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...

From the bestselling cult author, Osamu Dazai, a familiar theme with an unfamiliar twist: a lover’s suicide pact—but this time the woman livesSachiyo Takano, a charismatic young woman, travels from the countryside to a bustling prewar Tokyo, where she meets an irresistible stranger. They spend the night together, but things go sideways and never quite straightens out. Sachiyo wakes up in a hotel room, having survived a drug overdose, while her lover, whom she learn...

**THE MILLION-COPY JAPANESE BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE JAPAN BOOKSELLERS' AWARDMADE INTO AN AWARD-NOMINATED FILM"[This] beautiful bear hug of a book both broke my heart and restored my faith in humanity. A masterpiece." —Colleen Oakley, USA Today bestselling author of Jane & Dan at the End of the World"A love letter to those who've always felt out of step with the world." —Mikki Brammer, bestselling author of The Collected Regrets of Clover

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 ...

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...

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...

On a planet where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia -- until a boy escapes and a young woman's perception of the world is violently interupted. Two old friends enjoy cocktails on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems. A bickering couple emigrate to a world that has worked out an innovative way to side-step the need for war, only to bring their quarrels (and something far more destructive) with them.And in t...

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 ...

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.Izumi 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 he...

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...

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...