Listed released dates listed are tentative. Descriptions are excerpted from book sellers’ or publishers’ websites. Translators are listed unless I wasn’t able to find information.
Things change quickly in the publishing industry. I’ve made my best attempt to be comprehensive. Please contact me if I have missed any titles.
Thank you to the Goodreads Japanese Literature Group for pooling information.
See a list of all new releases available to order or preorder at RJL’s Bookshop.
Upcoming Releases
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa
Translated by Eric Ozawa
(North American and European releases expected summer 2023)
The Devil’s Flute Murders by Seishi Yokomizo
Translated by Jim Rion
(North American and European releases expected summer 2023)
“This classic from the golden age of crime presents a mind-bending Japanese mystery from the great Seishi Yokomizo, whose fictional detective Kosuke Kindaichi is a pop culture phenomenon akin to Sherlock Holmes. This time the beloved scruffy sleuth Kosuke Kindaichi investigates a series of gruesome murders within the feuding family of a brooding, troubled composer, whose most famous work chills the blood of all who hear it…”
The End of August by Yu Miri
Translated by Morgan Giles
(North American and European releases expected late summer 2023)
“In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have had to run under the Japanese flag. Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. She summons Korean shamans to hold an intense, transcendent ritual to connect with Lee Woo-cheol. When his ghost appears, alongside those of his brother Lee Woo-Gun, and their young neighbor, who was forced to become a comfort woman to Japanese soldiers stationed in China during World War II, she must uncover their stories to free their souls…”
The Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai
Translated by Sam Bett
(North American and European releases expected late summer 2023)
“The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba—the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age—is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries to maintain a lighthearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes, and trying to make each other laugh…”
- Learn more about Osamu Dazai and No Longer Human with the RJL podcast.
- Read my review of Dazai’s short story collection Early Light.
The Forest Brims Over by Ayase Maru
Translated by Hadyn Trowell
(North American and European releases expected summer 2023)
“A woman turns herself into a forest after long being co-opted to serve as the subject of her husband’s novels–this surrealist fable challenges traditional gender attitudes and exploitation in the literary world…”
Honeybees and Distant Thunder by Ondo Riku
Translated by Philip Gabriel
(North American and European releases expected spring 2023)
“In a small coastal town just a stone’s throw from Tokyo, a prestigious piano competition is underway. Over the course of two feverish weeks, three students will experience some of the most joyous—and painful—moments of their lives. Though they don’t know it yet, each will profoundly and unpredictably change the others, for ever…”
Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki
Translated by Daniel Joseph, Sam Bett, and David Boyd
(North American and European releases spring 2023)
“Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy…”
I Guess All We Have Is Freedom by Genpai Akasegawa
Translated by Matthew Fargo
(North American release expected spring 2023)
“In these stories, ostensibly quiet tales of a single dad in 1970s Tokyo, a doorknob practices radical politics, a peeled tomato smarts in pain, raw oysters tick like time bombs and gravestones provide a critique of capitalism…”
Love at Six Thousand Degrees by Maki Kashimada
Translated by Hadyn Trowell
(North American and European releases expected spring 2023)
“An ordinary housewife finds herself haunted by visions of a mushroom cloud and abruptly leaves her husband and son to travel alone to the city of Nagasaki, where she soon begins an affair with a young half-Russian, half-Japanese man…”
Marshland by Otohiko Kaga
Translated by Albert Novick
(North American and European releases expected early summer 2023)
“An epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo, where his coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar past as a petty criminal. Out of curiosity he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, and is gradually drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakako Ikéhata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakako find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train….”
Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai
Translated by Polly Barton
(North American and European releases summer 2023)
“Housewife Natsumi leads a small, unremarkable life in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes on trips to the supermarket, exchanges gossip with neighbours. Tracing the conversations and interactions she has with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying inability to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that make up a life confined to the home, where both everything and nothing happens.”
The Mill House Murders by Ayatsuji Yukito
Translated by Ho-Ling Wong
(European release expected late winter 2023; North American release expected spring 2023)
“As they do every year, a small group of acquaintances pay a visit to the remote, castle-like Water Mill House, home to the reclusive Fujinuma Kiichi, son of a famous artist, who has lived his life behind a rubber mask ever since a disfiguring car accident.
This year, however, the visit is disrupted by an impossible disappearance, the theft of a painting and a series of baffling murders…”
The North Light by Hideo Yokoyama
Translated by Louise Heal Kawai
(European release expected fall 2023)
“Minoru Aose is an architect whose greatest achievement is to have designed the Yoshino house, a prizewinning and much discussed private residence built in the shadow of Mount Asama. Aose has never been able to replicate this triumph and his career seems to have hit a barrier, while his marriage has failed. He is shocked to learn that the Yoshino House is empty apart from a single chair, stood facing the north light of nearby Mount Asama…”
People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice by Ao Omae
Translated by Emily Balistrieri
(North American and European releases expected summer 2023)
“Composed of the title novella and three short stories, People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice sensitively explores gender, friendship, romance, love, human interaction and its absence, and how a misogynistic society limits women and men…”
The Rainbow (also titled Beyond the Rainbow) by Yasunari Kawabata
Translated by Hadyn Trowell
(North American and European releases expected spring 2023)
“With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters—born to the same father but different mothers—struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age…”
The Rope Artist by Fuminori Nakamura
Translated by Sam Bett
(North American and European releases expected late spring 2023)
“Two detectives. Two identical women. One dead body—rapidly becoming two, then three, then four. All knotted up in Japan’s underground BDSM scene and kinbaku, a form of rope bondage which bears a complex cultural history of spirituality, torture, cleansing, and sacrifice…”
Sunrise: Radiant Stories by Erika Kobayashi
Translated by Brian Bergstrom
(North American and European releases expected summer 2023)
“Sunrise is a collection of interconnected stories continuing Erika Kobayashi’s examination of the effects of nuclear power on generations of women. Connecting changes to everyday life to the development of the atomic bomb, Sunrise shows us how the discovery of radioactive power has shaped our history and continues to shape our future…”
