Japanese Fiction Thrillers

From Mieko Kawakami, award-winning author of Breasts and Eggs, comes a bold novel of sacrifice and the tumultuous bonds of sisterhood, set in the gritty Tokyo of the 1990s. “I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Mieko Kawakami.” —Haruki Murakami “To...

EDO NOIR FROM THE TOKUGAWA ERA A junk dealer works his way through the back streets of Surugadai in midwinter, calling out for old rags and broken crockery. He is not a junk dealer. He is Mankichi, the Tenma detective from Osaka, and he has traced a missing woman to a shuttered house with a changed nameplate and bars on the windows. What he finds inside is worse than he imagined — and the people who put her there are already coming back. The second book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto shifts the action from the open roads and waterways of the Kamigata to the warren of Tokugawa-era Tokyo, ...

In the winter of 1937, the village of Okamura is abuzz with excitement over the forthcoming wedding of a son of the grand Ichiyanagi family. But amid the gossip over the approaching festivities, there is also a worrying rumour - it seems a sinister masked man has been asking questions about the Ichiyanagis around the village. Then, on the night of the wedding, the Ichiyanagi family are woken by a terrible scream, followed by the sound of eerie music - death has come to Okamura, leaving no trace but a bloody samurai sword, thrust into the pristine snow outside the house.

EDO NOIR FROM THE TOKUGAWA ERA Osaka, the 1760s. Two men arrive after dark at a canal-side guardhouse, looking for a room. One is a gruff tile-maker from Edo named Karakusa Gingorō. The other is his man Taichi, who is carrying a great deal of money and would prefer not to be murdered for it. They are bound for Awa — the sealed domain on the island of Shikoku that forbids entry to outsiders — on a mission to find a vanished spy whose disappearance, ten years ago, left behind a grieving daughter and an unanswered question that could bring down the shogunate. They do not know that a woman...

Emma Hooper thought coming home to small-town life and the family farm would give her a chance to rest and recover from a traumatic accident. But that was before she started seeing ghosts. It was before Grandma Hooper started singing on the roof, and it was way, way before anybody spotted a ghost in a 19th-century cavalry uniform coming out of an outhouse. Can Emma learn to handle her newfound ability to see spirits, while figuring out a confusing relationship with the handsome local doctor? All while solving the ghastly murder of Preacher Jacob?

A murdered princess. A buried secret. A spy with one chance to stop a war. 1975. The Empire of Japan never fell—and neither did its ghosts. When a royal assassination shatters the illusion of order, disgraced intelligence officer Major Suzuki Wataru is pulled back into the field. His mission: uncover the truth—or take the fall. In the decaying shadows of Manchukuo, Suzuki’s only ally is Lieutenant Park Ji-won, a sharp Korean operative with secrets as deep as the Empire’s own. Together, they follow a trail of betrayal that could fracture the global balance of power between Imperial ...

UNIT 731 In the frozen heart of Manchuria, behind the barbed wire of Unit 731, science became a weapon, and humanity the casualty. Dr. Kenji Tanaka, a brilliant young microbiologist, arrives with dreams of discovery and national pride. What he finds is a nightmare: a facility where prisoners are dissected alive, diseases are cultivated for warfare, and compassion is considered weakness. As the horrors mount and the screams of the voiceless echo through sterile halls, Tanaka is forced to confront the truth: he is no longer just an observer. He is complicit. Haunted by guilt and drawn to a ...

Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother who thought she had finally escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day to extort money from her, threatening both her and her teenaged daughter Misato, the situation quickly escalates into violence and Togashi ends up dead on her...

Jun Nakayama was a silent-film star in the early days of Hollywood. By 1964, he is living in complete obscurity, until a young writer, Nick Bellinger, tracks him down for an interview. When Bellinger reveals that he has written a screenplay with Nakayama in mind, Jun is intrigued by the possibility of returning to movies. But he begins to worry that someone might delve too deeply into the past and uncover the events that abruptly ended his career in 1922. Like the changing social and racial tides in California - and the unsolved murder of his favorite director.

A taut psychological thriller about the hidden demons that guide our convictions, our biases, and our deepest desires, available in English for the first time from “Japan’s Agatha Christie.” (The Sunday Times) In the middle of the night, a car drives off a pier. An elderly man drowns, but...

Nanao, nicknamed Ladybug - the self-proclaimed “unluckiest assassin in the world” - boards a bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka with one simple task: Grab a suitcase and get off at the next stop. Unbeknownst to him, the deadly duo Tangerine and Lemon are also after the very same suitcase - and they are not the only dangerous passengers onboard. Satoshi, “the Prince”, with the looks of an innocent schoolboy and the mind of a viciously cunning psychopath, is also in the mix and has history with some of the others.

Akira Kido is a divorce attorney whose own marriage is in danger of being destroyed by emotional disconnect. With a midlife crisis looming, Kido's life is upended by the reemergence of a former client, Rié Takemoto. She wants Kido to investigate a dead man - her recently deceased husband, Daisuké. Upon his death she discovered that he’d been living a lie. His name, his past, his entire identity belonged to someone else, a total stranger.

Nestled deep in the mist-shrouded mountains, The Village of Eight Graves takes its name from a bloody legend. In the 16th century, eight samurais, who had taken refuge there along with a secret treasure, were murdered by the inhabitants, bringing a terrible curse down upon their village. Centuries later, a mysterious young man named Tatsuya arrives in town, bringing a spate of deadly poisonings in his wake. The inimitably scruffy and brilliant Kosuke Kindaichi investigates.

Kosuke Kindaichi arrives on the remote Gokumon Island bearing tragic news—the son of one of the island’s most important families has died, on a troop transport ship bringing him back home after the Second World War. But Kindaichi has not come merely as a messenger—with his last words, the dying man warned that his three step-sisters’ lives would now be in danger. The scruffy detective is determined to get to the bottom of this mysterious prophesy, and to protect the three women if he can.

The acclaimed author of the celebrated literary horror novels The Hunger and The Deep turns her psychological and supernatural eye on the horrors of the Japanese American internment camps in World War II. 1944: As World War II rages on, the threat has come to the home front. In a remote corner...

With My Annihilation, Fuminori Nakamura, master of literary noir, has constructed a puzzle box of a narrative in the form of a confessional diary that implicates its reader in a heinous crime. Delving relentlessly into the darkest corners of human consciousness, My Annihilation interrogates the unspeakable thoughts all humans share that can be monstrous when brought to life, revealing with disturbing honesty the psychological motives of a killer.

A chilling Japanese psychological thriller and Edgar Award finalist about four women, forever connected by one horrible day in their childhood -- fifteen years later, someone wants to make sure they never forget. When they were girls, Sae, Maki, Akiko and Yuko were tricked into leaving their...

In the Chizurui family mansion, a haunting presence casts a shadow over its residents. By night, an eerie figure, clad in a sinister Hannya mask is seen roaming around the house. An amateur murder mystery writer, Akimitsu Takagi, is sent to investigate—but his investigation takes a harrowing turn as tragedy strikes. Within the confines of a locked study, the head of the family is found dead, with only an ominous Hannya mask lying on the floor by his side and the lingering scent of jasmine in the air.

Ken Hideyoshi is the new guy in Halawa Correctional Institute. He’s tough looking, a hard case. His cellmate is Cal—the mute tattoo artist of the prison who murdered his own wife. Ken, already inked with a gang symbol and a Japanese emblem, eventually asks Cal to create an elaborate tattoo on his back, in kanji script, of Musashi’s Book of the Void.

Acclaimed bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found brutally murdered in his home on the night before he's planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver. His body is found in his office, a locked room, within his locked house, by his wife and his best friend, both of whom have rock solid...