Asian Literature

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Winner of 2018 National Book Award in Translated Literature   Library Journal Best Books of 2018 Yoko Tawada’s new novel is a breathtakingly light-hearted meditation on mortality and fully displays what Rivka Galchen has called her...

A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the 2022 National Book Award. Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.”...

Part puzzle, part revenge tale, part ghost story, this ingenious novel spins half a century of Vietnamese history and folklore into “a thrilling read, acrobatic and filled with verve” (The New York Times Editors’ Choice).  ...

At New Seoul Park, Korea's greatest theme park, an enigmatic man tempts visitors with a mysterious jelly candy that promises an unbreakable bond. As the sun beats down on a muggy summer afternoon, a child separated from her disinterested parents, a...

This witty murder mystery puts a modern spin on the classic country house whodunnit. A must-read for fans of Agatha Christie, Richard Osman and Janice Hallett.A snowstorm. A country house. Old friends reunited.It's going to be murder.Torben Helle - art...

A Financial Times Translated Fiction Book of the Year.Translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai.Minoru Aose is an architect whose greatest achievement is to have designed the Yoshino house, a prizewinning and much discussed private residence...

Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family is a darkly humorous debut novel that follows a cunning antihero as she gets her revenge.When I think about what I actually did, I feel somewhat sad that nobody will ever know about the complex operation that...

From the bestselling author of The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and The Devil and the Dark Water comes an inventive, high-concept murder mystery: an ingenious puzzle, an extraordinary backdrop, and an audacious solution.Solve the murder to save...

Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Tonight is the opening night. There are birds perched everywhere, on the power lines, the guy ropes, the strings of light that festoon the tent . . . when I think of all those little...

A moving story about friendship, illness, and the poetry of Paul Celan by the astonishing Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award. Patrik, who sometimes calls himself “the patient,” is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin...

On the heels of Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada’s new and irresistible Suggested in the Stars carries on her band of friends’ astonishing and intrepid adventures It’s hard to believe there could be a more...

Internationally acclaimed author Yoko Tawada's most famous — and bizarre — tale in a stand-alone, New Directions Pearl edition. The Bridegroom Was a Dog is perhaps the Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada’s most famous story. Its initial...