Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength...

In Tokyo--one of the world's largest megacities--a stray cat is wending her way through the back alleys. And, with each detour, she brushes up against the seemingly disparate lives of the city-dwellers, connecting them in unexpected ways. But the city is changing. As it does, it pushes her to the margins where she chances upon a series of apparent strangers--from a homeless man squatting in an abandoned hotel, to a shut-in hermit afraid to leave his...

The fourth novel in the internationally bestselling Before the Coffee Gets Cold Series. The regulars at the magical Cafe Funiculi Funicula are well acquainted with its famous legend and extraordinary time-travel offer. Many patrons have reunited with old flames, made amends with estranged family and visited loved ones. But the journey is not without risks, and there are rules to follow. In the tradition of Toshikazu Kawaguchi's sensational Before...

When eighteen year old Keiko Yamada's father dies unexpectedly, he leaves behind a one way ticket to Japan, an unintelligible death poem about powerful Japanese spirits and their gigantic, beast-like Guardians, and the cryptic words: “Go to Japan in my place. Find the Gate. My camera will show you the way.” Alone and afraid, Keiko travels to Tokyo, determined to fulfil her father's dying wish. There, beneath glittering neon signs, her father's...

Nana "Hachi" Komatsu hopes that moving to Tokyo will help here make a clean start and leave her capricious love life behind her. Nana Osaki, who arrives in the city at the same time, has plans to score big in the world of rock' n' roll. Although these two young women come from different backgrounds, they quickly gecome best friends in a whirlwind world of sex, music, fashion, gossip and all-night parties! Takumi and Hachi are getting married, but...

Hachi has not seen Nana or the rest of Blast since she moved in with Takumi, and Shin and Reira's joint birthday party seems like the perfect chance for a little reunion. But Takumi is furious at Hachi for crashing the event, and she is forced to choose Takumi over Nana one more time. Was this Hachi's last chance to get back in Nana's life?

"When a bomb rips the facade off the Kensington Hotel in Tokyo, dozens are killed and injured while one man walks calmly away from the wreckage, a coy smile playing on his lips. Former Army intelligence officer Dan Reilly, now an international hotel executive with high level access to the CIA, makes it his mission to track him down. He begins a jet-setting search for answers as the clock ticks down to a climactic event that threatens NATO and the...

""A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be." In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace--and will touch lives in ways she...

Though it has a lovely name, the real "Isle of Dreams" is a hunk of reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay where the city dumps its garbage--and yet, Shozo Saka, a middle-aged widower, does indeed find the place beautiful: gravitating more and more, since the death of his wife, toward the Isle's massive piles of trash. One day, however, his refuge is invaded by Yoko, a mysterious woman in black, who visits the Isle on her motorcycle for no other reason than...