East Asian Literary Fiction
by Mieko Kawakami
In 1998 Japan's stalled economy, seventeen-year-old Hana dreams of escaping her mother's fate. Working at a bar, she finds family among the women there—Kimiko, Ran, Momoko—but ambition and survival intertwine in ways both tender and brutal in this sharp portrait of precarity and yearning.
The Books Oracle — reading tracker and book recommendations drawn from your own shelf.