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...

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, ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

**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...

In this intoxicating stream-of-consciousness novel, Mieko Kanai tackles the existential traps of motherhood, marriage, and domestic captivityThe apparently unremarkable Natsumi lives in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes to the supermarket, visits friends, and gossips with neighbors. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own infernally buzzing internal...

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, a masterful novel about loss and memory in the aftermath of a horrifying ecological disasterIn the summer of 2020, as Europe is beginning to open back up after the first phase of the pandemic, a young Japanese woman based in the German city of Göttingen is working on a PhD about the iconography of medieval saints. She waits at the train station to meet her old friend from graduate school, Nomiya, who died nine years earlier in the 201...

Tales from Japan that blend humor, surrealism, and sharp societal critique, by the acclaimed author of Where the Wild Ladies Are“Piercing and sometimes surreal... Matsuda shines.”—Publishers WeeklyIn The Woman Dies, renowned author Aoko Matsuda approaches often-thorny subjects such as sexism, prejudice, the normalizing effect of violence against women on screen, or the aesthetics associated with technolog...

**“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...