Japanese, Chinese, Korean & Other Literature Books

Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain is a beautiful rendering of the predicament of old age -- the gradual, reluctant narrowing of a human life, along with the sudden upsurges of passion that illuminate its closing.   By day...

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...

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers.Hat, ribbon, bird rose.To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any...

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...

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,...

This collection of mystery and horror stories is regarded as Japan's answer to Edgar Allan Poe.Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination, the first volume of its kind translated into English, is written with the quick tempo of the West but rich with...

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...

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...

Following a struggling young writer in nineteenth-century Oslo, Hamsun paints an arresting portrait of a mind descending into despair and delusion in this visceral masterpiece about being starved out of your ideals. With an introduction by Jo...

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...

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...

'A terrific novel' -- Angela CarterKoko won't do what is expected of her. Defying her family's wishes, she has brought up her eleven-year-old daughter alone in her apartment. And now, after a casual affair, she is unexpectedly pregnant again. What will...

Another of Junji Ito's classics, the sci-fi masterwork Remina tells the chilling tale of a hell star.An unknown planet emerges from inside a wormhole, and its discoverer, Dr. Oguro, christens the body “Remina” after his own daughter. His finding is met...

Set in 1970s Japan, this tender and poetic novel about a young, single mother struggling to find her place in the world is an early triumph by a modern Japanese master.Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko Odaka departs on...

'A masterpiece' -- Julian BarnesFlaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of a married woman's affair caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. Its heroine, Emma Bovary, is stifled by provincial life as the wife of a...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The acclaimed author of When the Emperor Was Divine tells the story of a group of young women brought from Japan to San Francisco as “picture brides” a century ago in this "understated masterpiece ... that unfolds with great...