**“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...

Why Japan? In Fifty Sounds, winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, Polly Barton attempts to exhaust her obsession with the country she moved to at the age of 21, before eventually becoming a literary translator. From min-min, the sound of air screaming, to jin-jin, the sound of being touched for the very first time, from hi'sori, the sound of harbouring masochist tendencies, to mote-mote, the sound of becoming a small-town movie star, Fifty Sounds is a pers...

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...

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...

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...

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, a sharp, photo-realistic novella of memory and thwarted hope 'He'd come to realise that it was a mistake to grind up his father's remains with such a thing. The mortar was lined with narrow grooves, a little too perfect for ashes to get stuck in.' 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 ...

What does it mean to lose yourself – and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention. On her morning commute, in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing, she encounters a nice-eyed stranger who returns her forgotten umbrella and finds herself catapulted into a dizzying, year-long whirlwind of obsession – not just with this endlessly attractive spectre, bu...

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...

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...

A love story that feels both new and achingly true, capturing the intensity, uncertainties and intimacy of falling for someone.Art student Isogai first models for one of his tutors, the much older Yuri, then begins a passionate affair with her. As he gets to know her better, he struggles to understand his own emotions and his place in the world, just as he yearns to be closer to her and for her to share more of herself with him.Don't Laugh at Other Peop...

THE MILLION COPY #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF BUTTER IS BACK WITH A NEW NOVEL OF OBSESSION‘Tender and thrilling it’s Yuzuki at her best’ ELLE‘Deliciously satisfying’ iPAPER‘Enjoyable and addictive’ INDEPENDENT‘Fantastically dark’ ERIN KELLYEriko really wouldn't mind being savaged, if it was her best friend doing the savaging …