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Novel 

Okei

By SAOTOME Mitsugu

Translated by Kenneth J. Bryson

Alma Books Limited, ISBN: 978-1-84688-070-4, 2008

Set in the midst of samurai warfare in the mountainous region of Aizu in the late nineteenth century, the novel recounts the coming of age of the young peasant girl Okei, who falls desperately in love with the fierce warrior Sanasuma Kingo, only to discover that the world she inhabits has no place for such passion. Okei must learn to understand both the nature of her hidden feelings and the arcane codes and honour system of the samurai.
As the forces of the old Tugokawa order struggle to contain the imperialist army, Okei and the rest of her rural community find that exile to the New World may be their only remaining chance of survival. Capturing the character of a country in the throes of revolution and faced with onset of modernity, Mitsugu Saotome's masterful novel succeeds in blending vivid historical detail with a timeless tale of romance, self-discovery and growing up.

Born in China, Mitsugu Saotome won the Naoki Prize for his novel Kyojin no ori (The Cage of the Traveller). From an early age he wrote historical fiction, an interest that he claims to be derived from his ancient samurai heritage. A prolific writer, his novels are immensely popular in Japan.

Novel 

Beyond the Blossoming Fields (Hanauzumi)

by WATANABE Jun'ichi

Translated by Deborah Iwabuchi and Anna Isozaki

London: Alma Books Ltd., ISBN: 978-1-84688-064-3, 2008

As a young girl from a wealthy family, Ginko Ogino seems set for a conventional life in the male-dominated society of nineteenth-century Japan. But when she contracts gonorrhoea from her hussband, she suffers the ignominy of divorce. Forced to bear the humilitation of being treated by male doctors, she resolves to become a doctor herself in order to treat fellow female sufferers and spare them some of the shame she had to endure.

Her struggle is not an easy on: her family disown her, and she has to convince the authorities to take seriously the very idea of a female doctor, and allow her to study alongside male medical students and sit the licensing exam.

Based on the real-life story of Ginko Ogino - Japan's first female doctor - Beyond the Blossoming Fields does full justice to the complexity of her character and her world in a fascinating and inspirational work of fiction.

Born in Hokkaido, Jun'ichi Watanabe became interested in literature in high school. After graduating at Sapporo Medical University, he worked as an orthopaedic surgeon, but in 1969 he resigned his post and moved to Tokyo to pursue a full-time career as a writer. The recipient of prestigious literary awards such as the Naoki Prize and the Yoshikawa Eiji Prize, Watanabe has written numerous scientific text as well as biographical books and works of fiction, many of which have been made into films.

Novel 

The Temple of the Wild Geese and Bamboo Dolls of Echizen (Gan no tera and Echizen take ningyo)

By MIZUKAMI Tsutomu

Translated by Dennis Washburn

Dalkey Archive Press, ISBN: 978-1-56478-490-2, 2008

The Temple of the Wild Geese, a semi-autobiographical account of Mizukami's childhood, tells the tale of Jinen, a Buddhist monk raised by villagers after his mother, a beggar, abandoned him. Sent to live at a temple at the age of ten, his resentment smolders for years until it explodes in a shocking climax.

In Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, no woman is willing to marry the diminutive Kisuke, a bamboo artisan, until Tamae, a prostitute, comes to pay her respects at the grave of Kisuke's father. In Tamae, Kisuke sees shadows of his own mother, who died when he was young, and the two eventually marry. Since Kisuke seeks only motherly affection form Tamae, the two never become lovers. Instead, Tamae devotes herself to caring for Kisuke as a mother would, and he thrives as a renowned maker of bamboo dolls.

Tsutomu Mizukami (1919-1994) was born in the Fukui Prefecture of Japan. As a child, he was sent by his parents to work and live in a temple in Kyoto. After leaving the temple, Mizukami studied literature at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. A bestselling author of novels, detective stories, biographies, and plays, Mizukami was also the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Naoki Prize for The Temple of the Wild Geese.

Novel 

White-haired Melody (Hakuhatsu no uta)

By FURUI Yoshikichi

Translated by Meredith McKinney

Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, ISBN: 978-1-929280-46-9, 2008

This novel is a meditative exploration of the strange borderland around the inner experience of aging and approaching death. Yet, rather than follow a conventional plot, the novel develops by means of an intricate weaving together through time of key experiences of the narrator and his friends to build a compelling portrait of human experience. Those familiar with Furui's writings will find here a fascinating new development of earlier themes. White-haired Melody, a work by one of Japan's finest contemporary novelists writing at the height of his power, is not to be missed.

Born in Tokyo in 1937, Furui Yoshikichi graduated form the University of Tokyo in German literature. While teaching at Kanazawa University, he translated the Austrian writers Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. He left the university in 1970 and began to establish himself as a writer. His major awards include the Akutagawa Prize in 1970 for the novella Yôko, the Tanizaki Prize in 1983 for Asagao (Morning Glory), the Kawabata Prize in 1986 for On Nakayama Hill, and the Mainichi Art Award in 1997 for The White-haired Melody. He includes very little social commentary in his novels, preferring to look into the heart of individual characters.

Novel 

The budding tree (Koiwasuregusa)

By KITAHARA Aiko

Translated by Ian MacDonald

Dalkey Archive Press, ISBN: 978-1-56478-489-6, 2008

This Naoki Prize-winning work is a personal yet precise account of the lives of working women in the Edo period (1600 - 1868). In the latter half of the Edo period, the warrior caste was finding itself pushed out of the top echelons of society by the rising merchant class, and repeated famines swept the countryside. Against this backdrop, a small number of women vigorously built themselves independent lives with unusual careers - working as designers of ornamental hairpins, or even scribes - in the male-dominated society of the day. The stories in The Budding Tree recount the conditions in which these women lived.

Aiko Kitahara was born in Tokyo's Shimbashi district. After graduating from Chiba Prefectural Girls' High School she joined an advertising firm, beginning her crative work on the side. She won the Shincho Prize for New Writers for her debut work, the 1969 Mama wa siranakatta yo (Mom Didn't Know). She has gained a widespread following for her elegant style and for her detailed images of the everyday lives of Edo-period Japanese. Many of her works have been adapted for television.

Novel 

The Glass Slipper and Other Stories (Garasu no Kutsu)

By YASUOKA Shotaro

Dalkey Archive Press, ISBN: 978-1-56478-504-6, 2008

In addition to "The Glass Slipper," this collection contains eight other stories held together by a common thread of self-preception. Yasuoka writes from the belief that the self has such depths that at times it can appear to be illusory. Set against the chaotic backdrop of the era running from before World War II to just after its end, these stories are infused with a timeless sense of novelty and humor. Highly praised by Haruki Murakami, The Glass Slipper and Other Stories continues to offer readers a fresh literary experience.

Shotaro Yasuoka was born in Kochi Prefecture, Japan in 1920. The son of a veterinary corpsman in the Imperial Army, his early life involved frequent moves from one military post to another. After the war, Yasuoka came down with spinal caries, and with no chance for treatment without money, took on a series of odd jobs. It was while he was bedridden with this disease that he began his writing carreer. A leading figure in postwar Japanese literature, in 2001 Yasuoka received the Cultural Merit Award for his literary achievement.

Poems 

Strong in the Rain - Selected Poems
By MIYAZAWA Kenji

Translated by Roger Pulvers

Tarset, Bloodaxe Books Ltd., ISBN: 978-1-85224-781-2, 2007

Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) is now widely viewed as Japan's greatest poet of the 20th century. Little known in his lifetime, he died at 37 from tuberculosis, but has since become a much loved children's author whose magical tales have been translated into many languages, adapted for the stage and turned into films and animations. Recognition for his poetry came much later. "Strong in the Rain" - the title-poem of this selection - is now arguably the most memorised and quoted modern poem in Japan.

Both intensely lyrical and permeated with sophisticated scientific understanding of the universe, Kenji Miyazawa's poems testify to his deep love of humanity and nature. From a young age he was fascinated by plants, insects, and especially minerals, which he collected. At school his interest in nature deepened and he began poring through books on philosophy and Buddhism, which were to strongly influence his later writing.

Miyazawa drew on nature in a way that no modern Japanese author had before him. Where other writers tended to use it as a springboard for their own meditations, he saw himself not just as nature's faithful chronicler and recorder but as its medium: light, wind and rain are processed through him before being recreated on the page.

His mode of active engagement with nature set him apart from virtually all other Japanese poets, and led to his work being largely ignored be the Bundan (the literary establishment) and misunderstood for half a century. But in the 1990s he received unprecedented attention in the Japanese media. The compassion, empathy and closeness to nature expressed in Kenji Miyazawa's poems and tales appealed strongly to a new generation of readers.

Novel 
Shame in the Blood (several short stories)
By MIURA Tetsuo

Translated by Andrew Driver

Shoemaker & Hoard, ISBN: 978-1-59376-171-4, 2007

Scarred by the death or disappearance of so many members of his family, the unnamed narrator of Shame in the Blood (Shinobugawa) is tormented by the fear that his blood is cursed. Then he mets Shino, a beautiful waitress who serves him hot sake and captures his heart. Shino's appearance in his life, and their subsequent marriage, offers the possibility that he might finally overcome his "cursed blood". Told as six related and layered stories, the book builds and deepens, using particulars of everyday life to provide a moving testimony that rings all the more true for being tinged with melancholic knowledge that love itself is a "little death."

Considered one of the finest love stories in modern Japanese literature, Shame in the Blood sold more than a million copies when first published in Japan, won the Akutagawa Prize for Literature, and was made into a feature film directed by Obayashi Nobuhiko. Working in the great tradition of Japanese novelists from Soseki to Kawabata, from Mishima to Abe, Miura takes his place as one of the greatest Japanese writers of our times.

Tetsuo Miura was born in 1931 in Aomori, Japan. His awards inculde the Akutagawa Prize for Literarture, the Noma Literary Prize, the Japan Literature Grand Prize, the Osaragi Jiro Prize, and the Kawabata Prize. Shame in the Blood is the author's first book translated into English.

Novel 

Rivalry (Udekurabe)

By NAGAI Kafu

Translated by Stephen Snyder

New York: Columbia University Press, ISBN: 978-0-231-14118-5, 2007

Rivalry tells a sweeping story in which politics compete with sisterly affection in a world ruled by material transation. Komayo is a former geisha who, upon the death of her husband, must return to the "world of flower and willow" to escape poverty. A chance encounter with an old patron, Yoshioka, leads to a relationship in which both lovers hope to profit: Yoshioka believes Komayo can restore his lost innocence; Komayo plans to use Yoshioka's patronage to compete in the elaborate music and dance performances staged by her fellow geisha.

Yoshioka is eager to ransom Komayo, but as she considers his offer, Komayo falls in love with Segawa, a young actor who promises to turn the talented geisha into the finest dancer in the Shimbashi quarter. Though her feelings for Segawa are genuine, Komayo is eager to use her lover's position to become the lead performer among her peers. Her ambition even tempts her to take on a third patron known only as the "Sea Monster," a repellent but wealthy antiques dealer whose deep pockets promise to shoot Komayo to the height of geisha celebrity.

Nagai Kafu (1879 - 1959) was a Japanese novelist whose translated works include Autumn Wind and Other Stories, American Stories, and During the Rains and Flowers in the Shades: Two Novellas.

Novel 
Realm of the Dead (Meido, Ryojun nyujoshiki)
By UCHIDA Hyakken
Translated by Rachel DiNitto

Normal Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, ISBN: 1-56478-447-9, 2006

With series of disconnected dreams and images that fade into one another without logic these stories describe the worlds of both the living and the dead.
Realm of the Dead is set in a dark and mysterious world where logic and reality are subject to constant change and where ideas about identity and self are continually questioned. In one story, the narrator watches footage from the Russo-Japanese War, but then, moving across the screen, finds himself fighting in the war. In another, the narrator goes to a freak show with a woman, only to find the woman herself has become a freak.
 

Uchida Hyakken was born to a family of saké brewers whose business later went bankrupt. He was the author of over fifteen volumes of fiction, essays, diaries, and poetry, including A New Account of My Hut, I Am a Cat: The Fake Version, and Gates Close at Dusk. An essay of his was adapted into the movie Madadayo, which was directed by master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. A major figure with a devoted following in Japan, this is his first book to be translated into English.

Novel 
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (Akutagawa Ryunosuke tanpenshu)
By AKUTAGAWA Ryunosuke

Translated by Jay Rubin with an introduction by Haruki Murakami
London: Penguin Books, ISBN: 0-140-44970-1, 2006

Akutagawa (1892 - 1927) was one of Japan's foremost stylists - a modernist master whose stories are marked by original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour. "Rashomon" and "In a Bamboo Grove" inspired Kurosawa's magnificent film and depict a past in which morality is inverted, while tales such as "The Nose" and "Loyality" paint a richly imaginative picture of medieval Japan peopled by Shoguns and priests, vagrants and peasants. Later works such as "Death Register", "The Life of a Stupid Man" and "Spinning Gears", draw on Akutagawa's own life to devastating effect, revealing his intense melancholy and terror of madness in exquisitely moving, impressionistic stories.

Novel 
The Cage (Ori)
By KITAHARA Kenzo

Translated by Paul Warham
New York: Vertical, ISBN: 1-932234-24-1/978-1-932234-24-4, 2006

Kazuya Takino leads a quiet life running a supermarket in the Tokyo suburbs. But when an extortionist tries to force him out of business, he finds himself drawn into the yakuza underworld . a world he once called home and thought he had left behind. Pursuing him is Detective Takagi, an aficionado of French cigarettes and modernist poetry, the most decorated inspector on the Tokyo police force. As the shadowy Maruwa gang engages Takino in an escalating cycle of violence and relation, Detective Takagi can only stand by and watch as the beast within Takino is lured and further out of his cage.

Kenzo Kitakata is the undisputed don of hardboiled and mystery writing in Japan, where he has received numerous literary awards. The Cage won the Japan Mystery Writers Association Award and is his third novel to appear in English. His American debut Ashes was one of Las Vegas Mercury's 10 Best Novels of 2003, a BookSense Selection, and a Village Voice Summer Read.

Novel 
Tokyo Tango (Bogichin)
By YOKOMORI Rika
Translated by Tom Gill
Duckworth, New York: Overlook Press, ISBN: 1-58567-814-7, 2006

Saya embarks on an intense love affair, throwing herself wholeheartedly into a world of late-night parties, expensive clothes and friendships with the extravagant players in Tokyo's seedy underworld, but she soon comes to realize the emptiness of their life together - their happiness governed by the rise and fall of Tokyo's economy, the betrayal of his many affairs, and the boredom and dissatisfaction of being kept as a trophy with no voice and no life of her own.

Tokomori's Tokyo is a city riding on the wave of excess, while an undercurrent of corruption is beginning to surface in the society that's slipping away from its roots and losing its center. Tokyo Tango is a complex modern love story that tells an age-old story of forbidden love, brought to life under the bright lights of a city in the grip of change.

Rika Yokomori has published over thirty-five books in the last fourteen years, running through novels, essays, travel writing, reportage and female oriented self-help books. She is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines in Japan.

Novel 
Floating Clouds

By HAYASHI Fumiko
Translated by Lane Dunlop
New York: Columbia University Press, ISBN: 0-231-13628-5, 2006

Floating Clouds follows Yukiko as she moves from the physically lush and beautiful surroundings of Japanese-occupied French Indochina to the desolation and chaos of postwar Japan. Hayashi's spare, affecting novel presents a rare portrait of Japanese colonialism and the harshness of Japan's postwar experience from the perspective of a woman. Its rich cast of characters, drawn from the back alleys of urban Japan and the low rungs of society, offers an unforgettable portrait of Japanese society after the war.

Fumiko Hayashi (1903-1951) was a novelist and short story writer. Her novels won both critical and popular acclaim in Japan. She is considered one of the most important Japanese novelists of the twentieth century.

Novel 
Bedtime Eyes (Beddotaimu aizu, Yubi no tawamure, Jesshi no sebone)
By YAMADA Amy

Translated by Yumi Gunji & Marc Jardine

New York: St. Martin's Press, ISBN: 0-312-35226-3, 2006

Bedtime Eyes is the first English-language publication of three of Yamada's short novellas: "Bedtime eyes", "The Piano Player's Fingers", and "Jesse". Thematically linked, each involves the relationship between a Japanese woman and an African-American man, exploring love, the search for true communication, and the vast gulf that separates the characters' different, yet equally revealing, viewpoints.

Amy Yamada is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction. One of the most popular authors in Japan, Yamada is the winner of the Bungei Prize (for "Bedtime Eyes") and the Naoki Prize. Bedtime Eyes is her second book, following Trash, to be published in the United States. She lives outside of Tokyo, Japan.

Novel 

Embracing Family (Hoyo Kazoku)

by KOJIMA Nobuo

Translated by Yukiko Tanaka

Dalkey Archive Press Illinois State University (USA), distributed in the UK by Turnaround Publisher Services Ltd.(London)

ISBN: 1-56478-405-3, 2005

Set during the U.S. occupation following World War II, Embracing Family is a novel of conflict - between Western and Eastern traditions, between a husband and wife, between ideals and reality. At the opening of the book, Miwa Shunsuke and his wife are trapped in a strained marriage, subtly attacking one another in a manner similar to that of the characters in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? When his wife has an affair with an American GI, Miwa is forced to come to terms with the disintegration of their relationship and the fact that his attempts to repair it only exacerbate the situation.

An award-winning novel, critics have read this book as a metaphor for postwar Japanese society, in which the traditional moral and philosophical basis of Japanese culture is neglected in favor of Western conventions.

Nobuo Kojima is the author of more than thirty volumes of fiction, essays, and criticism. He has been awarded the Akutagawa Prize, and the Minister of Education Prize. In addition to his writing, he has translated ths works of William Saroyan and J.D. Salinger, among others, into his native Japanese. Embracing Family is his first book translated into English.

Essay

Undercurrents (Waga jinsei no toki no toki)

by ISHIHARA Shintarô

Translated by Wayne P. Lammers

Kodansha International Ltd., ISBN-13:978-4-7700-3007-8 / ISBN-10:4-7700-3007-X, 2005

The author of this unforgettable, true-life adventure book is the outspoken Governor of Tokyo, whose efforts to rejuvenate and refinance the city have won over even those who thought him too unorthodox to support.

What many Westerners may not know is that, before his political carrier, Ishihara was a prominent and successful novelist. Here in this volume, however, he has turned his hand to non-fiction writing, and assembled  forty episodes from an active life that represent the times he felt he was most alive. And most of these reminiscences involve two passions: sailing and scuba diving.

Ishihara has raced oceangoing yachts all over the world. In the course of this pursuit he has known of crewmen being washed overboard and drowned; of boats being upended in monstrous seas; and of navigators - himself among them - being lost from start to finish of long voyages.

Beneath the waves as well, he has had some equally exciting experiences. Among them, he recalls encounters with man-eating sharks both inside and outside a prospective cage; indeed he has seen a great white take a fisherman almost right under his nose. Within the confines of an underwater tunnel he has come close to losing his life to a giant rock cod. And thanks to powerful currents, he has put his own and his son's lives in jeopardy in remote Pacific seas.

Linking all these episodes is the awareness he acquired in extreme situations both at sea and land: of how fine a line separates life and death, and how it is possible to stray across that line yet still bear witness to the experience. Hence the recurrence of this book of incidents that defy "normal" explanation: the time his father, for example, was seen in the garden of some close friends just moments after he died elsewhere; and the tale of a young pilot who "died once" before returning from bombing Pearl Harbor.

With good humor and in a relaxed, personal style, Ishihara tells stories that will fascinate not only those who share his love of dangerous outdoor pursuits, but also people simply intrigued by the prospect knowing what lies just beyond the boundary of common reality. In all these ways, Undercurrents will lasting pleasure.

Shintaro Ishihara, elected Governor of Tokyo since 1999, has been described by his American biographer as "a national hero and for many Japanese an appealing alternative to the party hacks who led the government... When voters are polled about who they would like to see as Prime Minister, he gets high marks."

In the fall of 1955, when he was a twenty-three-year-old student, he wrote a short novel - Season of the Sun - that won the top literary prize for new writers in Japan. A film version was released a year later, with Ishihara and his younger brother Yujiro. As a result, both became teen idols, with fans mimicking their hairstyles and clothes.

Ishihara followed this triumph with numerous plays and novels - even a musical version of Treasure Island - and ran a theater company, traveled to the North Pole, raced his own yacht, and crossed South America on a motorized journey that resulted in a best-selling memoir.

At the end of the 1960s he entered politics, becoming known for the independent position he summarized in the controversial The Japan That Can Say No, which he co-authored with the head of Sonny, Akio Morita.

Novel 

Kinshu: Autumn Brocade (Kinshû)

by MIYAMOTO Teru

Translated by Roger K. Thomas

New York: New Directions Books, ISBN: 0-8112-1633-0, 2005

Life, death, karma - these interwoven themes form the heart of Teru Miyamoto's lyrical novel in letters, Kinshu: Autumn Brocade, the first work to be published in the U.S. by one of Japan's most popular literary writers.

The word kinshu  has many connotations in Japanese - brocade, poetic writing, the brilliance of autumn leaves - and resonate here as a vibrant metaphor for the complex, intimate relationship between Aki and Yasuaki.

Ten years after a dramatic divorce, they meet by chance at a mountain resort. Aki initiates a new correspondence, and letter by letter through the seasons, the secret of their past unfold as they reflect on their present struggles. From a lover's suicide, to a father's controlling demands, to Mozart's Thirty-ninth Symphony ("a veritable marvel of sixteenth notes"), to the karmic consequences of their actions, the story glides through their deeply introspective and stirring exchanges. What begins as a series of accusations and apologies, questions and excuses, turn into a source of mutual support and healing.

Born in Kobe 1947, Teru Miyamoto has become one of Japan's most celebrated authors. He has received Japan's highest literary distinctions, including the Osamu Dazai Prize and the Akutagawa Prize, and several of his works have been made into award-winning movies, including Maboroshi, directed by Hirokazu Koreeda.

Novel 

Botchan (Bocchan)

by NATSUME Sôseki

Translated by Joel Cohn

Kodansha International Ltd., ISBN-13:978-4-7700-2122-9 / ISBN-10:4-7700-2122-4, 2005

Like The Catcher in the Rye or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Botchan, a hilarious tale about a young man's rebellion against "the system" in a country school, is a classic of its kind. Among Japanese readers both young and old it has enjoyed a timeless popularity, making it, according to Donald Keene, "probably the most widely read novel in modern Japan".

The setting is Japan's deep south, where the author himself spent some time teaching English in a boy's school. Into this conservative world, with its social proprieties and established pecking order, breezes Botchan, down from the big city, with scant respect for either his elders or his noisy young charges; and the result is a chain of collisions large and small.

Much of the story seems to occur in summer, against the drone of cicadas, and in many ways this is a summer book - light, funny, never slow-moving. Here, in a lively new translation much better suited to Western tastes than any of its forebears, Botchan's homespun appeal is all the more apparent, and even those who have never been near the sunlit island on which these calamitous episodes take place should find in it uninterrupted entertainment.

Natsume Sôseki, one of Japan's most acclaimed and beloved writers, was born in Tokyo in 1867. After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University with a degree in English literature, he spent a few years teaching in a secondary schools on the southern islands of Shikoku and Kyushu. In 1900, he was sent to England by the Japanese government to pursue further literary studies. He returned to Japan in 1903 and became a lecturer in English literature at the Tokyo Imperial University, the first native Japanese to hold this post. For the next four years he combined his academic work with the composition of a series of fictional works including the novels I am a Cat, Botchan, and The Three-Cornered World, which established him as a writer of major importance.  In 1907 he resigned from the university to devote himself to full-time literary work. The lighthearted satirical spirit of some of his early writing gradually gave way to a darker, deeper quality as he probed the themes of solitude, alienation, and other social and psychological consequences of modern life in a series of celebrated novels including Sanshirô, And Then, The Gate, The Wayfarer, and Kokoro. He died in 1916.

Novel 

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (Senseijutsu Satsujinjiken)

by SHIMADA Soji

Translated by Ross and Shika Mackenzie

Tokyo: IBC Publishing, ISBN: 4-925080-81-4-C0093, 2004

On a snowy night in 1936, an artist is battered to death behind the locked door of his Tokyo studio. The police find a bizarre testament describing his plan to create Azoth - the ideal woman - from various body parts of his young female relatives. Shortly after, his eldest daughter is raped and murdered. And then his other daughters and nieces all suddenly disappear. Gradually their dismembered bodies are found, all buried according to the astrological details expounded by the artist.

The mysterious genocide grips the nation, gaffing authorities and would-be amateur detectives alike, but it remains unsolved for more than 40 years. Then one day in 1979, a document is brought to Kiyoshi Mitarari - astrologer, fortune-teller and self-styled detective. With his own version of Dr. Watson in tow - the illustrator and detective story aficionado Kazumi Ishioka - he sets out on the trail of the invisible perpetrator of the Tokyo Zodiac Murders and the creator of Azoth.

The gripping tale of magic and illusion by one of Japan's master mystery storytellers is pieced together like a great stage tragedy. The author sets the reader the challenge of unraveling the mystery before the final curtain.

Soji Shimada worked as a designer, musician and an astrology writer for a major newspaper. The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, nominated for the Edogawa Rampo Award, was his mystery novel and is still one of the best selling mystery novels in Japan. Other works include the Detective Mitarai and the Detective Yoshiki series, more than one hundred other mystery novels, and several essays.

A television drama has been based on his work. As well as being a gifted writer, Shimada is also an active campaigner for the removal of the death penalty in Japan.

Novel 

A Wife in Musashino (Musashino Fujin)

by ÔOKA Shôhei

Translated by Dennis Washburn

Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, ISBN: 1-929280-28-9, 2004

A Wife in Musashino, published in 1950, was a major critical and commercial success, and was quickly adapted to the screen by the director Mizoguchi Kenji in 1951.

Composed simultaneously with portions of Ôoka's great war novel, Fires On The Plain, A Wife in Musashino, recounts the story of the ill-faced love between a young demobilized soldier, Tsutomu, and his married cousin, Michiko. The impact on Ôoka of French writers such as Stendhal and Radiguet is apparent not only in his finely detailed observations of human emotions, but also in his trenchant critique of social customs and conventions. The novel's depiction of the motivations and circumstances of its characters and its subtle portrait of class conflict and family tensions bring the tumultuous Japanese postwar period to life, revealing with rich insight the impact of the war on Japanese society and on individual lives.

Ôoka Shôhei was one of the most distinctive literary voices of Japan's postwar era. A prolific writer who received numerous awards, he also was an active translator of French literature and was recognized as an important critic and editor. Ôoka is best known for his works that detail his experiences as a soldier in the Second World War, and a number of his contemporaries, including the novelists Mishima Yukio and Ôe Kenzaburô, have placed him among the ranks of the finest artists of modern Japanese literature.

Novel 

No Reason for Murder (Tenjo no Ao)

by SONO Ayako

Translated by Edwards Putzar

New York: ICG Muse, Inc., ISBN: 4-925080-63-3, 2003

No Reason for Murder (Tenjo no Ao) has enjoyed great popular and critical acclaim in Japan. It is more than just a gripping mystery - it is also a famous female novelist's insightful portrait of Japanese daily life, family psychology and the moral maze of contemporary Japanese society.

Set on the rural Miura peninsula, southwest of Tokyo, the story focuses on the relationship between two very different people: Yikiko, a humble, single Christian woman with strong principles; and Fujio, an undisciplined social misfit and womanizer who loathes the social mores of his fellow humain beings. Yukiko turns out to be the one woman Fujio cannot seduce, and she provides a moral lifeline for his confused psychological state as he sinks ever further into a mire of rape, murder and incarceration.

Ayako Sono, known for her concern with Japan's social problems and deteriorating moral principles, presents a rich tapestry of characters, including a smothering and indulgent mother, a high school dropout, a department store clerk, a precious young boy, a Japanese Catholic priest, a female lawyer, lonely housewives, pestering reporters and persistent policeman.

The psychology of a serial murder and a depiction of the workings of the Japanese police and media are topics rarely found in literature from Japan. Agaionst that background, Ayako Sono  delicately probes into the reasons behind love, hate, and even murder.

Ayako Sono was born in Tokyo in 1931. Besides being one of Japan's most prominent contemporary novelists, she is a respected social critic and international activist. Baptized a Cathoric in 1948, she married the novelist Shumon Miura in 1953, and in the following year her first novel was nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. Her novels often explore Christian themes and moral conflicts in Japanese society today.

She has served in various cultural organisations, including the Nippon Foundation of which she has been Chaiperson since 1955. She also travels widely and operates the Japan Overseas Missionary Activity Sponsorship. Her many international awards include the Imperial Prize, The Japan Academy (1993); La Croce Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice (The Vatican, 1979)

and the Spirit of Helen Keller Award (2000).

Novel 

Strangers (Ijin-tachi to no Natsu)

by YAMADA Taichi

Translated by Wayne P. Lammers

New York: Vertical Inc., ISBN: 1-932234-42-X, 2003

When jaded 48-years-old scriptwriter Harada Visits Tokyo's old entertainment district where he grew up, he encounters a likeable working man who is the spitting image of his dead father. Lonely, nostalgic, and willing to believe the unbelievable, Harada follows the mysterious man, embarking on a bittersweet journey into the womb of a city whose living inhabitants have perhaps changed too rapidly and lost their souls.

While the visits to his parents seem invigorating to Harada, his beautiful and strangely vulnerable neighbor Kei insists that he stop seeing them for his own good. A battle for the soul - Harada's, a tired city's - ensues in this thinking man's ghost story. Strangers, with its moral probity and indelible warmth, is a contemporary classic.

Taichi Yamada worked at world-renowned Shochiku film studios until he set out on a highly successful career as a freelance scriptwriter that changed the Japanese TV drama forever. In the 1980s he started writing novels too, and Strangers, which was made into an acclaimed movie, is among his best. A household name synonymous with thoughtful entertainment in his own country, Taichi Yamada lives in Kawasaki, Japan. Strangers is his English-language debut.