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...

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...

From the author of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared comes a hilarious story of retribution inflicted upon one truly obnoxious Mr Alderheim, whose wronged young ex-wife and maltreated son decide to hire a specialist...

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...

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...

Tolstoy's epic masterpiece intertwines the lives of private and public individuals during the time of the Napoleonic wars and the French invasion of Russia. The fortunes of the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, of Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei, are intimately...

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...

An adorable new yuri manga for fans of Kase-san and Yamada and Bloom Into You. One day, high school girl Himari sees a girl, Yori, sing in a band, and it awakens feelings she doesn't understand... but Yori does!After Aki confesses that she...

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...

In this "mesmerizing" novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko, the Korean-American daughter of first-generation immigrants strives to join Manhattan's inner circle (USA Today).Meet Casey Han: a strong-willed, Queens-bred daughter of...

Among Dostoevsky's later novels, The Adolescent occupies a very special place: published three years after The Devils and five years before his final masterpiece, The Karamazov Brothers, the novel charts the story of nineteen-year-old Arkady – the...

An NYRB Classics OriginalA humble clerk and his loving wife scrape out a quiet existence on the margins of Tokyo. Resigned, following years of exile and misfortune, to the bitter consequences of having married without their families’ consent, and unable...