japanese literature in english

All Books

1Q84


An ode to George Orwell’s “1984” told in alternating male and female voices relates the stories of Aomame, an assassin for a secret organization who discovers that she has been transported to an alternate reality, and Tengo, a mathematics lecturer and novice writer.


A wild sheep chase



After dark


Two sisters, Eri, a fashion model sleeping her way to oblivion, and Mari, a young student, form the center of a novel that documents a series of encounters, with a jazz trombonist, the manager of a “love hotel” and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute brutalized by a businessman …


After the quake : stories


A collection of stories inspired by the January 1995 Kobe earthquake and the poison gas subway attacks two months later takes place between the two disasters and follows the experiences of people who found their normal lives undone by surreal events.


Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage


“The new novel–a book that sold more than a million copies the first week it went on sale in Japan–from the internationally acclaimed author, his first since 1Q84”– Here he gives us the remarkable story of Tsukuru Tazaki, a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares …


Dance dance dance : a novel


He burst upon the international scene with the wildly acclaimed A Wild Sheep Chase. He quickly came to represent the quirky voice of a new generation of Japanese writers. Now Haruki Murakami gives us his wittiest, boldest, most daring work to date. Dance dance dance continues the extraordinary adventure of …


Kafka on the shore


This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal …


Norwegian wood


This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event. Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college …


South of the border, west of the sun


A Japanese novel on a married businessman who has an affair with the girl of his youth. Hajime’s relationship with Shimamoto had always been chaste, now they both make up for it–25 years later. By the author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.


The sputnik sweetheart : a novel


A male college student falls in love with a woman who, over the years, guides him in her travels, and then disappears without trace. Assisting in the search, he goes home to Japan, where he finally achieves a true understanding of his beloved.


The wind-up bird chronicle


While searching for his missing wife, Japanese lawyer Toru Okada has strange experiences and meets strange characters. A woman wants phone sex, a man describes wartime torture, he finds himself at the bottom of a well. Part detective story, part philosophical meditation.


Underground


Covers the 1995 Tokyo Gas Attack, during which agents of a Japanese cult released a gas deadlier than cyanide into the subway system, as documented in interviews with its survivors, perpetrators, and victim family members. In March 1995, agents of a Japanese religious cult attacked the Tokyo subway system with …


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