Charlotte from Southwold shares some of her favourite books from the world of weird and wonderful Japanese fiction. Browse our staff picks and pick up a copy from your local library!
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations or explore more of the National Year of Reading campaign.
The Premonition
Banana Yoshimoto
It was the beginning of summer, and I was 19 years old. Yayoi lives with her perfect, loving family – something ‘like you’d see in a Spielberg movie’. But while her parents tell happy stories of her childhood, she is increasingly haunted by the sense that she’s forgotten something important about her past.
Deciding to take a break, she goes to stay with her mysterious but beloved aunt Yukino, whose strange behaviour includes waking Yayoi at two in the morning to be her drinking companion, watching Friday the 13th repeatedly and throwing away all the things she wants to forget.
Living a life without order, Yukino seems to be protecting herself, but beneath this facade Yayoi starts to recover lost memories, and everything she knows about her past threatens to change forever.
Convenience Store Woman
Sayaka Murata
Keiko has never really fitted in. At school and university people find her odd and her family worries she’ll never be normal. To appease them, Keiko takes a job at a newly opened convenience store.
Here, she finds peace and purpose in the simple, daily tasks and routine interactions. She is, she comes to understand, happiest as a convenience store worker.
But in Keiko’s social circle, it just won’t do for an unmarried woman to spend all her time stacking shelves and re-ordering green tea.
The Factory
Hiroko Oyamada
Within a sprawling industrial complex, three new employees are each assigned a department. There, each must focuses on a specific task: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds.
As they grow accustomed to the routine and co-workers, their lives become governed by their work – days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving.
With hints of Kafka and Beckett and unexpected moments of creeping humour, ‘The Factory’ is a vivid and surreal portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of the modern workplace.
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop
Satoshi Yagisawa
Hidden in Jinbocho, Tokyo is a booklover’s paradise. On a quiet corner in an old wooden building lies a shop filled with hundreds of second-hand books.
Twenty-five-year-old Takano has never liked reading, although the Morisaki bookshop has been in her family for three generations. It is the pride and joy of her uncle Ojisan, who has devoted his life to the bookshop since his wife Momoki left him five years earlier.
When Takano’s boyfriend reveals he’s marrying someone else, she reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle’s offer to live rent-free in the tiny room above the shop. Hoping to nurse her broken heart in peace, Takano is surprised to encounter new worlds within the stacks of books lining the Morisaki bookshop.
As summer fades to autumn, Ojisan and Takano discover they have more in common than they first thought.
The Nakano Thrift Shop
Hiromi Kawakami and Allison Markin Powell
Among the jumble of paperweights, plates, typewriters and general bric-a-brac in Mr Nakano’s thrift store, there are treasures to be found. Each piece carries its own story of love and loss – or so it seems to Hitomi, when she takes a job there.
And her fellow employees are just as curious as the items they sell. There’s the store’s owner, Mr Nakano, an enigmatic ladies’ man with several ex-wives; Sakiko, his sensuous, unreadable lover; his sister, Masayo, an artist whose free-spirited creations mask hidden sorrows.
And finally there’s Hitomi’s fellow employee, Takeo, whose abrupt and taciturn manner Hitomi finds, to her consternation, increasingly disarming.
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami
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.
Strangers
Taichi Yamada
Set in the great human maelstrom of Tokyo, this book is a thinking man’s ghost story.
Middle-aged, jaded and divorced, TV scriptwriter Harada returns one night to the dilapidated downtown district of Tokyo where he grew up. There, at the theatre, he meets a likable man who looks exactly like his long-dead father.
And so begins Harada’s ordeal, as he’s thrust into a reality where his parents appear to be alive at the exact age they had been when they had died so many years before.
May You Have Delicious Meals
Junko Takase
The power dynamics of the office are never more obvious than when it comes to food: mandatory lunches with the boss, the colleague who tries to curry favour with home-baked goods, discovering the discarded remnants of someone else’s late-night binge.
In their Saitama office, Ashikawa is the kind of woman Nitani knows he will likely marry: sweet, obliging, and determined to wean him off his addiction to instant noodles. But he finds himself increasingly unable to respect her – or the sugary treats she shares around the workplace, winning their colleagues’ affection with baking rather than hard work. Oshio is bolder and uninhibited – she is Nitani’s drinking buddy.
In the oppressive office atmosphere, the pair grows closer, both outsiders struggling with the rigid status quo.
Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks
Natsuko Imamura
Asa tries to give her classmate a biscuit.
Nami evades her classmates’ playground game of acorn-throwing.
Happy decides she’s not interested in doing anything other than lying down on her sofa.
Each of these three stories begins in a reasonable place, but – by the end – you’ll find yourself in another world altogether.
Ms Ice Sandwich
Mieko Kawakami and Hitomi Yoshio
A boy is obsessed with a woman who sells sandwiches. He goes to the supermarket almost every day, just so he can look at her face. She is beautiful to him, and he calls her ‘Ms Ice Sandwich’, and endlessly draws her portrait.
But the boy’s friend hears about this hesitant adoration, and suddenly everything changes. His visits to Ms Ice Sandwich stop, and with them the last hopes of his childhood.