Japanese, Chinese, Korean & Other Literature Books

Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname “Boulder.” When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a...

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREA New York Times Notable BookIn her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion.Blurring the line between fact and...

What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian. For Sayuri Komachi is able to sense exactly what each visitor to her library is searching for and provide just the book recommendation to help them find it.A restless retail...

This engaging series of childhood recollections tells about an ideal school in Tokyo during World War II that combined learning with fun, freedom, and love. This unusual school had old railroad cars for classrooms, and it was run by an extraordinary...

“Yokomizo at his absolute best... From the ominous opening through the brilliant final reveal, [he] ably blends suspense and fair-play detection... A classic of the genre.” —Publishers Weekly, starred reviewAn ingenious classic...

The Osugi family have come to a realisation. Each of them hails from a different planet. Father from Mars, mother from Jupiter, son from Mercury and daughter from Venus. Already seen as oddballs in their small Japanese town in the 1960s, this...

These four novels display Oe’s passionate and original vision. Oe was ten when American jeeps first drove into the mountain village where he lived, and his literary work reveals the tension and ambiguity forged by the collapse of values of his...

The penultimate novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, La Debacle (1892) takes as its subject the dramatic events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1870-1. During Zola's lifetime it was the bestselling of all his novels, praised by...

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal BoredomIzumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed...

Awarded the Prix des libraires by France’s booksellers, a universal story about music and restoring one’s faith in others amid the aftermath of tremendous loss.   Tokyo, 1938. An amateur quartet, led by the compassionate Yu, gathers to...

Vasily Eroshenko was one of the most remarkable transnational literary figures of the early twentieth century: a blind multilingual Esperantist from Ukraine who joined left-wing circles in Japan and befriended the famous modernist writer Lu Xun in China...

From one of Japan’s rising literary stars, two mesmerizing novellas told with stylistic inventiveness and breathtaking sensitivity about memory, loss, and love.   Touring the Land of the Dead tells the story of Taichi, who was forced to...

"A knockout." —Publishers Weekly (Starred review)"A remarkable collection." —Kirkus ReviewsA collection of contemplative, lyrical stories examining the visible and invisible consequences of atomic power on Japanese...

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize A sharp, photo-realistic novella of memory and thwarted hope set in modern-day Tokyo—an “unflinching . . . powerful” showcase of the best in contemporary Japanese literature (Shelf Awareness)Divorced...

A startling novella from the heir to Haruki Murakami and Gabriel García Márquez   Trapped in Tokyo, left behind by a series of girlfriends, the narrator of Slow Boat sizes up his situation. His missteps, his violent...

Tense, subtly disturbing Japanese literary horror perfect for fans of Tender is the Flesh and The VegetarianAn unforgettably creepy child narrator weaves uncanny tales about her new stepmother in this feminist horror novella + short story...

The wise and charming international bestseller and hit Japanese movie—about a young woman who loses everything but finds herself—a tale of new beginnings, romantic and family relationships, and the comfort that can be found in books...

In this intoxicating stream-of-consciousness novel, Mieko Kanai tackles the existential traps of motherhood, marriage, and domestic captivity   The apparently unremarkable Natsumi lives in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she...

'It was a very momentous day, the day on which I was to be slaughtered'Bringing together tales of melancholy and madness, nightmare and fantasy, this is a new collection of the most haunting German stories from the past 200 years. Ranging from the...

Prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-Jin’s debut confronts familial love, duty, mortality, and generational schism through the incendiary gaze of a tradition-bound mother faced with her daughter’s queer relationship. When a widowed, aging...