Japan

  • Wildcat dome

    £14.99

    Mitch and Yonko haven’t spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo, but ever since the sudden death of Mitch’s brother, they’ve been mourning in their private ways, worlds apart. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, they choose to reunite, finding each other in a city undone by disaster. Mitch and Yonko have drifted apart, but they will always be bound together. Because long ago they witnessed an unspeakable tragedy, a tragedy that they’ve kept secret for their entire lives. They never speak of it, but it’s all around them. Like history, it repeats itself.

  • Night train to the stars

    £9.99

    Japanese fairy tales – enchanting, enigmatic stories of animals, human beings and the great natural world. Dark and innocent, sublime and whimsical, Miyazawa’s stories have the ageless feel of the best fairy tales. There are animal allegories like ‘The Ungrateful Rat’ where a rude rodent insults all the objects he meets – until he meets the Rat Trap. There are morality tales like ‘The Restaurant of Many Orders’, where two hunters become the hunted. There are also transcendent stories of childhood and mortality like Miyazawa’s best-known ‘Night Train to the Stars’, where a magical steam train carries children through the night up to the heavens. These stories reveal the unique brilliance of one of Japan’s most beloved early twentieth-century writers.

  • Behind the painting

    £9.99

    Nopporn, a Thai student studying in Japan, is tasked with hosting a distinguished old family friend and his new wife, the beautiful, aristocratic Kirati. Despite their difference in age and status, and the social constraints of the day, Nopporn and Kirati are inexorably drawn to each other. A stirring portrayal of youthful romantic obsession, and later attempts to come to terms with the frailty of once-passionate feelings, ‘Behind the Painting’ also affords an intimate insight into the sterile existence endured by many women of high social status at the time. First published in 1937, the novel has been reprinted more than fifty times in Thailand and has twice been adapted for film as well as a musical.

  • The third love

    £14.99

    Having married her childhood sweetheart, Riko now finds herself trapped in a relationship that has been soured by infidelity. One day, by chance, she runs into her old friend Mr Takaoka, who offers friendship, love, and an unusual escape: he teaches her the trick of living inside her dreams. And so, each night, she sinks into another life: first as a high-ranking courtesan in the 17th century, and then as a serving lady to a princess in the late Middle Ages. As she experiences desire and heartbreak in the past, so Riko comes to reconsider her life as a 21st century woman, as a wife, as a mother, and as a lover, and to ask herself whether, after loving her husband and loving Mr Takaoka, she is now ready for her third great love.

Nomad Books