“The night was deep, the stars were out, and I felt like the only person left in the world.” Hardboiled The first novella follows an unnamed woman who […]
Japanese literature
Lizard
“People are born with their own special destiny, and it’s not something you can change just because you want to.” Chapter 1: Newlywed The story opens with a […]
Japanese literature
Memoirs of a Polar Bear
“Writing is like walking on thin ice—you never know when you’ll fall through.” Part One: The Grandmother’s Memoirs The novel opens with the autobiographical writings of a polar […]
Japanese literature
Where the Wild Ladies Are
“The dead are always with us. They just change their forms.” Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda is a collection of interconnected feminist retellings of traditional […]
Japanese literature
After the Quake
“The earth shook for precisely seventeen seconds. Exactly seventeen seconds—no more, no less.” UFO in Kushiro Komura’s wife leaves him after the Kobe earthquake, claiming he is “empty.” […]
Japanese literature
Kafka on the Shore
“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of […]
German literature
The Flounder
“I, the Flounder, was there when it began. And I was there when it ended.” The Flounder by Günter Grass is a sprawling, mythic novel that intertwines history, […]
German literature
Dog Years
“Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have […]
German literature
The Tin Drum
“Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, […]
Russian literature
The Master and Margarita
“Who are you, then?”“I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”— The Master and Margarita Part 1 The novel opens in 1930s […]