From January to June: Ten 2025 Japanese Books You Can’t Miss!

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings – but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human.

— Google Books

Welcome to Tenderness!

A quaint seaside town in Kitakyushu, Mojiko is full of hidden delights. And one unexpected treasure is the 24/7 convenience store, Tenderness. Sure, it’s a bit odd that the incredibly handsome manager has his own fan club. And perhaps the customers are somewhat eccentric, if not entertaining. But there’s a warmth about the store that draws you in.

The truth is, Tenderness is different. Operating only in Kyushu, Tenderness stands firm and proud by its motto “Caring for People, Caring for You”, no matter the cause. And for Mitsuhiko, dishing out delicious food is simply the appetizer to his unsolicited but hearty wisdom on the town’s shenanigans.

— Google Books

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.

Driven to behave in increasingly absurd ways by the workplace rules that govern their lives, they must navigate the tensions of modern life: between leisure and hard work; indulgence and restraint; the promise of delicious food, and the reality of a lonely pot noodle.

— Penguin Books

Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka Isawa has severe spine curvature and uses an electric wheelchair and ventilator. Within the limits of her care home, her life is lived online: she studies, she tweets indignantly, she posts outrageous stories on an erotica website. One day, a new male carer reveals he has read it all – the sex, the provocation, the dirt. Her response? An indecent proposal…

Written by the first disabled author to win Japan’s most prestigious literary award and acclaimed instantly as one of the most important Japanese novels of the 21st century, Hunchback is an extraordinary, thrilling glimpse into the desire and darkness of a woman placed at humanity’s edge.

— Penguin Books

The fragrance of a single stem in a vase.
The shimmering reflection of fireworks in a lake.
The quiet of a bookshop as evening falls.
The feeling of opening a brand-new diary and beginning to write …

Moments of beauty endure. But what happens when you begin to forget?

Yuriko leads a quiet, orderly life as a piano teacher. It’s New Year’s Eve and her grown-up son Izumi comes to visit. Yuriko makes him his favourite meal: omelette and hayashi rice. Together, they look like a normal family. But Yuriko has a secret. Many years earlier, when Izumi was a boy, Yuriko suddenly disappeared for an entire year. She returned, but the lost year was never discussed.

Now as Yuriko begins to lose her memory, Izumi is forced to race against time as he seeks the truth behind this long-buried mystery. Will he learn to understand the woman his mother once was, before it is too late? And is he ready to become a father himself?

One Hundred Flowers is a story about the preciousness of every moment, the beauty and pain of family love, and the healing power of letting go.

— Google Books

“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 passed away.

Calling himself the go-between, Ayumi lays down strict rules around the meetings between the living and the dead: the deceased cannot have been summoned by anyone else; they may refuse; and they must meet under a full moon.

– Anxious Hirase asks to see the celebrity who showed her kindness at a critical moment;
– An arrogant family man wants clarity about a will from his beloved mother;
– After a bike accident, a school girl has a question for her former best friend;
– A salary man wants to ask the only woman he ever loved what caused her to run away.

With each reunion, tantalizing clues are scattered for readers to piece together the emotional truth behind the go-between in this mesmeric and unputdownable tale of kindness, compassion and connection.

— Penguin Books

It’s early 2020, and with the world in chaos as coronavirus spreads, two lonely people, both seeking to break with their pasts, meet and start sharing a home.

One is a former security guard who was captured on video knocking down a protester who died soon afterward; the other, a former teacher accused of driving a student to suicide. In an oppressive atmosphere of tension and fear, the pair avoid direct contact and communicate through notes and their shared presences, close yet distant. Their odd connection, with neither affection nor trust, brings them a kind of privacy and safety they both need – but at what cost?

— Google Books

Mitch and Yonko haven’t spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo—but ever since the sudden death of Mitch’s brother, they’ve been mourning in their private ways, worlds apart. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, they choose to reunite, finding each other in a city undone by disaster.

Mitch and Yonko have drifted apart, but they will always be bound together. Because long ago they witnessed an unspeakable tragedy, a tragedy that they’ve kept secret for their entire lives. They never speak of it, but it’s all around them. Like history, it repeats itself.

Yuko Tsushima’s sweeping and consuming novel is a metaphysical saga of postwar Japan. Wildcat Dome is a hugely ambitious exploration of denial, of the ways in which countries and their citizens avoid telling the truth—a tale of guilt, loss, and inevitable reckoning.

— Penguin Books

Amane is ten years old when she discovers she’s not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in ‘clean’, sexless marriages. But Amane’s parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm. Still, she can’t help questioning what sex and marriage are for.

But when Amane and her husband hear about Eden, an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse (including men who are fitted with artificial wombs), the family unit does not exist and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there. But can this bold experiment build the brave new world Amane desires, or will it push her to breaking point?

— Granta Books

On the outward journey we are introduced to the emotional dilemmas of five characters as we puzzle out how they will unravel; on the return journey six months later, we watch them resolve:

– a man meets the woman who always happens to borrow a library book just before he can take it out himself;
– a woman in a white bridal dress boards looking inexplicably sad;
– a university student leaves his hometown for the first time;
– a girl prepares to leave her abusive boyfriend;
– an elderly widow discusses adopting the Dachshund she has always wanted with her granddaughter.

As the seasons come around, so the Hankyu line trundles on carrying the lives and loves of its passengers ever forwards.

— Penguin Books