Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them. Betrayed by her wealthy lover, Sunja finds unexpected salvation when a young tubercular minister offers to marry her and bring her to Japan to start a new life. So begins a sweeping saga of exceptional people in exile from a homeland they never knew...

A successful Japanese nightclub owner, husband, and father risks everything to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart.

Satiric comedy in which two young brothers refuse to talk until their parents agree to buy them a television set. Set in a 1950s residential suburb of Tokyo.

After learning that her father is the Crown Prince of Japan, Izumi travels to Tokyo, where she discovers that Japanese imperial life--complete with designer clothes, court intrigue, paparazzi scandals, and a forbidden romance with her handsome but stoic bodyguard--is a tough fit for the outspoken and irreverant eighteen-year-old from northern California.

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and...

As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Haruki Murakami's protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls, plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic, and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Dance Dance Dance is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through the cultural Cuisinart that is contemporary Japan, a place where everything...

"Kyoto, Japan, 1948. 'If a woman knows nothing else, she should know how to be silent ... Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist.' Such is eight-year-old Noriko 'Nori' Kamiza's first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents' imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her shameful...

Life in Japan for a transplanted California with a fledging antiques business and a nonexistent love life isn't always fun, but when the flower arranging class Rei Shimura's aunt cajoles her into taking turns into a stage for murder, Rei finds plenty of excitement she's been missing. Unfortunately too many people have a reason for committing the crime--her aunt included. While struggling to adjust to the nuances of Japanese propriety, trying to keep...

A warrior arose 140 years ago in Kyoto, with the coming of the American "Black Ships," who helped introduce the progressive age known as Meiji and then vanished. This tale begins in the 11th year of Meiji, in Tokyo.

The first in a proposed trilogy set in ancient Japan, telling the story of Takeo, a sixteen-year-old saved from a massacre by the mysterious Lord Otori, who struggles to reconcile his dual nature--the one given him by the Hidden, the pacifist people among whom he was born and raised, and the one inherited from his father, a celebrated assassin.