The story takes place in a beautiful but deeply authoritarian country whose capital is called Mahoroba. The nation presents itself as peaceful, prosperous and aesthetically perfect. Its streets are clean, its white buildings gleam beneath an unnaturally vivid sky, and seasonal flowers—especially hydrangeas—are cultivated as symbols of social harmony. Yet the apparent beauty is manufactured […]
This is Maki Kashimada’s new novel in ten years after the publication of Touring the Land of the Dead. The novel is narrated by an unnamed woman whose memories revolve around her extraordinary friend Anju. Their relationship is intimate, competitive, devotional and erotic. Although they are not biologically related, the narrator thinks of them as […]
1. Thank You for Your Understanding The first story takes place inside a large company whose public image is progressive, fashionable and attentive to diversity. Internally, however, its employees remain trapped by hierarchy, gender expectations and the fear of saying the wrong thing. A central figure is Sakurai, an experienced female employee who has survived […]
Chapter Three The second book resumes with the search for missing elementary-school pupil Kotaro Narui, whose disappearance has revived memories of the unsolved—or supposedly solved—kidnapping and murder of his aunt, Sae Niinuma, twenty-five years earlier. Kotaro’s classmates, Hayato Kurai and Kazuki Sakai, have followed their own suspicions to an abandoned school building once used by […]
Chapter One The novel begins with the disappearance of Sae Niinuma, a twenty-two-year-old receptionist at a department store in the fictional Hokuriku prefecture of L. In July 1994, a man telephones her workplace claiming to be “Mori,” a reporter from the respected local newspaper. He says he wants to interview Sae for a feature celebrating […]
1. “Kaho” The first story introduces Kaho as a woman whose life is shaped by a painful, almost philosophical awareness of faces, beauty, ugliness and the way other people judge the female body. It opens during a dinner date. The man sitting opposite her tells her, after dessert, that he has dated many women but […]
The novel follows a pregnant woman, apparently in her late thirties or around forty, over the course of a single day and night in Tokyo, while her mind moves through decades of memory. The opening scene is ordinary on the surface: she has just had blood drawn at a maternity clinic. Yet this routine prenatal […]
The book is narrated by a woman whose life has been stripped of ordinary purpose by AI, work, and the hunger to be useful. The story begins not in the everyday world but inside a hyper-realistic zombie game world, in a mountain hotel called something like The Plugged Hill. The narrator is the hotel’s sole […]
The protagonist, Nogami, is a married woman approaching middle age who works in public relations for S Corporation, a food-related company that is publicly celebrated as a progressive and employee-friendly workplace. The novel opens before dawn, while Nogami lies awake beside her peacefully sleeping husband. She has been suffering from severe insomnia for months. Unable […]
Hooked opens with Eriko Shimura, a thirty-year-old elite employee at a major Japanese trading company, arriving at her office before dawn. Eriko is disciplined, ambitious, immaculately groomed, and fiercely invested in the idea that time is the most precious resource in life. She lives with her parents, works relentlessly, and believes that constant self-improvement is […]