Japanese Novellas – serie

An unsettling, poignant story about two troubled strangers finding refuge in each other during the pandemic

As coronavirus spreads, paranoia overtakes a quiet northern Japanese town. People keep strict social distance, they disinfect their groceries and doorknobs, they fear-especially anyone from a teeming city. In these tense, antiseptic circumstances, two odd loners meet.

One bears the burden of possibly causing a protestor's death, the other worries her behaviour led to a student's suicide. In their remote lives, there is no relief. But then an unlikely connection begins to grow between them.

As the world collapses around them, can they become one another's refuge?

Tense, subtly disturbing literary horror from a prize-winning Japanese writer

A young girl loses her mother, and her father blindly invites his secret lover into the family home to care for her. As she obsessively tries to curate a pristine life, this new interloper remains indifferent to the girl, who seems to record her every move - and she realises only too late all that she has failed to see.

With masterful narrative control, Nails and Eyes builds to a conclusion of disturbing power. Paired with two additional stories of unsettled minds and creeping tension, it introduces a daring new voice in Japanese literature.

Seventeen-year-old Haruo spends all his waking hours online, fixated on the endangered Japanese crested ibis, Nipponia Nippon. Alone in his Tokyo apartment, living off his parents' indulgence, he descends into a fantasy world where he alone shares a bond with the last of these noble birds, their lives caged in the national conservation centre.

Haruo's destiny becomes clear. He will free the birds-alive or dead-from an undeserving civilization. As Haruo's emotional state grows increasingly erratic, he searches the internet for weapons and prepares for the night of reckoning.