living alone when one night she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, 'Sensei', in a bar. He is at least thirty years her senior, retired and, she presumes, a widower. After this initial encounter, the...

Haunting, elegiac and profound, Where Reasons End charts the process of parental grief through a mother’s imagined conversation with her dead son. With lyrical economy and deep compassion, Li crafts a tender, humane novel of love, loss and...

Written when Mishima was only twentysix, Forbidden Colors is a depiction of a male homosexual relationship, in which a rich older man buys the love of a young man who is stunningly handsome but who lacks the ability to love. As in Mann's Death in Venice,...

For a generation adjusting painfully to the demands of a modern industrial and commercial society, Asia came to represent an alternative vision of the good life: aesthetically austere, socially aristocratic, and imbued with spirituality. The Book of...

In the Tokyo suburbs four women work the graveyard shift at a factory. Burdened with heavy debts, alienated from husbands and children, they all secretly dream of a way out of their dead-end lives. A young mother among them finally cracks and strangles...

From the critically acclaimed author of Rainbirds comes a novel of tragedy anddark histories set in Japan. University sophomore Miwako Sumida has hanged herself, leaving those closest to her reeling. In the months before her suicide, she was hiding away...

'That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing - from Conrad and Kafka, to Beckett and beyond - starts in Dostoyevsky's work' Malcolm BradburyAlienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own...

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales - from the demon-haunted 'St John's Eve' to the strange surrealism of 'The Nose', from the heart-rending trials of the copyist in 'The Overcoat' to those of the delusional clerk in 'The Diary of a Madman' -...

In this short story enhanced with beautiful illustrations, the bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, Beartown, and Anxious People delivers an insightful and poignant tale about finding out what is truly important in life.A father and a son are seeing...

New York Times Bestseller   "Packed with suspense. . . a gripping edge-of-your-seat thriller.” — Washington Book Review The internationally acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author returns to the magnificent universe he constructed in his bestselling...

An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Bâtarde relates Violette Leduc’s long search for her own identity through a series of...

From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children...

Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize. Winner of the PEN Translates Award. A monumental first collection in English from Banu Mushtaq: lawyer, activist, champion of Muslim women, and winner of India’s highest literary honors. In the...

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Translated Literature!   “Was desire something like being possessed by a nightmare?” Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does...