A fierce mixed-race fighter develops a powerful attachment to the yakuza princess she’s been forced to protect in this explosive queer thriller: Kill Bill meets The Handmaiden meets Thelma and Louise.Tokyo, 1979. Yoriko Shindo, a workhorse of a woman who has been an outcast her whole life, is kidnapped and dragged to the lair of the Naiki-kai, a branch of the yakuza. After she savagely fends off a throng of henchmen in an attempt to escap...

A bestseller in Japan, a remarkable reflection on making art, living life, and accepting death, from the legendary Ryuichi Sakamoto, the world-renowned musical genius and godfather of electronic music.One of Japan's most influential artists and composers, Ryuichi Sakamoto was a man of multitudes. Perhaps best known as the Oscar-winning composer of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor and a founder of the groundbreaking electronic music group Yellow Magic...

What transforms a person into a killer? Can it be something as small as a suggestion?Turn this page, and you may forfeit your entire life.With My Annihilation, Fuminori Nakamura, master of literary noir, has constructed a puzzle box of a narrative in the form of a confessional diary that implicates its reader in a heinous crime.Delving relentlessly into the darkest corners of human consciousness, My Annihilation interrogat...

For the first time in English, Osamu Dazai’s hilariously comic and deeply moving prequel to No Longer HumanThe Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba—the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age—is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries...

**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...

For fans of No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai’s darkly bewitching novel about the small redemptions of being a pathetic, miserable writer.A fictional writer in his thirties named Osamu Dazai has just mailed his publisher an awful manuscript, filling him with dread and shame. Wandering along a river in a nearby park in suburban Tokyo, he meets a high-school dropout and the two get into an intellectual spat. Eventually, Dazai finds himself agreeing to perform in ...

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal BoredomIzumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds her...

The aftermath of the murder of a bondage teacher reveals the darkest corners of the human mind in this chilling new mystery from the master of Japanese literary noir.Two detectives. Two identical women. One dead body— then two, then three, then four. All knotted up in Japan’s underground BDSM scene and kinbaku, a form of rope bondage which bears a complex cultural history of spirituality, torture, cleansing, and sacrifice.As Togashi, a junior member of the ...

**THE MILLION-COPY JAPANESE BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE JAPAN BOOKSELLERS' AWARDMADE INTO AN AWARD-NOMINATED FILM"A love letter to those who've always felt out of step with the world." —Mikki Brammer, bestselling author of The Collected Regrets of CloverFrom the internationally bestselling author of The Convenience Store By the Sea, a deeply moving story about the unexpected bond between a woman who has fled her Tokyo life for a seaside village a...

For the first time in English, a glittering novella about stardom from “one of the greatest avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth century” (Judith Thurman, The New Yorker)Winner of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese LiteratureAll eyes are on Rikio. And he likes it, mostly. His fans cheer, screaming and yelling to attract his attention—they would kill for a moment alone with him. Final...

From the bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs and international literary sensation Mieko Kawakami comes a sharp and illuminating novel about the impact of violence and the power of solidarity in our contemporary societies.Hailed as a bold foray into new literary territory, Kawakami’s novel is told in the voice of a fourteen-year-old student subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy chooses to suffer in complete ...

The story of three women by a writer hailed by Haruki Murakami as Japan’s most important contemporary novelist.Challenging every preconception about storytelling and prose style, mixing wry humor and riveting emotional depth, Kawakami is today one of Japan’s most important and bestselling writers. She exploded onto the cultural scene first as a musician, then as a poet and popular blogger, and is now an award-winning novelist.Breasts & Eggs paints ...