The year is 2021. While the whole world has been thrown into chaos by the Covid-19 crisis, the disease is in remission in Japan. But it has not been completely eliminated and when the number of cases surges, ...

Company employee Shimamoto gets on the wrong train and disembarks at an unfamiliar station. His subordinate, Yazaki, utters a strange warning: “Better leave as soon as you can. This is the haunted city ...

Yoko enjoys her single life as a successful author. Yet since childhood she has had a recurring  dream in which she is an unhappy housewife with a husband and child who make incessant demands on her. ...

A novel in eight short stories involving incidents of murder, injurious assault, and such by a writer regarded as the originator and queen of the genre known as iyamisu in Japan—literally, “eww ...

The story takes place in fictitious Tomazawa, a town that once grew to a population of 80,000 in the middle of a flourishing coal-mining district in Hokkaido. Since the advent of cheap oil, the town has ...

A fire breaks out in a building where a religious group in Nagano runs a brothel. The bodies recovered from the ruins are infested by a mysterious worm, and the blood in their veins has turned yellow. ...

Kai Ogata, 14, all but loses his two cousins to vicious bullying: Shota Dobashi, 13, is beaten into a coma, and his sister Suzuna, 12, is raped and left emotionally scarred. Thanks to provisions of the ...

The story is set on the small but picturesque island of Enoshima, a popular seaside resort in Kanagawa Prefecture just south of Tokyo. The Nishiura Photo Studio that was in business there for a full century ...

The body of a young teacher named Okumura is found dismembered and reassembled in the shape of a chair in a middle-school classroom. One of his students, a fair-faced 13-year-old named Kobayashi, happens ...

An intelligent and thrilling entertainment that follows the covert exploits of spies on the eve of hostilities between Japan and the United States in December 1941. Saburō Shiota is an ensign in the Imperial ...

This volume contains eight short stories that complement author Tetsuya Honda’s best-selling novel series featuring crime fighter Reiko Himekawa. Five of the tales relate cases that Reiko, now 33, undertakes ...

In an apartment in suburban Tokyo, the remains of a body are discovered along with a dozen or so cats. All that can be gathered from the scene is the victim’s name, Yoko Suzuki. Whether the death is ...

Freelance writer Sayoko Hamaoka is stabbed to death on the street. Shortly afterward, 68-year-old Sakuzo Machimura turns himself in to the police and confesses to the crime, claiming that he did it for ...

In this collection of five short mysteries, “Nobara no niwa e“ (To the Garden of Wild Roses) takes place at a luxurious villa in the old capital of Kamakura, south of Tokyo. Shihoko ...

A fanciful tale in which a dog rescued by a young nurse working for a terminal-care facility becomes a therapy dog for the patients in an unusual way, and also solves an old murder mystery. The dog, a ...

Public prosecutor Hideki Otomo asks his friend Koichiro Sakuma, who works for Forest, a major eldercare chain, for help in finding a high-end facility for his aging father. Forest has been growing rapidly ...

A year after the events of Inbijiburu rein (Invisible Rain), Reiko Himekawa’s team in Criminal Investigation Division I of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department has been disbanded, and Reiko ...

Hiromi drifts from one motherless home to another, serving as a surrogate mother to children whose single fathers—truck drivers, crewmen on far-roaming fishing boats—are away for extended periods of ...

Three linked stories portray the emotional ups and downs of adolescence. In Yakusoku no basho, yakusoku no jikan (Agreed Time, Agreed Place), 13-year-old Yū Kikuchi arrives as a midyear transfer ...

Who is the person who lives next door? Koichi Takakura is a criminology professor who lives with his wife Yasuko in the suburbs of central Tokyo. Like many married couples, the Takakuras hadn’t given ...