Japanese, Chinese, Korean & Other Literature Books

‘If there’s any metaphor I would use for the act of writing, it would have to be listening,’ says Jon Fosse in A Silent Language, the lecture he delivered after being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. When he writes, Fosse...

In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the...

Pale Horse is a thinly disguised retelling of the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich. Written in the form of a diary by the leader of a group of five revolutionaries, the novel provides a straightforward and clinical account of the...

THE EXTRAORDINARY LOST NOVEL FROM THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA AND ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDESitting alone, overlooking the still and blue lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach surveys the men of the hotel bar. She is happily...

A classic Japanese mystery —a pair of sleuths investigate a series of bloody murders in 19th century TokyoA captivating locked room murder mystery perfect for fans of Stuart Turton and Janice HallettJapan, 1869. A time of reform and rebellion...

Filled with striking, river-like sentences and plenty of humour, the opening volume of Proust’s modernist masterpiece covers the Narrator’s childhood in Combray – including perhaps the most famous cake-eating scene in the history of...

'What is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad.'Autobiographical stories from one of Japan's masters of modernist story-telling.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday...

A spellbinding novel that places one family’s tragedies against the uncontainable life force of the land itself.Near a village high in the Pyrenees, Domènec wanders across a ridge, fancying himself more a poet than a farmer, to “reel...

Zhao Yunlan is Chief of the Special Investigations Department: a secret group of uniquely skilled individuals who investigate strange happenings in modern-day Dragon City. Although laid-back and cheeky to those who don't know him, this tenacious and...

Presented as a series of letters between the humble copying clerk Devushkin and a distant relative of his, the young Varenka, Poor People brings to the fore the underclass of St Petersburg, who live at the margins of society in the most appalling...

Returning to Russia from a tour in Italy, twenty-three-year-old Dimitry Sanin breaks his journey in Frankfurt. There he encounters the beautiful Gemma Roselli, who works in her parents' patisserie, and falls deeply and deliriously in love for the first...

The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets. He returns to Kyoto to find Otoko, a young woman with whom he had a terrible affair many years before, and discovers that she is now a painter, living with a younger woman as...

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. In this world, the fates of two people, Tengo and Aomame, are closely intertwined. They are each, in their own way, doing...

Beautiful, twisted and brilliant - discover Yoko Ogawa. A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster-brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool - sparking an unspoken infatuation that draws out darker possibilities. A...

In a crumbling, seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet, seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother fusses over the off-season customers. When, one night, they are forced to eject a prostitute and a middle-aged man from his room, Mari...

A woman goes into a bakery to buy a strawberry cream tart. The place is immaculate but there is no one serving so she waits. Another customer comes in.The woman tells the new arrival that she is buying her son a treat for his birthday. Every year she...

In this classic Japanese locked room mystery an amateur detective investigates a string of gruesome unsolved murders. Astrologer, fortuneteller, and self-styled detective Kiyoshi Mitarai must solve a macabre murder mystery that has baffled Japan for 40...

Shortlisted for the Man Booker International 2018From the author of The Vegetarian, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2016From the author of The Vegetarian and Human Acts comes a book like no other. The White Book is a meditation on colour,...

A glimpse into the humorous, sardonic world of Dazai Osamu, presenting a new and very different look at a one of the recognized masters of Japanese, and indeed global, literature. These works from the middle years of his brief career show a skilled hand,...

Publishing in English for the very first time, Japan's beloved coming of age classic on what really matters in life The streets of Tokyo swarm below fifteen year-old Copper as he gazes out into the city of his childhood. Struck by the thought of the...