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A Woman of Pleasure
Kiyoko Murata’s A Woman of Pleasure is a feminist novel about the self-liberation of Japanese sex workers in the early twentieth century. It’s also a vibrant window into…
Tree in the Middle of the World
世界の真ん中の木 (Tree in the Middle of the World) is a lushly illustrated picture book written and drawn by Makiko Futaki, a former animator at Studio Ghibli. Originally published…
Dragon Goes House-Hunting
Earlier this year, Seven Seas released the tenth and final volume of Kawo Tanuki and Choco Aya’s fantasy series Dragon Goes House-Hunting. This manga follows the misadventures of…
Yami-hara
Mizuki Tsujimura’s Yami-hara is a collection of four disturbing stories about toxic social dynamics connected by a fifth chapter about the sinister force at the center of each…
Idol, Burning
Rin Usami’s Idol, Burning is only 115 pages long, but this masterfully translated literary novella paints a vibrant portrait of a young woman’s search for community in online…
Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks
Natsuko Imamura’s Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks collects three short literary thought experiments that go to strange places. Each of the characters is…
Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan
Chris McMorran’s Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan is an academic monograph about gender and society that’s surprisingly entertaining and enjoyable to read. McMorran is an anthropologis…
川のほとりに立つ者は
A young woman named Kiyose was recently promoted to the position of manager at an independent café. She devotes her love and attention to the business, but all…
The Night of Baba Yaga
The Night of Baba Yaga is two hundred pages of violence, torture, and rape. All of the novel’s descriptions of violence, torture, and rape are graphically explicit; and…
The Deer King: Survivors
Nahoko Uehashi’s fantasy epic The Deer King is the story of two characters who find themselves caught in an ongoing conflict fought on two fronts – an imperial…
ハンチバック
Saō Ichikawa’s ハンチバック (Hunchback), which won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for emerging writers, is about a woman with a congenital spinal condition who lives in a group home…
室外機室
室外機室 collects four gorgeously illustrated magical realist stories drawn by an otherwise unpublished artist who goes by Chome. The stories transport the reader to a reality slightly removed…
The Forest Brims Over
Maru Ayase’s short magical realist novel The Forest Brims Over is about a young woman named Rui whose husband is a famous writer. Fed up with the words…
Glitch
Shima Shinya’s four-volume sci-fi manga Glitch opens in a mundane setting in contemporary Japan: a high school student named Minato Lee has moved to a small rural town…
Mina’s Matchbox
Tomoko is only twelve years old when she loses her father to cancer. To learn to support herself, Tomoko’s mother attends a dressmaking school in Tokyo, where she…
Emergent Tokyo
Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City is a fascinating study of urban space augmented by a wealth of photographs and illustrations. Jorge Almazán convincingly argues that, instead of…
Being Dead Otherwise
Being Dead Otherwise is an anthropological account of the shifting cultures of death and dying in contemporary Japan. Despite its seemingly grim topic, this is one of the…
Flowers of Grass
Takehiro Fukunaga’s 1954 novel Flowers of Grass is considered to be a classic of postwar Japanese fiction, and it’s the sort of book that I imagine many people…
Cannibals
Shinya Tanaka’s prizewinning novella Cannibals is a harrowing story of how poverty enables a cycle of abuse and assault. The writing and translation are beautiful, but the book…
Tokyo Express
Seichō Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express is a slim mystery novel from 1958 whose crime is largely dependent on train schedules. Although two apparent victims of suicide appear to have…
The God of Nishi-Yuigahama Station
Takeshi Murase’s linked short story collection The God of Nishi-Yuigahama Station is about four people who lost members of their family in a tragic train derailment. For a…
Rental Person Who Does Nothing
Shōji Morimoto’s Rental Person Who Does Nothing is probably the most chill autobio essay collection I’ve read, and it’s also one of the more interesting. Morimoto, who makes…
おやすみ、東京
Atsuhiro Yoshida’s 2018 linked short story collection おやすみ、東京 chronicles the adventures of a cast of slightly odd characters with subtle connections to one another. Each of the stories…
からだの美
Yōko Ogawa’s 2023 collection からだの美 brings together sixteen short essays on the theme of bodies and physicality. The three primary topics are sports, performing arts, and animals. The…
掌に眠る舞台
Yōko Ogawa’s 2022 collection 掌に眠る舞台 contains eight stories connected by the broad theme of “stages.” Some stories are about the world of performing arts, while others take an…
Tower Dungeon
Tsutomu Nihei’s newest manga series, Tower Dungeon, is a grim and grisly dark fantasy about a small team of knights attempting to rescue a princess from an evil…
Tokyo These Days
Taiyō Matsumoto’s newest series, Tokyo These Days, follows a senior manga editor named Shiozawa who suddenly quits his job at a publishing company. After an initial period of…
The Hunting Gun
Yasushi Inoue’s epistolary novella The Hunting Gun tells the story of a man’s extramarital affair through three letters: one from his daughter, one from his wife, and one…
A Perfect Day to Be Alone
Nanae Aoyama’s novella A Perfect Day to Be Alone chronicles a year in the life of a young woman named Chizu who moves in with an elderly relative…
Mild Vertigo
Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo is a slice-of-life novella whose short length belies its Proustian ambitions. The narrator, a housewife living in an apartment in the Tokyo suburbs with…
Tree Spirits Grass Spirits
Tree Spirits Grass Spirits collects twenty-one autobiographical stories about plants by the celebrated Japanese-American poet Hiromi Ito. As translator Jon L Pitt explains in the preface, these sto…
Dragon Palace
Dragon Palace collects eight surreal stories by award-winning and internationally celebrated author Hiromi Kawakami. These stories are contemporary fantasies about shapeshifters, talking animals, a…
Diary of a Void
Diary of a Void is about a woman in her mid-thirties who lies about being pregnant and decides to run with it. Emi Yagi’s short novel isn’t quite…
Life Ceremony
Japanese Title: 生命式 (Seimeishiki)Author: Sayaka Murata (村田 沙耶香)Translator: Ginny Tapley TakemoriPublication Year: 2019 (Japan); 2022 (United States)Press: Grove PressPages: 244 Life Ceremony collec…
Dead-End Memories
Japanese Title: デッドエンドの思い出 (Deddo endo no omoide)Author: Banana Yoshimoto (吉本 ばなな)Translator: Asa YonedaPublication Year: 2003 (Japan); 2022 (United States)Press: CounterpointPages: 221 Dead-End Me…
Books on Japanese Culture and Society
This past semester I taught a class on Japanese science fiction and fantasy, and I was surprised by how interested my students were in learning more about the…
Japanese Suspense Novels by Female Authors
The Memory Police by Yoko OgawaNormal people quietly go about their lives on a sleepy island where memories collectively vanish a bit at a time. But what happens…
There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job
Japanese Title: この世にたやすい仕事はない (Kono yo ni tayasui shigoto wa nai)Author: Kikuko Tsumura (津村 記久子)Translator: Polly BartonPublication Year: 2015 (Japan); 2020 (United Kingdom)Press: Bloomsbury Publis…
The End of the Line for the Shinra Corporation
One of the most iconic images of Final Fantasy VII is Cloud standing tall as he faces the dark tower of the Shinra corporate headquarters. Over the meandering…
The Easy Life in Kamusari
Japanese Title: 神去なあなあ日常 (Kamusari naa naa nichijō)Author: Shion Miura (三浦 しをん)Translator: Juliet Winters CarpenterPublication Year: 2012 (Japan); 2021 (United States)Press: Amazon CrossingPages: 1…
Contemporary Japanese Literature
Juliet, Nichijou - My Ordinary Life: Episode 0, Nichijou - My Ordinary Life
500 Years Later: An Oral History of Final Fantasy VII
Editor: Matt LeoneBook Design: Rachel DaltonPublication Year: 2018Press: Read-Only MemoryPages: 240 500 Years Later: An Oral History of Final Fantasy VII is a book-length collection of interviews w…
Earthlings
Japanese Title: 地球星人 (Chikyūseijin)Author: Sayaka Murata (村田 沙耶香)Translator: Ginny Tapley TakemoriPublication Year: 2018 (Japan); 2020 (United States)Press: Grove PressPages: 247 Content Warning: T…
The Life-Changing Magic of Embracing Your Inner Weirdo
Marie Kondo instructs readers of her bestselling home organization guide The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up to surround themselves only with things that spark joy. I don’t care…
The Cat Who Saved Books
Japanese Title: 本を守ろうとする猫の話 (Hon o mamorō to suru neko no hanashi)Author: Sosuke Natsukawa (夏川 草介)Translator: Louise Heal KawaiPublication Year: 2017 (Japan); 2021 (United States)Press: HarperColli…
The Beast Player
Japanese Title: 獣の奏者 I 闘蛇編 (Kemono no sōja ichi: Tōda hen) and 獣の奏者 II 王獣編 (Kemono no sōja ni: Ōjū hen)Author: Nahoko Uehashi (上橋 菜穂子)Translator: Cathy HiranoIllustrator: Yuta…
The Woman with the Flying Head
Author: Yumiko Kurahashi (倉橋由美子)Translator: Atsuko SakakiPublisher: M. E. SharpePublication Year: 1997Pages: 159 Yumiko Kurahashi was a member of the generation of female writers whose work began a…
So We Look to the Sky
Japanese Title: ふがいない僕は空を見た (Fugainai boku wa sora o mita)Author: Misumi Kubo (窪 美澄)Translator: Polly BartonPublication Year: 2010 (Japan); 2021 (United States)Press: Arcade PublishingPages: 267 So…
Lonely Castle in the Mirror
Japanese Title: かがみの孤城 (Kagami no kojō)Author: Mizuki Tsujimura (辻村 深月)Translator: Philip GabrielPublication Year: 2017 (Japan); 2021 (United Kingdom)Press: DoubledayPages: 355 Thirteen-year-old Ko…
The Woman in the Purple Skirt
Japanese Title: むらさきのスカートの女 (Murasaki no sukāto no onna)Author: Natsuko Imamura (今村 夏子)Translator: Lucy NorthPublication Year: 2019 (Japan); 2021 (United States)Publisher: Penguin BooksPages: 216 T…
Colorful
Japanese Title: カラフル (Karafuru)Author: Eto Mori (森絵都)Translator: Jocelyne AllenPublication Year: 1998 (Japan); 2021 (United States)Publisher: CounterpointPages: 224 A fourteen-year-old boy named Ma…