Imagine you come across a small café in a back alley of Tokyo where you can travel back in time to talk things over with your ex-boyfriend, as long as you come back before your coffee gets cold. Or you stumble into an enchanted library, where the librarian gives you a book to cure your frustration with your sales job. Or, to ramp it up a bit, you serially murder misogynistic businessmen, tempting them to their deaths with your acclaimed beef stew. Or – and this is a common one – your worries about financial security are calmed by the appearance of a particularly comforting cat.
For younger generations who grew up on Studio Ghibli films, the peace and order of the idealised Japanese life is a wistful fantasy
Lovers of contemporary Japanese fiction will already be familiar with these fantasies, and these days, that’s everyone from critics to BookTok teens. Last year, 43 per cent of the top translated fiction sales were Japanese, and the fiction shelves at any good bookshop will bear this out. Interest in Japanese authors is nothing new – Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto have been cult writers here since the 1990s – but these days it’s become an obsession, largely due to the runaway success of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter. Her gruesome tale about a gourmet chef turned serial killer won the Waterstones Book of the Year 2024 and topped the translation bestseller charts, displacing her compatriot Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s dreamy Before the Coffee Gets Cold. Yuzuki’s biting social commentary and Kawaguchi’s cosy fairytale represent the two main strands of Japanese fiction in the UK market.
Its success is partly because Japan is a country at the sharp end of modern anxieties. 92 per cent of the population live and work in urban settings, and despite or because of this, surveys suggest its people are some of the loneliest in the world. Younger people are so discouraged by their financial prospects that birth rates have hit record lows, while their obsession with thinness has led to a controlling diet culture far beyond our own. Urbanisation, alienation, problems with body image: the very issues associated with Gen Z are writ large in Japanese fiction. Rika, the heroine of Butter, is warned by her boyfriend that ‘men putting on weight is different from women putting on weight’. In Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, the narrator struggles with choices around parenthood in a society ‘catered to couples’, while her sister is desperate for plastic surgery because ‘prettiness means value’. And then there is Keiko, Sayaka Murata’s titular Convenience Store Woman, who becomes part of the ‘machine of society’ when she starts following her employer’s corporate manual, gradually turning into a ‘convenience store animal’.
It’s a lot more fun reading about these issues when they’re on the other side of the world. And recognising familiar problems in an unfamiliar setting can help us to think about them differently, the technique which literary critics call defamiliarisation. Take Convenience Store Woman: the heroine’s obsession with adopting corporate behaviours is an exaggerated but recognisable version of what we all do at work. But the eccentric Keiko is thrilled to ‘accomplish a normal facial expression and manner of speech’, to pull off ‘being a “person”’ – if fitting in makes her happier, is being a convenience store woman really so bad? Ginny Tapley Takemori, Murata’s translator, has suggested that in Japanese fiction, things are ‘not as black and white as they are in western fiction’. It certainly helps you reframe things. For all the misogyny and murder in Butter, after all, Yuzuki and her characters are most interested in the pleasures of gastronomy.
The biggest sell of all, though, is what the Japanese call ‘healing fiction’. If the social commentaries confront modern anxieties, these novels are their antidote; if you’re stressed out by Convenience Store Woman, turn to The Convenience Store by the Sea, where Sonoko Machida casts the same setting as a seaside idyll. For younger generations who grew up on Studio Ghibli films like My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away, the peace and order of the idealised Japanese life is a wistful fantasy, and a whole genre has risen up around it. Stories are set in cafés, libraries, and stores with names like Tenderness, where local communities cross paths and come together, lost narrators find happiness in moments of connection, and cats wander in and out of the frame.
Michiko Aoyama’s bestselling What You Are Looking for Is in the Library is a manifesto for reading these books. Restless store workers and accountants visit Mrs Komachi’s magical library, and she gives them a book which makes them see the world in a happier way. There is a comforting sense that reading is healing; that unlike looking at Instagram, which is full of posts about this cosy aesthetic, picking up a novel is already the real deal. The books are designed with this desire in mind. Publishers of novels like Before the Coffee Gets Cold will sometimes put cats on the English covers even when the story doesn’t involve a cat at all, because they know what we’re all hoping for.
Much of what appeals to us in these works can be found in their style. Translators like Tapley Takemori and Polly Barton, who translated Butter, have managed to make these texts colloquial and accessible; an easier task these days, since audiences are increasingly receptive to Japanese terms and customs. But they also capture some of the nuances of the complex Japanese writing system, which consists of two phonetic scripts and thousands of kanji characters, as well as the recognisable spareness of the language. Barton memorably described learning a language as ‘the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling’. That feeling is the magic of reading Japanese literature, and it certainly isn’t lost in translation.
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