Translator: Takemori, Ginny Tapley
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The Isle of South Kamui and other stories
A young Tokyoite doctor accepts a post on a remote island south of Okinawa. When a highly contagious fatal disease breaks out, he has to choose between saving himself or saving others. A hormone-ridden teenage youth left alone with his young stepmother following his fathers death is consumed with jealousy as her affections turn to…
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From the Fatherland, With Love
From the Fatherland, with Love is set in an alternative, dystopian present in which the dollar has collapsed and Japan’s economy has fallen along with it. The North Korean government, sensing an opportunity, sends a fleet of rebels in the first land invasion that Japan has ever faced. Japan can’t cope with the surprise onslaught…
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Things Remembered and Things Forgotten
The ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are – by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and…
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The Little House
The Little House is set in the early years of the Showa era (1926-89), when Japan’s situation is becoming increasingly tense but has not yet fully immersed in a wartime footing. On the outskirts of Tokyo, near a station on a private train line, stands a modest European style house with a red, triangular shaped…
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She and Her Cat
A collection of four interrelated, stream-of-consciousness short stories follows women and their cat companions as they explore the frailty of life, the pain of isolation, and the limits of communication.
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Life Ceremony
In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the…
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Earthlings
As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. Each summer, Natsuki counts down the days…
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Convenience Store Woman
Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated…
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The Cake Tree in the Ruins
“I am still unable to leave the burnt-out ruins.” Akiyuki Nosaka, 2014. In 1945, Akiyuki Nosaka watched the Allied firebombing of Kobe kill his adoptive parents, and then witnessed his sister starving to death. The shocking and blisteringly memorable stories of The Cake Tree in the Ruins are based on his own experiences as a…
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The secret of the blue glass
In a dusty library, in the quietest corner of a house in a Tokyo suburb, live the Little People: Fern and Balbo, Robin and Iris. Just a few inches high, sleeping in cigarette boxes and crafting shoes from old book jackets, they need only one thing from their Humans, a nightly glass of milk, served…