Asian Literature

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...

In this classic Japanese locked room mystery an amateur detective investigates a string of gruesome unsolved murders. Astrologer, fortuneteller, and self-styled detective Kiyoshi Mitarai must solve a macabre murder mystery that has baffled Japan for 40...

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,...

Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. It tells of Shinji, a young fisherman and Hatsue, the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. Shinji is entranced at the sight of Hatsue in...

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...

*OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD**NOW AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER*If you could go back, who would you want to meet?In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local...

From the author of the international bestseller Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this book follows four new customers who hope to travel back in time in a little Japanese café.In a back alley in Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving...

A heartwarming and quietly profound story-within-a-story novel from the author of The Cat and The City, Four Seasons in Japan follows a Tokyo translator who stumbles upon a mysterious book left on the subway about a stern grandmother...

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 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...

A New York Times bestselling author—and “a mythmaker for the millennium, a wiseacre wiseman” (New York Times Book Review)—delivers a surreal and elaborate quest that takes readers from Tokyo to the remote mountains of northern...

Among the jumble of paperweights, plates, typewriters and general bric-a-brac in Mr Nakano's thrift store, there are treasures to be found. Each piece carries its own story of love and loss - or so it seems to Hitomi, when she takes a job there working...

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...

Read this classic exploration of political violence, traditional samurai values and right wing nihilism.Isao is a young, engaging patriot, and a fanatical believer in the ancient samurai ethos. He turns terrorist, organising a violent plot against the...

The Akutagawa Prize-winning stories from the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo In these three haunting and lyrical stories, three young women experience unsettling loss and romance. In a dreamlike adventure, one woman travels through an apparently...

I wake up, get out of bed, say good morning to my plant, unwrap a protein bar, and drink a liter of bottled water. I’m awake for five full minutes before remembering I might die today. When you get old, you get soft. The author of 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...

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami is as close to being Haruki Murakami (apologies to John Malkovich) as we’ll ever get. A beautiful and luxurious deep dive into how Murakami works and writes, fans of his fiction as well as anyone interested in...