-
Ms Ice Sandwich
49,000 TNDA young boy returns obsessively to a supermarket sandwich counter, entranced by the beauty of the woman who works there. Her aloof demeanour and electric blue eyelids make him feel the most intense joy he’s ever known. He calls her Ms Ice Sandwich, and he wants nothing more than to spend his days watching her coolly slip sandwiches into bags.
But life keeps getting in the way – there’s his beloved grandmother’s illness, and a faltering friendship with his classmate Tutti, who she invites him into her private world. Wry, intimate and wonderfully skewed, Ms Ice Sandwich is a poignant depiction of the naivety and wisdom of youth, just as it is passing.
-
No Longer Human
59,000 TNDMine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings.
His attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a “clown” to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness. Still one of the ten bestselling books in Japan, No Longer Human is an important and unforgettable modern classic: “The struggle of the individual to fit into a normalizing society remains just as relevant today as it was at the time of writing.” (The Japan Times)
-
No One Knows
59,000 TNDNo one really understands how we suffer. One day, when we’re adults, we may come to recall this suffering, this misery, as silly and laughable, but how are we to get through the long, hateful period until then? No one bothers to teach us that. Osamu Dazai was a master raconteur who plumbed—in an addictive, easy style—the absurd complexities of life in a society whose expectations cannot be met without sacrificing one’s individual ideals on the altar of conformity.
The gravitational pull of his prose is on full display in these stories. In “Lantern,” a young woman, in love with a well-born but impoverished student, shoplifts a bathing suit for him—and ends up in the local newspaper indicted as a crazed, degenerate communist. In “Chiyojo,” a high-school girl shows early promise as a writer, but as her uncle and mother relentlessly push her to pursue a literary career, she must ask herself: is this what I really want? Or am I supposed to fulfill their own frustrated ambitions? In “Shame,” a young reader writes a fan letter to a writer she admires, only to find out, upon visiting him, that he’s a bourgeoise sophisticate nothing like the desperate rebels he portrays, and decides (in true Dazai style): “Novelists are human trash.
No, they’re worse than that; they’re demons. . .
They write nothing but lies.”This collection of 14 tales—a half-dozen of which have never before appeared in English—is based on a Japanese collection of, as Dazai described them, “soliloquies by female narrators.” No One Knows includes the quietly brilliant long story “Schoolgirl” and shows the fiction of this 20th-century genius in a fresh light.
-
Norwegian Wood
59,000 TNDThe haunting, enigmatic love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar in Japan, and is his bestselling title throughout the worldAutumn 1969, and soon I would be 20. When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
‘Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami’s writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility’ Guardian’Poignant, romantic and hopeless, it beautifully encapsulates the heartbreak and loss of faith’ Sunday Times’A masterly novel’ New York Times
-
One Hundred Flowers
59,000 TND‘A tender meditation on memory, familial bonds, and the evanescence of every day moments … a profoundly affecting read’ – Storizen Magazine’A believable slice-of-life window into human nature that resonates on multiple levels’ – The Japan TimesFROM THE AUTHOR OF THE JAPANESE BESTSELLER IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD WHICH HAS SOLD OVER TWO MILLION COPIESThe fragrance of a single stem in a vase. The shimmering reflection of fireworks in a lake.
The quiet of a bookshop as evening falls. The feeling of opening a brand-new diary and beginning to write … Moments of beauty endure.
But what happens when you begin to forget?Yuriko leads a quiet, orderly life as a piano teacher. It’s New Year’s Eve and her grown-up son Izumi comes to visit. Yuriko makes him his favourite meal: omelette and hayashi rice.
Together, they look like a normal family. But Yuriko has a secret. Many years earlier, when Izumi was a boy, Yuriko suddenly disappeared for an entire year.
She returned, but the lost year was never discussed. Now as Yuriko begins to lose her memory, Izumi is forced to race against time as he seeks the truth behind this long-buried mystery. Will he learn to understand the woman his mother once was, before it is too late? And is he ready to become a father himself?One Hundred Flowers is a story about the preciousness of every moment, the beauty and pain of family love, and the healing power of letting go.
-
Pachinko
59,000 TNDYeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja.
When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then Isak, a Christian minister, offers her a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife. Following a man she barely knows to a hostile country in which she has no friends, no home, and whose language she cannot speak, Sunja’s salvation is just the beginning of her story.
Through eight decades and four generations, Pachinko is an epic tale of family, identity, love, death and survival.
-
Please Look After Mother
69,000 TNDWINNER OF THE MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE’An authentic, moving story that brings to vivid life the deep family connections that lie at the core of Korean culture’Gary Shteyngart’Kyung-Sook Shin’s tale… has hit a nerve’Guardian’A raw tribute to the mysteries of motherhood’New York Times’The most moving and accomplished, and often startling, novel’Wall Street JournalWhen sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mother?Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOTHER is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.
With an introduction by Banana YoshimotoA W&N Essential
-
Rental Person Who Does Nothing : A Memoir
59,000 TNDThe true life adventures of Shoji Morimoto, who launched a business in which he rents himself out to do nothing in Japan. ‘Distinctively Japanese musings on meaning and connection’ – ObserverNeed a rental person who does nothing? Shoji Morimoto provides a fascinating service to the lonely and socially anxious. After an old boss told him that he contributed nothing and that it made no difference whether he showed up to work or not, he wondered if a person who ‘does nothing’ could still have a place in the world.
With a tweet, his Rental Person service was born. – Have a deep secret you desperately need to reveal, so deep that you can’t tell a friend or family member?- Have you spent a long time home alone, and want to know what it’s like to have somebody with you at your apartment?- Or for someone to simply think of you on a stressful day? Or wave to you as you leave the train station on a long journey?Morimoto is dependable, non-judgmental and committed to remaining a stranger throughout each request, and his encounters are revelatory about both Japanese society and human psychology. In Rental Person Who Does Nothing, Morimoto chronicles his extraordinary experiences in his unique line of work and reflects on how we consider relationships, jobs and family in our search for meaningful connection and purpose in life.
-
Return to the DallerGut Dream Department Store
69,000 TNDShe is now an official employee of the dream industry! She can finally take the express commuter train to the Company District, where all the dream production companies are located and discover how all raw dream materials and testing equipment are produced. But the Company District is not quite what she expected, it hides the darker underbelly of the magical industry that Penny thought she was a part of. Penny discovers the Civil Complaint Center, full of people filing complaints about their dreams.
She also learns about the regular customers who have stopped coming to the store. As she gets to the bottom of each complaint, she begins to expand her horizons, transforming from just selling dreams to understanding what lies in the hearts of their lost regulars. Return to the DallerGut Dream Department Store delves deeper into the dream industry and its customers.
Why do some of them buy a dream and never return? Will Penny and her colleagues be able to bring their regulars back?
-
Roadkill
79,000 TNDFrom a prize-winning new voice in Korean fiction, with roots in feminist SFF, these exhilarating stories will transport you to strange new worlds, celebrating young women striving for their independence and self-expression’Radically brilliant… made me want to spark trouble and overthrow the system’ JANE FLETT’Plenty to keep you up at night, I loved the eerie beauty of the worlds Amil creates’ NAOMI ISHIGURO’Thrilling and unsettling… I loved this’ MEGAN BRADBURYIn a near future where women are an endangered minority, two young friends try to break free from a facility designed for those few who can still give birth.
Every year in a secluded seaside village, a maiden is sacrificed to a divine sea serpent. Elsewhere, the last female shaman of an indigenous tribe tells her stories to a visiting research team. And in South Korea’s Alps Grand Park, the residents exist in an exclusive world dominated by giant air purifier towers as others are left to live in the shade.
The women in these stories find themselves trapped – by circumstance, society or tradition – as they fight for a means of escape. This sweeping and subversive collection celebrates their strength and their courage, their desire for independence and self-expression. Translated by Archana Madhavan
-
Sixty-Nine
69,000 TNDIn a small, inconsequential city in Japan, all that matters to 17-year-old Kensuke Yazaki and his friends is girls, rock music and, to a much lesser extent, school. Told at high speed and with irresistible humour by Kensuke himself, this is the story of their 1969, as they engage in heated conversations about Marxism, Rimbaud, Godard, the Beatles and the Stones, set up a barricade in their school, organise a rock festival and map out a highly successful strategy in girl-winning.
This is a young Japan entirely turned towards the West, pervaded by Western music, where the girls have nicknames pulled from famous British films, but still locked in a fight with the rigid post-war conservatism of the older generation. -
Snow Country
59,000 TNDA tale of wasted love, and beauty, by Japan’s literary masterShimamura is tired of the bustling city. He takes the train through the snow to the mountains of the west coast of Japan, to meet with a geisha he believes he loves. Beautiful and innocent, Komako is tightly bound by the rules of a rural geisha, and lives a life of servitude and seclusion that is alien to Shimamura.
Snow Country is both delicate and subtle, reflecting in Kawabata’s exact, lyrical writing the unspoken love and understated passion of the young Japanese couple.