Asian Literature

Norwegian Wood author Haruki Murakami is on exceptionally fine form in this versatile collection of short stories about modern masculinity and the many faces of solitude. I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is...

Discover Haruki Murakami's first two novels.'If you're the sort of guy who raids the refrigerators of silent kitchens at three o'clock in the morning, you can only write accordingly.That's who I am.'Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are Haruki...

An eclectic, eccentric and altogether brain-bending collection of short stories.Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, an ice man, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic...

Three bears. The first, a diligent memoirist whose unlikely success forces her to flee Soviet Russia. The second, her daughter, a skilled dancer in an East Berlin circus. The third, Knut, a baby bear born and raised in Berlin Zoo at the beginning of the...

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...

A masterpiece of literary mystery soaked in Parisian atmosphere, The Reader’s Room sees an editor with gaps in her memory trying to identify the author of an exquisite crime thriller manuscript, whilst a series of murders eeriely...

Winner of the Munhakdongne Novel Award, South Korea's most prestigious literary prize.Cabinet 13 looks exactly like any normal filing cabinet…Except this cabinet is filled with files on the ‘symptomers’, humans whose strange abilities and bizarre...

(Available after March 30th, 2022)Yoko Tawada—winner of the National Book Award—presents three terrific new ghost stories, each named after a street in Berlin   The always astonishing Yoko Tawada here takes a walk on the supernatural side of the street...

A fascinating discovery, Kawabata’s unfinished final novel Dandelions is a great master’s last word A fascinating discovery, Dandelions is Kawabata's final novel, left incomplete when he committed suicide in 1972. Beautifully spare and deeply...

(Available after 3-20 days)Go is a game of strategy in which two players attempt to surround each other’s black or white stones. Simple in its fundamentals, infinitely complex in its execution, Go is an essential expression of the Japanese spirit. And in...

Witty and satirical, this cosmological fable from the great Japanese author finds an extra-terrestrial family living in 1960s Japan desperately trying to save humanity from the folly of nuclear war.   The Osugi family have come to a realization. Each...

By Man Asian Literary Prize winner Kyung-Sook Shin, "a moving delve into a lonely psyche" that follows a neglected young woman's search for human connection in contemporary Seoul (YZ Chin). San is twenty-two and alone when she happens upon a job at...

(Available after 3-20 days)Part romance, part detective story, Sputnik Sweetheart tells the story of a tangled triangle of uniquely unrequited love.K is madly in love with his best friend, Sumire, but her devotion to a writerly life precludes her from...

Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s great storytellers at the peak of his powers.Here we meet a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who is on the run, and Nakata, an aging simpleton who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their...

Hear the Wind Sing is Murakami's first novel, available for the first time in English outside Japan.In Hear the Wind Sing the narrator is home from college on his summer break. He spends his time drinking beer and smoking in J's Bar with the Rat,...

Recognized throughout the world for his brilliance as a novelist and playwright, Yukio Mishima is also noted as a master of the short story in his native Japan, where the form is practiced as a major art.   Nine of Yukio Mishima’s finest stories were...

At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to...

“Filled with the kind of sublime, galvanizing stories that strike like a lightning bolt, searing your nerves . . . It’s easy enough to see why Kim . . . is acclaimed as the best writer of his generation; pick up this book and find out for yourself.”...

Whispers of witchcraft and sinister revelations of an old shipwreck fill the life of Thomas Treadwater – a reluctant soldier and man of reason – with dark unrest in Andrews’ mesmeric historical mystery set amidst the English Civil War...