Product Description: Now in paperback: a quietly stunning tour de force about the redemptive power of love.While The Lake shows off many of the features that have made Banana Yoshimoto famous—a cast of vivid and quirky characters, simple yet nuanced prose, a tight plot with an upbeat pace—it’s also one of the most darkly mysterious books she’s ever written...read more

Product Description: The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P is a highly acclaimed work of fiction that won Japans most prestigious literary prize for women writers. A provocative, picaresque spin on a coming-of-age story, the novel tells of a young Japanese woman who wakes up one afternoon to discover that her big toe has turned into a penis...read more

Product Description: Rei Hayakawa, a lonely, bulimic freelance writer with a drinking problem, wanders into a convenience store. She's swaddled in her coat and scarf, while her thoughts – of alienation, of hunger, of the need for gin and white wine – drift in via stream-of-consciousness...read more

The author of Lizard, Amrita, Asleep and Goodbye Tsugumi offers two novellas, one about a young woman's dream about an ex-lover while on a hiking trip, and the other about the sister of a woman lying in a coma. Reprint.

The consummate post-modern Japanese writer serves up another hard-to-describe burst of creative energy, written in chapters as short as a few paragraphs and chronicling a gang that kills American presidents.

Having grown up by the sea alongside her charismatic invalid cousin Tsugumi, Maria moves to Tokyo and encounters an entirely different world of university enrollment and impending adulthood, and spending a last summer with her cousin, she comes to a new understanding about home and family. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

Three extraordinary novellas narrate the individual stories of three women, all bewitched into a spiritual sleep--a sleepwalker mourning a lost love, a woman unable to remain awake who is involved in an affair with a man whose wife is in a coma, and a woman whose dreams are haunted by a woman she once confronted in a love triangle. Reprint. 50,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

First published in 1958, this collection of stories by the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese author explores characters broken by war, loss, and longing. Reprint. 20,000 first printing. (view table of contents)