Japanese, Chinese, Korean & Other Literature Books

Oceans and decades apart, two women are inextricably bound by the secrets between them.Japan, 1957. Seventeen-year-old Naoko Nakamura’s prearranged marriage would secure her family’s status in their traditional Japanese community, but Naoko...

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force--and one of Haruki Murakami's most acclaimed and beloved novels.In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat--and then for his wife as well--in a netherworld beneath the...

Eyes mark the shape of the city. The midnight hour approaches in an almost-empty diner. Mari sips her coffee and reads a book, but soon her solitude is disturbed: a girl has been beaten up at the Alphaville hotel, and needs Mari's help. Meanwhile Mari's...

Narrated by a ghost, this unusual narrative written in a haunting and poetic voice is a fresh, subtly political take on class and memory, family and trauma. It's all about the importance of human connection and the unending search for it. It may be...

After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of...

It's just before New Year, and Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo's nightlife. But, Frank's behaviour is so odd that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: his client may in fact have...

(Available after 3-20 days) A book that “speak[s] volumes about our need for connection—human, feline or otherwise” (The San Francisco Chronicle), The Travelling Cat Chronicles is a life-affirming anthem to kindness and self-sacrifice that shows how the...

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. This brilliantly imagined novel brings us the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of...

A funny, transporting, surprising, and poignant novel that was one of the highest-selling debuts of recent years in Korea, Love in the Big City tells the story of a young gay man searching for happiness in the lonely city of Seoul. Love in the Big...

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written...

A haunting, bizarre short story collection about violence, mental illness, and the warped contradictions of the twentieth-century female experience.  A close friend and protégé of Marguerite Duras, Barbara Molinard (1921–1986)...

(Available after December 30th, 2022)For the first time in English, literary icon Marguerite Duras's foundational masterpiece about a young woman's existential breakdown in the deceptively peaceful French countryside.The Easy Life is the story of...

(Available after 3-20 days)A short novel by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, called "our very best writer today" by Milan Kundera, this eccentric romp celebrates the indestructability––against censorship and political oppression––of the written word.   Too...

(Available after August 30th, 2023)An unfulfilled college student hurtles through four parallel realities to explore the what-might've-been and the what-should-never-be in this Groundhog Day meets The Midnight Library–esque novel from one of Japan’s most...

This eclectic, moving and richly enjoyable collection is the essential introduction to Korean literature.Journeying through Korea's dramatic recent past, from the Japanese occupation and colonial era to the devastating war between north and south and the...

If you could swap your life for a better one, which would you choose?On the outskirts of Rainbow Town, there is an old, abandoned house. They say that if you send a letter detailing your misfortunes there, you could receive a ticket. If you bring this...

A novel of lesbian identity and motherhood, and the societal pressures that place them in opposition.The daughter of an illustrious French family whose members include a former Prime Minister, a model, and a journalist, Constance Debré abandoned...

Japan’s internationally celebrated master storyteller returns with five stories of women on their way to healing that vividly portrays the blissful moments and everyday sorrows that surround us in everyday life.A New York Times Notable Book"This is...

‘One of the masters of the short story’ -- Guardian.‘I have to tell you – you see, this is just about the strangest experience I have been through...’These six stories of obsession, secrets, delusions and desires from one of...

An excoriating - and extremely funny - satire of China's Cultural Revolution and the bureaucratic madness that followed the fall of Mao, Wang Xiaobo's masterpiece is available for the first time in a full English translation. The bestselling novel by...