Japanese, Chinese, Korean & Other Literature Books

A high-octane crime thriller with echoes of a Japanese Tarantino movie, Bullet Train finds five ruthless killers sharing the same locomotive as a suitcase full of cash leads to a dizzying array of double-crosses and plot twists. Five killers are on a...

Murakami tells the true story behind an act of terrorism that turned an average Monday morning into a national disaster.In spite of the perpetrators' intentions, the Tokyo gas attack left only twelve people dead, but thousands were injured and many...

A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick. In Tokyo - one of the world's largest megacities - a stray cat is wending her way through the back alleys. And, with each detour, she brushes up against the seemingly disparate lives of the city-dwellers, connecting them in...

In this shimmering Chinese-inspired fantasy, debut author Joan He introduces a determined and vulnerable young heroine struggling to do right in a world brimming with deception. Tyrants cut out hearts. Rulers sacrifice their own.Princess Hesina of Yan...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 CWA INTERNATIONAL DAGGER. To find your missing daughter. To hold her in alive in your arms. Mikami doubted there was anything a parent wouldn’t put themselves through in order to achieve such a goal. The nightmare no parent could...

A dizzying tale of lust and murder, from one of Japan's greatest mystery writers. A hunter prowls the night spots of Shinjuku But he's the one walking into a trap... Ichiro Honda leads a double life: by day a devoted husband and a diligent worker, by...

Through the narrator who follows and watches the mysterious Woman in the Purple Skirt, Imamura weaves a disquieting, darkly voyeuristic narrative of obsession, manipulation and the insidious effects of gossip. The Woman in the Purple Skirt is being...

Sparkling and utterly original, If I Had Your Face provides a surgical overview of the complex social hierarchies and the absurd beauty standards in modern day Seoul, through the parallel stories of four young women. Longlisted for the...

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER“A manifesto to happiness—the one found when you stop running from who you are.” –New York Times Book Review “An extraordinary book, acrobatic on the level of the sentence, symphonic across its many movements—and this is a book...

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...

The Sunday Times and New York Times Bestseller. A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo. They work at home as freelance writers. They no longer have very much to say to one another. One day a...

A modern classic in Japan on par with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye, Botchan is a very popular Japanese novel and still widely read decades after its first publication.Botchan, a timeless Japanese novel written by Japan's...

Mishima's literary powers are on full display in his penultimate novel that is a meditation on reincarnation and Buddhist philosophy.Honda, a brilliant lawyer and man of reason, is called to Bangkok on legal business, where he is granted an audience with...

The dramatic climax of The Sea of Fertility tetraology takes place in the late 1960s. Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, discovers and adopts a sixteen-year-old orphan, Toru, as his heir, identifying him with the tragic protagonists of the three...

Asle is an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway. His only friends are his neighbour, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also...

"This smart and original mystery is a true page-turner… will baffle, surprise, and draw out suspicion until the final few pages. With each book, Higashino continues to elevate the modern mystery as an intense and inventive literary form." —Library...

Battle-tested project leader at a PR firm and slippery bachelor, Sakuma sees himself as a player. His smug self-regard doesn't seem entirely unfounded, both in love and at work. When is idea for a mini-theme park is dismissed as too costly and vacuous at...

Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore.His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living...

Kobo Abe, the internationally acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes, combines wildly imaginative fantasies and naturalistic prose to create narratives reminiscent of the work of Kafka and Beckett.In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless...

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...