When Ruth finds a piece of debris washed up on a beach on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest she discovers the diary of sixteen-year-old Nao, living in Tokyo, who decides that death is the only escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century.

Japan, 1939. On the Street of a Thousand Blossoms in Tokyo, two orphaned brothers are growing up with loving grandparents who inspire them to dream of a future firmly rooted in tradition. The older boy, Hiroshi, shows early signs of promise in sumo wrestling, while Kenji is fascinated by the art of creating exquisite masks for actors in the Noh theater. But as the ripples of war spread all the way to their quiet neighborhood, the brothers must put...

A freelance editor in Tokyo finds the strength to change her drab, lonely existence only to have episodes from her past drag her back into old habits, in the new novel from the best-selling author of Breasts and Eggs.

What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo's most enigmatic librarian. For Sayuri Komachi is able to sense exactly what each visitor to her library is searching for and provide just the book recommendation to help them find it. A restless retail assistant looks to gain new skills, a mother tries to overcome demotion at work after maternity leave, a conscientious accountant yearns to open an antique store, a recently retired salaryman searches for newfound...

In a suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls become suspicious of a neighbor's teenage son when his father is found brutally murdered and the young man disappears, unaware that all four of them will become caught up in the crime.

"Set in Tokyo over the course of one night, Aki and Hiro have decided to be together one last time in their shared flat before parting. Their relationship has broken down after a mountain trek during which their guide died inexplicably. Now each believes the other to be a murderer and is determined to extract a confession before the night is over. Who is the murderer and what really happened on the mountain?" -- Amazon.

"A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo....

The K Apartments for Ladies are occupied by over one hundred unmarried women, once young and lively, now grown and old?and in some cases, evil. Their residence conceals a secret connecting the unsolved 1951 kidnapping of four-year-old George Kraft to the clandestine burial of a child's body in the basement bath-house. So, when news comes that the building must be moved to make way for a road-building project, more than one tenant waits with apprehension...

The Guest Cat is a subtly moving novel that conveys deeply felt ways of being. Two writers, a young couple, enjoy their quiet cottage in a leafy part of Tokyo: they work at home as freelance editors. One day a cat invites herself into their small kitchen. She is a beautiful creature. she leaves, but comes again, and then again and again. New, small joys, radiated by the fleeting loveliness of life, accompany the cat; the days take on more light and...