* statistically, based on millions of data-points provided by fellow humans
Yasuko lives a quiet life, working in a Tokyo bento shop, a good mother to her only child. But when her ex-husband appears at her door without warning one day, her comfortable world is shattered. ... (Goodreads)
Acclaimed bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found brutally murdered in his home on the night before he's planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver. His body is found in his office, a ... (Goodreads)
When a man is found murdered in an abandoned building in Osaka in 1973, unflappable detective Sasagaki is assigned to the case. He begins to piece together the connection of two young people who are ... (Goodreads)
The events of 1Q84 take place in Tokyo during a fictionalized year of 1984, with the first volume set between April and June, the second between July and September, and the third between October and ... (Wikipedia)
Tsukiko is drinking alone in her local sake bar when by chance she meets one of her old high school teachers and, unable to remember his name, she falls back into her old habit of calling him ... (Goodreads)
The narrator's housekeeping agency dispatches her to the house of the Professor, a former mathematician who can remember new memories for only 80 minutes. She is more than a little frustrated to find ... (Wikipedia)
Sinister forces draw together a cast of desperate characters in this eerie and absorbing novel from Yoko Ogawa. An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has ... (Goodreads)
From Mikage's love of kitchens to her job as a culinary teacher's assistant to the multiple scenes in which food is merely present, Kitchen is a short window into the life of a young Japanese woman ... (Wikipedia)
Comprising two distinct but interrelated plots, the narrative runs back and forth between both plots, taking up each plotline in alternating chapters. The odd-numbered chapters tell the 15-year-old ... (Wikipedia)
This quasi-detective tale follows an unnamed, chain-smoking narrator and his adventures in Tokyo and Hokkaido in 1978. The story begins when the recently divorced protagonist, an advertisement ... (Wikipedia)
The novel tells the tales of four women, working the graveyard shift at a Japanese bento factory. All four women live hard lives. Masako, the leader of the four women, feels completely alienated from ... (Wikipedia)
MGB officer Leo is a man who never questions the Party Line. He arrests whomever he is told to arrest. He dismisses the horrific death of a young boy because he is told to, because he believes the ... (Goodreads)
The young Portuguese Jesuit priest Sebastião Rodrigues (based on the historical Italian figure Giuseppe Chiara ) travels to Japan to assist the local Church and investigate reports that his mentor, a ... (Wikipedia)
The book is written in the first person for all parts and follows a woman whose sister and old school friend have been murdered. The narrator of Grotesque is unnamed and forever lives under the ... (Wikipedia)
Keiko Furukura is a 36-year old woman who has been working part-time at a convenience store , or konbini , for the last 18 years. She has known since childhood that she is "different" and that ... (Wikipedia)
A startlingly original voice makes her literary debut with this wondrous coming-of-age story infused with Chinese folklore, romantic intrigue, adventure, and fascinating, dreamlike twists. 'One ... (Goodreads)
Librarian's note: There is an Alternate Cover Edition for this edition of this book, here,. Three young doctors-their hopes, their dreams, their unexpected desires... Dr. Paige Taylor: She swore it ... (Goodreads)
After World War II, a small aristocratic family in Japan has lost all of their money. The family consists of three people: Kazuko, her brother Naoji, and their mother. Naoji is a soldier in the South ... (Wikipedia)
Banana Yoshimoto has a magical ability to animate the lives of her young characters, and here she spins the stories of three women, all bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning a lost lover, ... (Goodreads)
The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon away from life as a San Francisco web-design drone and into the aisles of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, but after a few days on the job, Clay ... (Goodreads)
Junior high school teacher Yuko Moriguchi ( Takako Matsu ) announces to her rowdy, disrespectful class that she will resign before spring break. She explains that because the HIV -positive father of ... (Wikipedia)
An enchanting seventeenth-century epic of grand passion and adventure, this debut novel tells the captivating story of one of India's most legendary and controversial empresses – a woman whose ... (Goodreads)
Yakov Liebermann is a Nazi hunter (loosely based on Simon Wiesenthal ) who runs a center in Vienna that documents crimes against humanity, perpetrated during the Holocaust . The waning interest of ... (Wikipedia)
In 1969, while working in a dead letter office in Nebraska , disgruntled postal clerk Randolph Jaffe discovers hints to a mysterious society known as The Shoal, which ostensibly practises a form of ... (Wikipedia)
Marie Brennan begins a thrilling new fantasy series in, A Natural History of Dragons, combining adventure with the inquisitive spirit of the Victorian Age. You, dear reader, continue at your own ... (Barnes & Noble)
Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy , a novel written by a ... (Goodreads)
Sonny Lofthus is serving time for crimes he did not commit. As payment, he receives a steady supply of drugs to satisfy his addiction. His life changes completely when he learns the truth about his ... (Wikipedia)
In the buildup to World War II, Ono, a promising artist, breaks away from the teaching of his master, whose artistic aim was to reach an aesthetic ideal in representations of the 'floating world' of ... (Wikipedia)
Sarah Nickerson is like any other career-driven supermom in Welmont, the affluent Boston suburb where she leads a hectic but charmed life with her husband Bob, faithful nanny, and three children - ... (Goodreads)
Moments after Lisbeth is born, she’s taken from her mother and handed over to an enslaved wet nurse, Mattie, a young mother separated from her own infant son in order to care for her tiny charge. ... (Goodreads)