Japan Focus

A Dictionary of Japanese Food helps food lovers around the world decipher the intricacies and nuances of Japanese cooking and its ingredients. Defi...

A classic of Japanese history, this book is the preeminent work on the history of Japan. Newly revised and updated, A History of Japan is a single-...

A History of Japanese Art offers readers a comprehensive view of Japanese art through Japanese eyes—a view that is the most revealing of all perspe...

In A History of Modern Japan, cultural historian Christopher Harding delves into the untold stories of Japan's recent history--from a pop star's nu...

illustrated by Julia Kuo A Japanese American family, reeling from their ill treatment in the Japanese imprisonment camps, gives up their American c...

When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a distant land. A sensitive misfit in the wo...

Translated by Ivan Morris As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams is a unique autobiography in which the anonymous writer known as Lady Sarashina intersper...

Battle Royale is a high-octane thriller about senseless youth violence, and one of Japan's bestselling - and most controversial - novels. As part o...

translated by Howard Hibbett The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets. He returns to Kyoto to find Otoko, a youn...

Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one ...

translated by Geoffrey Trousselot In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one ...

Despite years of stagnation, Japan remains one of the world's largest economies and a country which exerts a remarkable cultural fascination. David...

Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd On a hot summer's day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: thirty-year-old Natsu, her older sister ...

'What Japan was she owed to the samurai. They were not only the flower of the nation, but its root as well.' Inazo Nitobe's book, the most influent...

translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on ...

Ineko has lost the ability to see things. At first it was a ping-pong ball, then it was her fiancé. The doctors call it 'body blindness', and she i...

translated by J. Keith Vincent One morning, Takahashi, a writer who has just stayed up all night working, is interrupted by a phone call from his o...

translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori Natsuki isn't like the other girls. She has a wand and a transformation mirror. She might be a witch, or an ali...

Coinciding with the new edition of the bestseller Designing Design, Kenya Hara's latest book, Ex-formation, searches for the beginning of design in...

From Japan is a collection of work from some of the most talented agencies in Japan, such as Nendo, MR Design, Grand Deluxe, Daikoku Design Institu...

translated by Ralph McCarthy, Charles De Wolf and Ginny Takemori From the Fatherland, with Love is set in an alternative, dystopian present in whic...

Fumio Sasaki is a writer in his thirties who lives in a tiny studio in Tokyo with three shirts, four pairs of trousers, four pairs of socks and not...

Two prostitutes are murdered in Tokyo. Twenty years previously both women were educated at the same elite school for young ladies, and had seemingl...

We are currently accepting pre-orders for this title. Orders of this title are expected to be fulfilled by late-June 2021. Click here to find out m...

Written over the course of 1904-1906, Soseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle-class Japanese soci...

"Think not that dreams appear to the dreamer only at night, the dream of this world of pain appears to us even by day." In this book, famed author ...

It is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's modernizers and nationalists...

In this collection of classic ghost stories from Japan, beautiful princesses turn out to be frogs, paintings come alive, deadly spectral brides hau...

Two hundred and twenty tales from medieval Japan--tales that welcome us into a fabulous faraway world populated by saints, scoundrels, ghosts, magi...

A twenty-year-old murder A chain of unsolvable mysteries Can one detective solve this epic riddle? When a man is found murdered in an abandoned bui...

Kitchen juxtaposes two tales about mothers, transsexuality, bereavement, kitchens, love and tragedy in contemporary Japan. It is a startlingly orig...

Translated by Stephen Dodd When Hanio Yamada realises the future holds little of worth to him, he puts his life for sale in a Tokyo newspaper, thus...

An enchanting and fascinating insight into Japanese landscape, culture, history and future. Originally written in Japanese, this passionate, vividl...

Modern Japanese Short Stories is a remarkable collection of Japanese stories from the pioneers of contemporary Japanese literature. This volume's t...

A young boy returns obsessively to a supermarket sandwich counter, entranced by the beauty of the woman who works there. Her aloof demeanour and el...

The stories in this fantastical, unconventional collection are subtly wrought depictions of the darkness of our desires. From an isolated bamboo gr...

The Crooked House sits on a snowbound cliff at the remote northern tip of Japan. A curious place to build a house, but even more curious is the hou...

In this short introduction to Zen Buddhism, a practising Japanese monk shares the many lessons he has learned from life inside a temple. With charm...

Okinawa: The History of an Island People is the definitive book available in English on the history of Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands, and an influ...

Onibi: Diary of a Yokai Ghost Hunter follows the adventures of two young foreigners as they travel to a remote and mysterious corner of Japan. Alon...

In the Tokyo suburbs four women work the graveyard shift at a factory. Burdened with heavy debts, alienated from husbands and children, they all se...

In the Tokyo suburbs four women work the draining graveyard shift at a boxed-lunch factory. Burdened with chores and heavy debts and isolated from ...

translated by Ted Goossen Take a story and shrink it. Make it tiny, so small it can fit in the palm of your hand. Carry the story with you everywhe...

translated by Ralph McCarthy It’s a set-up like a video game: two rival gangs fight to death for the control of a Tokyo district. In one gang, six ...

In a suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls drift through a hot smoggy August and tedious summer school classes. There's dependable T...

translated by Ted Goosen Shiga Naoya, the master of Japanese 'I fiction', was encouraged by acclaimed novelist Soseki Natsume to serialise an accou...

When a man is discovered dead by poisoning in his empty home his beautiful wife, Ayane, immediately falls under suspicion. All clues point to Ayane...

translated by William Johnston Beneath the light of the candle I am sitting with my hands on my knees, staring in front of me. And I keep turning o...