How can you save your friend’s life if she doesn’t want to be rescued? In a tranquil neighbourhood of Tokyo, seven teenagers wake to find their bedroom mirrors are shining. At a single touch, they are pulled from their...

A beloved Japanese modern classic about our special connection with cats, and how they can change our lives over the course of a lifetime. For the last twenty years, Japanese readers have been falling in love with Mayumi Inaba’s...

Tokyo, 1947. The Pink Labyrinth is one of the bomb-scarred city’s most shady neighbourhoods. There, in the dead of night a patrolling policeman catches a young Buddhist monk digging in the back yard of The Black Cat Cafe, a...

Jane Takagi-Little, by trade a documentary filmmaker, by nature a truth seeker, is “racially half, ” Japanese and American, and, as she tells us, “neither here nor there…” Jane is sharp-edged, desperate for a job, and determined not to...

A young man finds himself in ragingly cosmopolitan Tokyo, haunted by memories of the past, facing an uncertain future. When a typical twenty-something year old English teacher in Japan develops severe physical and psychological aversions to his daily routine...

In occupied Tokyo a man arrives at a bank talking of a dysentery outbreak, which he has been sent to treat. He administers a potion, and they fall dead. He robs the bank and disappears. Nothing has ever happened...

These six stories are all inspired by Tokyo, a magical place that writer Wendy Nelson Tokunaga has observed both first-hand and from afar. A Tokyo teenager obsessed with becoming an idol singer despite her mother’s trepidations. An American bar...

One of Soseki’s most beloved works of fiction, the novel depicts the 23-year-old Sanshiro leaving the sleepy countryside for the first time in his life to experience the constantly moving ‘real world’ of Tokyo, its women and university. In...

On the outskirts of Tokyo, in a neighbourhood crossed by a commuter railway, local cats weave their way through the lives and homes of their owners as they navigate difficult times. A cat named Chobi sends silent messages of...

From the International Booker Prize-Shortlisted author of Heaven and Breasts and Eggs. Hana has nothing but she’s hopeful. She’s fifteen years old. She lives in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Tokyo with her young mother, a hostess...