**“Tender and prickly and consistently confounds expectation . . . the novel is deft and light as air. But it carries a streak of something stronger and sharper than melancholy, tracing a relationship that is at once moving and deeply fraught.” —from the foreword by Katie Kitamura, author of AuditionA love story that feels both new and achingly true from one of Japan’s most acclaimed writers, capturing the intensity, uncertainties, and intimacy of falling for someone for t...

A Paperback OriginalNamed a Most Anticipated Book by The New York Times, The Guardian, Forbes, Oprah Daily, Lit Hub, and Publishers WeeklyFrom the author of the international bestseller Butter comes a chilling and perceptive novel about obsession, female friendship, and the slow unraveling of two livesEriko’s life looks perfect—from her prestigious job at a Japan...

How do we talk about porn? Why it is that when we do talk about porn, we tend to retreat into the abstract? How do we have meaningful conversations about it with those closest to us? In Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton interrogates the absence of discussion around a topic that is ubiquitous and influences our daily lives. In her search for understanding, she spent a year initiating intimate conversations with nineteen acquaintances of a range of ages, genders and sexualities ab...

**FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOKFINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTIONLONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE, THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION, AND THE PRIX MÉDICIS ÉTRANGER****A bombshell bestseller in Japan, a defiant, darkly funny debut novel about a young woman in a care home seeking autonomy and the full possibiliti...

The cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer, and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true storyThere are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarineGourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in the Tokyo Detention House convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, whom she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination, ...

In this "delightfully uncanny" collection of feminist retellings of traditional Japanese folktales, humans live side by side with spirits who provide a variety of useful services—from truth-telling to babysitting, from protecting castles to fighting crime (The New York Times Book Review)A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious ba...

Hell of Solitude presents a varied and eclectic selection of writings by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, one of the most important and beloved Japanese writers of the twentieth century. Bringing together fiction, poetry, and philosophical prose – much of it appearing in English for the first time here – this collection showcases the range and intensity of Akutagawa's imagination. Moving from the whimsical and fantastical to the grave and introspective, the pieces reveal a writer of extraordi...

For anyone who has ever yearned to master a new language, Fifty Sounds is a visionary personal account and an indispensable resource for learning to think beyond your mother tongue.“The language learning I want to talk about is sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover,” writes Polly Barton in her eloquent treatise on this profoundly humbling and gratifying act. Shortly before graduating with a degree in philosophy from th...

**Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Thrillist, The Millions, Frieze, and Metropolis JapanThe first English language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon**At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly p...

A new selection of six short stories by one of Japan's most iconic twentieth-century writersAn adolescent girl narrates her day in an existential masterpiece that explores what it means to be a forming person in a fomenting society. A woman writes a farewell note to her husband, an artist who has driven her away with his counterfeit profundity and naked ambition. A plain young woman steals a bathing suit for a handsome friend, only to find herself ostracised by her...

A shocking collection of absurdist, strangely moving, and uncanny short stories, gleefully taking familiar tropes to horrifying conclusions—a revelationA cat who looks like Orson Welles and is the grim reaper. A murder in a secret society of chivalric knights in a high school. An utterly disturbing tale involving rabbits and fathers. These short stories by Mieko Kanai, first published in Japan in the 1970s, are teeming with transgressive sexuality, nightmares, knot...

Winner of the Akutagawa PrizeA sharp, photo-realistic novella of memory and thwarted hope set in modern-day Tokyo—an “unflinching . . . powerful” showcase of the best in contemporary Japanese literature (Shelf Awareness)Divorced and cut off from his family, Taro lives alone in one of the few occupied apartments in his block, a block that is to be torn down as soon as the remaining tenants leave. Since the death of his father, Taro ...