A tale of twisted love from Yoko Ogawa—author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper and the Professor. In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees ... continue
A trio of novellas explores the mysteries of love, motherhood, fertility, obsession, innocence, and cruelty, in the stories of a lonely teenage girl who falls in love with her foster brother, a young woman who records her pregnant sister's daily moods ina
Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family. He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem—ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper—with a ten-year-old son—who is hired to care for the Professor. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold mem... continue
**Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020** On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those who remember live in fear of the Memory Police. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river, or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wa... continue