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The Tatami Galaxy
The Tatami Galaxy is a magical realist comedy set in Kyoto in the early 2000s. The author, Tomihiko Morimi, is famous for his over-the-top characters and offbeat urban…
Yokohama Station SF
Two hundred years after the end of a devastating global conflict, Yokohama Station has expanded to cover almost all of Honshu, Japan’s central island. Once governed by artificial…
Strange Buildings
Strange Buildings, the 2023 follow-up to Uketsu’s smash hit Strange Houses, collects eleven illustrated stories about horror-themed architectural riddles followed by a lengthy exposition that reveals how these…
ブラフマンの埋葬
Yōko Ogawa’s 2004 novel Burafuman no maisō (Brahman’s Funeral) is a story about the lonely caretaker of an isolated artist’s retreat who adopts a forest creature of indeterminate…
Tokyo Ueno Station
Yū Miri’s 2014 novel Tokyo Ueno Station is a compelling portrait of one man’s life and a pointed critique of the inequalities that support the supposed national prosperity…
Bone Ash
Tow Ubukata’s 2022 horror novel Bone Ash is a story about cursed architecture. The twist is that the architecture in question is the skyscraper outside Shibuya Station that…
About a Place in the Kinki Region
About a Place in the Kinki Region, originally published in 2023, is a horror novel assembled from roughly two dozen short stories presented in various formats, from magazine…
The Blanket Cats
Kiyoshi Shigematsu’s The Blanket Cats collects seven stories about the clients of a service that rents cats for a period of three days. What I appreciate about these…
Strange Map
Strange Map (変な地図), published in October 2025, is the fourth book written by Uketsu, the bestselling author of Strange Pictures and Strange Houses. Unlike Uketsu’s previous books, which…
Tokyo Apartment
Atsuhiro Yoshida’s 2025 short fiction collection #Tokyo Apartment brings together 21 stand-alone stories about people living in and around Tokyo. The characters are usually living on their own,…
北国ゆらゆら紀行
Ryōko Nagara’s Kitaguni yura-yura kikō (北国ゆらゆら紀行) is an episodic travelogue manga that follows a young woman named Tsukiko who left her job and her husband to return to…
或るバイトを募集しています
Aru baito o boshū shite imasu (或るバイトを募集しています) is a collection of eight short horror stories conveyed in the form of documentary-style found footage. Each story is prefaced by…
ツミデミック
Michi Ichiho’s Tsumidemic (ツミデミック), which won the prestigious Naoki Prize for popular fiction in 2024, collects six stories about the atmospheric strangeness of the Coronavirus pandemic. While ever…
Hunchback
Saou Ichikawa’s 2023 novella Hunchback is a striking work of fiction and a major contribution to the literature of disability. Ichikawa’s brutally honest depiction of her disabled protagonist’s…
May You Have Delicious Meals
Junko Takase’s 2022 novella May You Have Delicious Meals is a small human drama about workplace bullying. It’s also a critique of Japanese corporate culture that simultaneously pokes…
Under the Eye of the Big Bird
Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a book about the quiet end of the world. Despite its postapocalyptic setting, the story is gentle. The…
Okareta basho de abaretai
Emuko Asai began posting essays online in 2021. She never considered herself to be a writer, she says, but the enthusiastic support she received from thousands of readers…
Higashi Tokyo Machi Machi
Keita Katsushika’s manga Higashi Tōkyō Machi Machi (東東京区区) is a leisurely walking tour of East Tokyo. As suggested by their pen name, the artist lives in Tokyo’s Katsushika…
A Hundred Years and a Day
In October 2024, Matt Alt published an article in Aeon titled “The Joy of Clutter.” Instead of decrying the unsightliness of visual complexity, Alt argues that clutter has…
Mimi ni sumu mono
Yoko Ogawa’s 2024 short story collection Mimi ni sumu mono (耳に棲むもの) is about quiet endings and the unremarked deaths of small things. The tone of these five stories…
Kanda Gokurachō Shokunin Banashi
The first volume of Akihito Sakaue’s manga Kanda Gokurachō Shokunin Banashi, which won the Tezuka Osamu New Creator Prize in 2024, collects five stand-alone short stories about the…
Strange Pictures
Strange Pictures is a compulsively readable horror mystery novel first published in 2022 by Uketsu, a mysterious masked YouTuber. This book is addictive, so much so that I…
First Love
Rio Shimamoto’s 2018 novel First Love is a psychological mystery about a beautiful college student who has been arrested for the murder of her adoptive father. Although it…
Kamimachi
Machiko Kyō’s Kamimachi (“Waiting for God”) was serialized from June 2019 to December 2022 and published as a two-volume graphic novel in August 2023. The story follows four…
星屑家族
Hoshikuzu Kazoku is a two-volume graphic novel set in an alternate universe where parents are required to obtain a license to raise children. To qualify for a license,…
Mornings With My Cat Mii
Cats are adorable creatures, it’s true. It’s also true that they’re a little magical. Unfortunately, the experience of caring for a cat isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, and…
とんこつ Q&A
とんこつ Q&A collects four stories by Natsuko Imamura, the author of The Woman in the Purple Skirt. Each of these stories is built on a cute and wholesome…
５２ヘルツのクジラたち
５２ヘルツのクジラたち is a bestselling novel by Sonoko Machida that won the 2021 Japan Booksellers’ Award Grand Prize. In March 2024, the story was adapted into a feature film…
Belles Ruelles
Belles Ruelles is a gorgeous full-color anthology that collects the work of eleven manga artists and illustrators, each of whom has been tasked with telling a story set…
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami returns to an earlier era of his writing. Although ostensibly set in the present, there’s a timeless quality to…
Nails and Eyes
Kaori Fujino’s Nails and Eyes collects three short stories whose crystal-clear prose is darkened by the shadow of creeping psychological horror. The theme of family lies at the…
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…