Japanese Short

The 24 stories that make up Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman generously express the incomparable Haruki Murakami’s mastery of the form. Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an ice man, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things for which we might wish. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit Murakami’s ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and entertaining.

In this collection of classic ghost stories from Japan, beautiful princesses turn out to be frogs, paintings come alive, deadly spectral brides haunt the living and a samurai delivers the baby of a Shinto goddess with mystical help. Here are all the phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore: 'rokuro-kubi', whose heads separate from their bodies at night; 'jikininki', or flesh-eating goblins; and terrifying faceless 'mujina' who haunt lonely neighbourhoods.

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A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig - watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods - turns out to be inconvenient. Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful.

The Dilemmas of Working Women is Fumio Yamamoto’s darkly witty look at modern Japanese women who are ambivalent about their lives and jobs. In “Naked,” a woman who’s simultaneously lost her business and her husband finds that it is surprisingly comfortable to stay at home sewing stuffed animals, even if it makes her a “loser” in the eyes of society. In “Planarian,” a young woman recovering from breast cancer tells her friends and boyfriend that she would prefer to be the titular worm to organically regenerate her body.

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In these 11 stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien - and through it, find a way to liberation. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is the English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearlessly inventive young writers.

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories brings together 15 stories that span Hisaye Yamamoto's 40-year career. It was her first book to be published in the United States. Yamamoto's themes include the cultural conflicts between the first generation, the Issei and their children, the Nisei; coping with prejudice; and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.

A new selection of 14 of Yukio Mishima's best short stories from the 1960s—his final decade—Voices of the Fallen Heroes offers a unique glimpse into the mind of one of Japan’s greatest writers. In the title story, "Voices of the Fallen Heroes," a séance brings forth the spirits of young officers in the Imperial Army and the kamikaze pilots of World War II, who reproach the Emperor and mourn Japan’s modern decline. In another, Mishima recounts the true story of the time a deranged fan broke into his home at dawn, insisting on meeting the author and imploring him to "tell the truth."

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom: A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; idle high school students find adventure in another dimension but aren't all that impressed; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki's stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.

Contos de guerreiros japoneses revelará aos seus ouvintes os mais preciosos valores japoneses: disciplina, lealdade, dedicação, perseverança, auto sacrifício, humildade e devoção. Tal arcabouço ético e narrativas envolventes recebem a ilustração de Shusui Okakura e outros artistas, fazendo ecoar da forma mais bela o passado e a memória japonesa.

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.

A dream I wish to have in the night most often isn’t about dating a Hollywood star or making a great hit song. It’s not about my parents saying to me with tears, “We were wrong. We’re sorry”, either. It’s about numbers. I once saw a woman on TV who won four million dollars by the lottery with the numbers she had seen in her dream. Shortly after that, I myself saw numbers in my dream and began to buy a lottery ticket with those numbers.

Originally published in 1922 and translated by Takashi Kojima, this classic short story was the inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, about the murder of a samurai. Told from the perspective of multiple witnesses.

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Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai'i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise and the boundaries of the real, where the superstitions born of the islands take on the weight of truth.