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Publisher description: Kenzaburō Ōe, the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, is internationally acclaimed as one of the most important and influential post-World War II writers, known for his powerful accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and his own struggle to come to terms with a mentally handicapped son. His most popular book, A PERSONAL MATTER is the story of Bird, a frustrated intellectual in a failing marriage whose utopian...
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations.
Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history....
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations.
Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history....
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"When thirty-four-year-old Ms. Shibata gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only woman at her new workplace-a company that manufactures cardboard tubes-she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day she announces that she can't clear away her colleagues' dirty cups-because she's pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is . . . Ms. Shibata is not pregnant. Pregnant Ms. Shibata...
5) After dark
Author
Language
English
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Description
A short novel that centers on two sisters--Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny's toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own, three "night people". They are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and soon it becomes clear that Eri's slumber--mysteriously...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Lady Bird, an unlucky assassin, is tasked with grabbing a suitcase from a bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka and exiting at the next stop, but doesn't realize other dangerous passengers are trying to do the same.
A dark, satirical thriller by the bestselling Japanese author, following the perilous train ride of five highly motivated assassins--soon to be a major film from Sony. Nanao, nicknamed Lady Bird--the self-proclaimed "unluckiest assassin...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"Suzuki is just an ordinary man until his wife is murdered. When he discovers the criminal gang responsible he leaves behind his life as a maths teacher and joins them, looking for a chance to take his revenge. What he doesn't realise is that he's about to get drawn into a web of unusual professional assassins, each with their own agenda. The Whale convinces his victims to take their own lives using just his words. The Cicada is a talkative and deadly...
8) The thief
Author
Language
English
Description
The Thief is a seasoned pickpocket. Anonymous in his tailored suit, he weaves in and out of Tokyo crowds, stealing wallets from strangers so smoothly sometimes he doesn't even remember the snatch. Most people are just a blur to him, nameless faces from whom he chooses his victims. He has no family, no friends, no connections. But he does have a past, which finally catches up with him when Ishikawa, his first partner, reappears in his life, and offers...
Author
Language
English
Description
As she films a 52-part series on wholesome American beef for Japanese television, director Jane Takagi-Little of New York realizes she is doing her viewers a disservice and sabotages the show. Combines exposure of unhealthy production of meat and a cross-cultural view of America.
10) Zen attitude
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Life in modern Tokyo is a blast for Rei Shimura, a young Japanese-American woman who enjoys busy days as an antiques dealer and steamy nights with a devoted new boyfriend. But things come to a standstill when Rei overpays ofr a rare old chest of drawers for a wealthy client, the owner of a famous Zen temple in Kamakura. The exquisite tansu turns out to be a fake: the worst deal Rei has ever made. When the temple family turns on Rei--and the con man...
Author
Publisher
Bitter Lemon Press
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
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Description
On a stormy summer day the Aosawas, owners of a prominent local hospital, host a large birthday party. The occasion turns into tragedy when 17 people die from cyanide in their drinks. The only surviving links to what might have happened are a cryptic verse that could be the killer's, and the physician's bewitching blind daughter, Hisako, the only person spared injury. But the youth who emerges as the prime suspect commits suicide that October, effectively...
Author
Series
James Bond series volume 12
Language
English
Formats
Description
British secret agent James Bond, a broken man after the tragic end to his last mission, is sent to Japan to train under spy chief Tiger Tanaka and carry out an impossible mission to assassinate one of Tanaka's enemies.
Author
Series
Sano Ichiro mysteries volume 16
Language
English
Description
When the shogun's carefully regulated court is thrown into chaos by a massive earthquake in 1703 Japan, Sano Ichiro investigates the poisoning murders of a nobleman's daughters to prevent the regime's takeover.
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Kyoto, Japan, 1948. "Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist." Such is eight-year-old Noriko "Nori" Kamiza's first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents' imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her skin. The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Combining the incisive intimacy of Sally Rooney with the sharp wit of Helen Fielding, a compulsively readable and astonishingly relatable debut novel about marriage, motherhood, love, self and the vibrant, surprising city that is modern Tokyo. Mizuki is a Japanese housewife. She has a hardworking husband, two adorable children and a beautiful Tokyo apartment. It's everything a woman could want, yet sometimes she wonders whether it would be more fun...
16) Pachinko
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Award Nominated Women Authors
Great Leads on Great Reads
Lunch with a Librarian
Read-Alikes for The Covenant of Water
Great Leads on Great Reads
Lunch with a Librarian
Read-Alikes for The Covenant of Water
Description
Profoundly moving and gracefully told, PACHINKO follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them. Betrayed by her wealthy lover, Sunja finds unexpected salvation when a young tubercular minister offers to marry her and bring her to Japan to start a new life. So begins a sweeping saga of exceptional people...
Author
Publisher
Open Letter
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"It is summer in Tokyo. Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring twelve-year-old Mieko, in an apartment in an abandoned hotel, and lying on the floor at her grandparents' daydreaming, playing Tetris, and listening to the sounds from the street above...The plan is for Claire to visit Korea with her grandparents. They fled the civil war there over fifty years ago, along with thousands of others, and haven't been back since. When they...
18) Mild vertigo
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"The apparently unremarkable Natsumi lives in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes to the supermarket, visits friends, and gossips with neighbors. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own infernally buzzing internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae...
Author
Series
Lady joker volume 1
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Books You May have Missed 2021: Combined
Japanese Crime Fiction
Translations from Japanese
Women in Translation (2021)
Japanese Crime Fiction
Translations from Japanese
Women in Translation (2021)
Description
"This tour-de-force is widely regarded as the quintessential post-WWII Japanese novel. A plan to kidnap a major corporation's CEO becomes an allegory for the alienation of the individual self, a mirror to modern-day Japanese identity. In 1995 in Tokyo, five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on the horses. They have little in common except a disaffection with their lives. One is a poorly socialized but genius factory welder. One is a demoted...
Author
Publisher
Little, Brown and Company
Pub. Date
©2017.
Language
English
Description
"Seventeen-year-old Sophia has seven days left in Tokyo before she moves back to the United States, and she unexpectedly finds herself drawn to Jamie, a boy with whom she shares a heartbreaking history. Can their one short week of Tokyo adventures end in anything but good-bye?"--
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