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The best Japanese fiction in translation

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Mina's Matchbox

On sleepless nights, I open the matchbox and reread the story of the girl who gathered shooting stars 
 
After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya. It is a year which will change her life. 
 
While the 1970s transform Japan, her uncle's magnificent colonial mansion is a place out of time; its sprawling gardens are even home to a pet pygmy hippo. Equally beguiling are Tomoko’s relatives, especially her cousin Mina. Their growing friendship draws her into an intoxicating world – one full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling. 
 
Rich with the magic and mystery of youth, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time, and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse. 
 
'Beguiling' New Yorker 
 
‘Beautifully composed’ Financial Times 
 
‘Effervescent’ New York Times Book Review 
 
‘Transfixing’ Time 
 
'I read Mina’s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end' Ruth Ozeki

[A] beautifully composed novel… [and] elegant translation… Ogawa has turned a deceptively simple account of a year spent with exotic relatives into something closer to a universal fable about the precarious wonder of growing up

A conspicuously gifted writer…To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state... She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance'

A transfixing coming of age tale set in early 1970s Japan. [Tomoko] uncovers a host of secrets that force her to question her family’s complicated history

Dreamy and whimsical, Mina’s Matchbox traffics in the themes at which Ogawa always excels: memory, identity, and nostalgia

This elegant, unusual novel full of eccentric personages is a Wes Anderson movie waiting to happen

Yoko Ogawa is a quiet wizard, casting her words like a spell, conjuring a world of curiosity and enchantment, secrets and loss. I read Mina’s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.

Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness

Ogawa, an award-winning novelist both in her native Japan and in the United States, writes with exquisite artistry about the complications of a close-knit household whose members are quietly protective of its wounding secrets, as seen through the eyes of a young girl; the novel is beautifully translated by Snyder

If you loved The Memory Police, you’ll be excited for Ogawa’s “hypnotic, introspective novel” ... Tomoko and her cousin Mina decipher the world around them: the family’s strange dynamics, her uncle’s absences, her aunt’s misery, and her great-aunt’s experience of the Second World War, in a coming-of-age story that’s sure to be transformative

This engaging bildungsroman explores the friendship and mutual curiosity between two extraordinary young people...Facing complicated themes with deceptively simple language...A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood’s ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy.

Immersive and poignant. . . filled with wonder

A timely if disconcerting reminder of all that swirls beneath seemingly placid water

Evokes the secret crushes and crushing secrets of girlhood with charm and elegance

Highly original. Infinitely charming. And ever so touching

Paul Auster,on THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR

A masterpiece...a novel that makes us see differently

Mina’s Matchbox, in a magnificent translation by Stephen B. Snyder, demonstrates the abiding comfort of fiction that envisions childhood as a time of discovery

Ogawa pulls off the rare feat of making childhood memories both credible and provocative. Readers will be hypnotized

Yoko Ogawa (Author) 
Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space and Zoetrope. Her works include The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge. Her most recent novel, The Memory Police, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. 
 
Stephen Snyder (Translator) 
Stephen Snyder is a translator and professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA. 
 
He has translated works by Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, and Miri Yu, among others. His translation of Natsuo Kirino’s Out was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 2004, and his translation of Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011.?

On sleepless nights, I open the matchbox and reread the story of the girl who gathered shooting stars. 
 
After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya. It is a year which will change her life. 
 
The 1970s are bringing changes to Japan and her uncle's magnificent colonial mansion opens up a new and unfamiliar world for Tomoko; its sprawling gardens are even home to a pygmy hippo the family keeps as a pet. Tomoko finds her relatives equally exotic and beguiling and her growing friendship with her cousin Mina draws her into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling. 
 
Rich with the magic and mystery of youth, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time, and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse. 
 
Praise for Mina's Matchbox 
 
'I read Mina’s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.' RUTH OZEKI, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness 
 
'Dreamy and whimsical, Mina’s Matchbox traffics in the themes at which Ogawa always excels: memory, identity, and nostalgia' Esquire, Best Books of the Summer 
 
'A conspicuously gifted writer. . . To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state. . . She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance' Guardian 
‘Evokes the secret crushes and crushing secrets of girlhood with charm and elegance’ People

Revenge

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE MEMORY POLICE 
 
'A conspicuously gifted writer…To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare, and her stories continue to haunt. She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance' Guardian 
 
Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders – locked in the embrace of an ominous and darkly beautiful web, their fates all converge through the eleven stories here in Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge. As tales of the macabre pass from character to character – an aspiring writer, a successful surgeon, a cabaret singer, a lonely craftsman – Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty. 
 
Translated by Stephen Snyder 
 
Elegant, novellas-in-translation, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

The Memory Police

A compelling and surreal, Orwellian mystery by one of Japan's greatest writers.

**Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020** 
 
On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . 
 
Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those who remember live in fear of the Memory Police. 
 
To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river, or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed. 
 
When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next? 
 
'Beautiful... Haunting' Sunday Times 
 
'This timeless fable of control and loss feels more timely than ever' Guardian

The Memory Police is a masterpiece: a deep pool that can be experienced as fable or allegory, warning and illumination. It is a novel that makes us see differently, opening up its ideas in inconspicuous ways, knowing that all moments of understanding and grace are fleeting. It is political and human, it makes no promises. It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision

It's an age since I read a book as strange, beautiful and affecting… this haunting work reaches beyond…to examine what it is to be human… a remarkable writer

Masterly...Like Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, Yoko Ogawa's novel transforms a familiar metaphor into imaginative truth.

In a feat of dark imagination, Yoko Ogawa stages an intimate, suspenseful drama of courage and endurance while conjuring up a world that is at once recognizable and profoundly strange

Explores questions of power, trauma and state surveillance...particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe.

The fresh take on 1984 you didn't know you needed.

This is a work of immense precision that is drawing on allegory, that is drawing on myth, that is drawing on dystopia and is doing that deftly. It is the work of a Japanese master who transcends her cultural context to speak to us on a level that is universal.

Ted Hodgkinson, Chair of Judges, International Man Booker Prize

The acclaimed Japanese writer’s fifth English release is an elegantly spare dystopian fable...Reading The Memory Police is like sinking into a snowdrift: lulling yet suspenseful, it tingles with dread and incipient numbness.

Ogawa exploits the psychological complexity of…[a] bizarre situation to impressive effect… her achievement is to weave in a far more personal sense of the destruction and distortion of the psyche

One of Japan’s most acclaimed authors explores truth, state surveillance and individual autonomy. Ogawa’s fable echoes the themes of George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, but it has a voice and power all its own.

This timeless fable of control and loss feels more timely than ever

A lovely, if bleak, meditation on faith and creativity - or faith in creativity - in a world that disavows both...The Memory Police truly feels like a portrait of today.

Ogawa lays open a hushed defiance against a totalitarian regime by training her prodigious talent on magnifying the efforts of those who persistently but quietly rebel... mesmerizingly direct prose.

A work about identity, authoritarianism and self-expression

Margaret Atwood’s excellent The Blind Assassin comes to mind here...remarkably layered...we’re fortunate to have more work by such a uniquely gifted and idiosyncratic writer

**** An allegorical tale about how we are defined and maintained by our memories. It is easy to fall under the thrall of the exquisite sadness pervading the whole experience

Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind

Ogawa’s anointed translator, Snyder, adroitly captures the quiet control with which Ogawa gently unfurls her ominously surreal and Orwellian narrative. The Memory Police loom, their brutality multiplies, but Ogawa remarkably ensures that what lingers are the human(e) connections... As the visceral disappears, somehow the spirit holds on.

First it’s small things — bells, ribbons, stamps — that disappear from the cloistered Japanese island where an unnamed novelist toils over her next book and worries about her community’s increasing isolation. With the objects go the memory of them: “It doesn’t hurt,” the protagonist’s mother explains to her, “and you won’t even be particularly sad.” Eventually, the “disappeared” things — paper, springtime — grow in scale and value, and the narrator struggles to avoid the clutches of the titular Memory Police. An unfortunately zeitgeisty novel about censorship, oppression, and the gradual compression of experience under autocratic regimes, this is a deeply traumatizing novel in the best way possible.

The translation of this masterpiece by the acclaimed Japanese author into English this year is cause for celebration

Terrifying, surreal and profoundly moving

One of Japan's finest writers serves up a riveting slice of dystopian suspense, which is far more pertinent and reflective of modern society than one would like. A troubling examination of state surveillance and control.

This beautiful and simple novel explores the power of memory and its importance to the soul

The Housekeeper and the Professor (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)

VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS - following on from the success of Vintage Russian Classics and European Classics, these are covetable new editions of the best Japanese writers on the Vintage list

He is a brilliant maths Professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. 
 
She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. 
 
Each morning, the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to one another. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant mathematical equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers reveal a poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her son. 
 
With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory. 
 
'This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water...Dive into Yoko Ogawa's world and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen' New York Times 
 
VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS - five masterpieces of Japanese fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.

Beautiful...the extraordinary Yoko Ogawa casts her spell ...This is a tale which will leave the reader gasping

Alive with mysteries both mathematical and personal, this novel has the pared-down elegance of an equation

Strangely charming, flecked with enough wit and mystery to keep us engaged throughout... fairy-tale surrealism and quiet spiritual wisdom

This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water...Dive into Yoko Ogawa's world  and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen

Where Yoko Ogawa's brilliance lies is in taking such an apparently stiff framework and bending it into a work of warmth and beauty; or showing us that mathematics is not a cold, hard, science, but an elegant, complex, shimmering art. This feat of literary spoon-bending is accomplished with such calm elegance that it quite takes the breath away

Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space and Zoetrope. Her works include The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge. Her most recent novel, The Memory Police, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

‘a poignant tale of beauty, heart and sorrow’ Publishers Weekly

The Housekeeper and the Professor

An enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist.

Highly original. Infinitely charming. And ever so touching.

A perfectly sustained novel (a tribute to Stephen Snyder's smooth translation); like a note prolonged...a pause enabling us to peer intently into the lives of its characters...has all the charm and restraint of any by Ishiguro and the whimsy of Murakami

Beautiful...the extraordinary Yoko Ogawa casts her spell. Never before has the beauty of maths been so lovingly explored...a tender, gentle book...Ogawa is an original and establishes a world in a paragraph..This is a tale which will leave the reader gasping...Hopefully more of her exciting, thoughtful fiction is heading our way.

Its unnamed characters suggest archetype or myth; its rapturous concentration on the details of weather and cooking provide a satisfyingly textured foundation

Ogawa's crystalline prose heightens the simple elegance of this tale of lost souls looking for comfort and shelter - and finding it in the timeless symmetry of mathematical equations.

Yoko Ogawa (Author) Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space and Zoetrope. Her works include The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge. Her most recent novel, The Memory Police, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Stephen Snyder (Translator) Stephen Snyder is a translator and professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA. 
 
He has translated works by Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, and Miri Yu, among others. His translation of Natsuo Kirino’s Out was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 2004, and his translation of Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011.?

He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. 
She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper who is entrusted to take care of him. 
 
Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.

Hotel Iris

A dark and beautifully written story of a young girl's tragic love triangle with an older man and his young nephew

It's brave territory for Ogawa, and she manages in with sharp focus; she creates moments of breathtaking ugliness, often when least expected...but also sometimes a longing that is touching and tender

Both very weird and very good... Image by perfect image, we are led down into a mysterious and gripping universe, simultaneously beautiful and terrifying... From the opening sentences of Hotel Iris you know that every word will count and that every scene will be the occasion for strong and strange feeling

To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare... She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance

Precisely written, this dreamlike narrative expands into an ambiguous story of sexual dependency and damage. Ogawa's exact prose glitters as menacingly as the surrounding sea

Exploring dark desires is something at which Ogawa has become disconcertingly adept

In a crumbling, seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet, seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother fusses over the off-season customers. When, one night, they are forced to eject a prostitute and a middle-aged man from his room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a long seduction. 
 
Mari begins to visit the mysterious man at his island home, and he initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure. As Mari's mother and the police begin to close in on the illicit affair, events move to a dramatic climax. 
 
By the author of The Housekeeper and the Professor

Yoko Ogawa

Stephen Snyder

Written in haunting, spare, shimmering prose...punctuated by acts of casual violence and vindictive spite. Profoundly unsettling, magnificently written and instantly memorable, these stories vindicate [Ogawa's] status as one of Japan's greatest living writers

Yoko Ogawa's British debut is inexcusably belated....Ogawa is a conspicuously gifted writer... Not a word is wasted, yet each resonates with a blend of poetry and tension... mesmerising... To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare, and her stories continue to haunt. She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance. She should be discovered in Britain, and this book must surely begin the process

The three Japanese novellas in The Diving Pool are both creepy and disturbingly lovely...spine-tingling uncertainty surfaces throughout the haunting prose

A fine collection of three queasily unsettling novellas... She invests the most seemingly banal domestic situations with a chilling and malevolent sense of perversity, marking her out as a master of subtle psychological horror

An intriguing trilogy of exquisitely sketched stories... Elegant, intelligent, quietly disturbing

A welcome introduction to an author whose suggestive, unsettling storytelling speaks volumes by leaving things unsaid

Hard not to finish in one go, Yoko Ogawa's stories are perfect for spooky bedtime reading - and not-so-sweet dreams

Polished, original and strange.  She reveals humour, menace, and humanity in a quietly explosive book

Her combination of the strange with the visceral elegantly conveys silent inner worlds of misery and pain

Ogawa is original, elegant, very disturbing. I admire any writer who dares to work on this uneasy territory - we're on the edge of the unspeakable. The stories seem to penetrate right to the heart of the world, and find it a cold and eerie place. Her spare technique is very skilled. Every word is put to work. She sets up a small vibration, a disturbance, which begins quietly and generates wider and wider ripples of unease. There are no narrative tricks, but the stories generate a surprising amount of tension. You feel as if you've touched an icy hand

Ogawa's tales possess a gnawing, erotic edge

Yoko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in prose that is gentle yet penetrating.

Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Prize Winning author of A Personal Matter

Each well narrated and haunting novella, about love, obsession and dark humour, has an unpredictable twist of viciousness coupled with compassion

Vintage Classics WEIRD GIRLS: Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of women’s weird fiction. 
 
A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster-brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool - sparking an unspoken infatuation that draws out darker possibilities. 
 
A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, but rather than a story of growth the diary reveals a more sinister tale of greed and repulsion. 
 
Driven by nostalgia, a woman visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo. There she finds an isolated world shadowed by decay, haunted by absent students and the disturbing figure of the crippled caretaker. 
 
The VINTAGE CLASSIC WEIRD GIRLS series ventures into the dark heart of the uncanny with disturbing, and disturbed, protagonists who dare to defy the norm. Bold, disruptive, chilling and enchanting, these tales of the weird are strange enough to get lost in.

Yoko Ogawa

Praise for The Diving Pool

Written in haunting, spare, shimmering prose...punctuated by acts of casual violence and vindictive spite. Profoundly unsettling, magnificently written and instantly memorable, these stories vindicate [Ogawa's] stat ...

Yoko Ogawa's British debut is inexcusably belated....Ogawa is a conspicuously gifted writer... Not a word is wasted, yet each resonates with a blend of poetry and tension... mesmerising... To read Ogawa is ...

The three Japanese novellas in The Diving Pool are both creepy and disturbingly lovely...spine-tingling uncertainty surfaces throughout the haunting prose

Written in haunting, spare, shimmering prose...punctuated by acts of casual violence and vindictive spite. Profoundly unsettling, magnificently written and instantly memorable, these stories vindicate [Ogawa's] stat ...

Yoko Ogawa's British debut is inexcusably belated....Ogawa is a conspicuously gifted writer... Not a word is wasted, yet each resonates with a blend of poetry and tension... mesmerising... To read Ogawa is ...

The three Japanese novellas in The Diving Pool are both creepy and disturbingly lovely...spine-tingling uncertainty surfaces throughout the haunting prose

Written in haunting, spare, shimmering prose...punctuated by acts of casual violence and vindictive spite. Profoundly unsettling, magnificently written and instantly memorable, these stories vindicate [Ogawa's] stat ...

Yoko Ogawa's British debut is inexcusably belated....Ogawa is a conspicuously gifted writer... Not a word is wasted, yet each resonates with a blend of poetry and tension... mesmerising... To read Ogawa is ...

The three Japanese novellas in The Diving Pool are both creepy and disturbingly lovely...spine-tingling uncertainty surfaces throughout the haunting prose

Books by Yoko Ogawa

Series by Yoko Ogawa

Weird Girls

Articles featuring Yoko Ogawa

The best Japanese fiction in translation

Pinks, layers and bold fonts: the book cover trends that have dominated 2021

8 empowering books about living through loss

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