You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
THE EMOTIONAL MILLION-COPY JAPANESE BESTSELLER ____________ Readers love this book: 'Every word resonated in my heart' ***** Reader review' 'Perfect for anyone who loves to think deeply about what they have just read' ***** Reader review 'Makes you ponder about death and about life' ***** Reader review Brimming with suspense and heartbreak, the million-copy Japanese fantasy mystery for fans of BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD and LONELY CASTLE IN THE MIRROR ______________ Is there anyone you wish to see? So asks the smart young man, Ayumi, to his clients who have come to him for a reunion with the person who once changed their life. But it is no ordinary reunion The people they ask to see have pa...
A poignant Japanese tale about the importance of human connection during moments of adversity The Chronicles of Narnia meets The Breakfast Club with a signature Japanese flair: a sympathetic, insightful look at the causes of teen angst and depression in modern-day Japan, this novel was a #1 Japanese bestseller and winner of the influential Japan booksellers' award. How will you help your friend if she doesn't want to be saved?
On a snowy school day like any other, classmates and childhood friends Hiroshi and Mizuki arrive at school to find the campus eerily empty. Before long, they find themselves trapped inside with six other friends, and even stranger, all the clocks have stopped at a very specific moment–the exact time when a former classmate jumped off the school roof to their death three months earlier. It turns out that this departed friend is their way out of their current predicament and may even be among their group…but no one can remember who it was that took their life on that sad day. The students must face themselves and their past memories to piece together the identity of this suicide victim or risk a similar fate–with their lives lost and forgotten inside these frigid school walls.
For fans of BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD, fairy tale and magic are weaved together in sparse language that belies a flooring emotional punch. 'Strange and beautiful. Imagine the offspring of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle with The Virgin Suicides' GUARDIAN 'Genuinely affecting. A story of empathy, collaboration and sharing truths' FINANCIAL TIMES Translated by Philip Gabriel, a translator of Murakami _______________________________ Would you share your deepest secrets to save a friend? 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 lonely lives to a wondrous castle filled with winding stairways, w...
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 the title story, Suzuki offers readers a tragic and warped mirroring of her own final days as the tyranny of enforced screen-time and the mechanistion of labour bring about a shattering psychic collapse. 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 playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.
"I lived in a haunted apartment." Zack Davisson opens this definitive work on Japan's ghosts, or yurei, with a personal tale about the spirit world. Eerie red marks on the apartment's ceiling kept Zack and his wife on edge. The landlord warned them not to open a door in the apartment that led to nowhere. "Our Japanese visitors had no problem putting a name to it . . . they would sense the vibes of the place, look around a bit and inevitably say 'Ahhh . . . yurei ga deteru.' There is a yurei here." Combining his lifelong interest in Japanese tradition and his personal experiences with these vengeful spirits, Davisson launches an investigation into the origin, popularization, and continued exi...
Known for his biting wit and rapid-fire brain cells, Yukito Ayatsuji is a detective and top-ranked skill user who possesses the ability to expose any crime. When a request to investigate a puzzling murder incident hits his desk, Ayatsuji must team up with Mizuki Tsujimura, a spunky agent sent from the Special Division, to tackle the case. Can the unlikely duo get to the bottom of this mystery?!
'If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination ... imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes'. So wrote the award winning Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima of her story, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, a piece that illuminates, as if by throwing a switch, the layers of wartime devastation that lie just below the surface of Tokyo's insistently modern culture. The ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are - by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past.