A cat who looks like Orson Welles and is the grim reaper. A murder in a secret society of chivalric knights in a high school. An utterly disturbing tale involving rabbits and fathers. These short stories by Mieko Kanai, first published in Japan in the 1970s, are teeming with transgressive sexuality, nightmares, knotty family ties, endless labyrinths, and metafictional themes that seem to unfold into illogical but deeply satisfying puzzles.

Finally translated into English by the brilliant Polly Barton, these stories are an important (and previously missing) piece of the Japanese literary canon, bridging the eroticism of Tanizaki and the surrealism of Kobo Abe with the contemporary literature of Haruki Murakami, Hiroko Oyamada, and Sayaka Murata.

In the summer of 2020, a young Japanese academic based in the German city of Göttingen waits at the train station to meet her old friend Nomiya, who died nine years earlier in Japan's devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami but has now inexplicably returned from the dead. As soon as he arrives, she guides him through the city, showing him Göttingen's scale model of the solar system and talking about her PhD studies, her roommate, and their mutual friends. Yet it isn't long before his spectral presence in the city begins to fray the narrator's psyche and destabilize the world around them: eerie objects are found in the forest, the model of Pluto begins disappearing and reappearing, and threads in the fabric of time start unraveling. The narrative continues to spiral and unfold, with the presence of death ever lingering.

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, The Place of Shells is a hypnotic, poetic novel that explores the ebb and flow of memory—its physical manifestations, its sudden detours—and the overwhelming stranglehold of trauma.

The apparently unremarkable Natsumi lives in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes to the supermarket, visits friends, and gossips with neighbors. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own infernally buzzing internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that forms a lonely life confined to a middle-class home, where both everything and nothing happens.

With shades of Clarice Lispector, Elena Ferrante, and Kobo Abe, this verbally acrobatic novel by the esteemed novelist, essayist, and critic Mieko Kanai—whose work enjoys a cult status in Japan—is a disconcerting and radically imaginative portrait of selfhood in late-stage capitalist society.