The recent rise of translated Japanese fiction showed no signs of stopping in 2025, with many works achieving major international literary awards. Akira Otani made history as the first Japanese winner of the UK’s Dagger Award for Crime Fiction in Translation, while Hiromi Kawakami’s speculative novel, Under the Eye of the Big Bird, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
The “healing fiction” movement, popularized post-pandemic by authors like Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Before the Coffee Gets Cold), continued to offer solace throughout a turbulent year with nostalgic slice-of-life episodes. On the other hand, some of the year’s most celebrated works leaned into more radical themes — confronting disability, ecological collapse and dystopian futures. Here are just a few of 2025’s most talked-about works of translated Japanese fiction.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird
Hiromi Kawakami
(translated by Asa Yoneda)
Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, this is a sweeping speculative novel that imagines a future where humans are nearing extinction. Under the watch of “Mothers,” new life-forms — factory-made from animal cells or sustained by water and sunlight — must interbreed with alien beings to ensure survival. Spanning geological eons through 14 interconnected episodes, the novel asks what remains of human emotion when the structures of our world are gone.
Hiromi Kawakami is one of Japan’s most globally celebrated literary voices today, best known for her work Strange Weather in Tokyo. Her writing often blends mundane environments and daily life with subtle, enchanting surrealism and a dreamlike atmosphere.
Hunchback
Saou Ichikawa
(translated by Polly Barton)
Longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize and winner of Japan’s Akutagawa Prize, Hunchback offers a witty, unsentimental take on disability, sexuality and autonomy. It centers on Shaka Isawa, a woman with a congenital muscle disorder who lives in a care home. While her physical life is limited, Shaka spends her nights writing raunchy erotica for a digital audience. When she tweets an offer of a large sum of money for a sperm donor one day, it unleashes a series of events that forever change her life.
Saou Ichikawa is the first author with a severe disability to win the Akutagawa Prize. Speaking from an electric wheelchair, Ichikawa described the novel as her “revenge” against a literary world that has long ignored or sanitized the lived experiences of disabled people.
The Night of Baba Yaga
Akira Otani
(translated by Sam Bett)
Akira Otani made history in 2025 as the first Japanese winner of the Dagger Award for Crime Fiction in Translation. The Night of Baba Yaga is about fierce multiracial fighter Yoriko Shindo, who is kidnapped by the yakuza and then forced to become a bodyguard for the boss’s sheltered daughter, Shoko Naiki. Though originally wary of her post, Yoriko gradually forms an unbreakable friendship and bond with Shoko.
Born in Tokyo in 1981, Otani began her career as a video game writer. In 2024, The Night of Baba Yaga, her fourth feature-length novel published in Japan, was her first to be translated into English. Tokyo Weekender featured the book in its “10 Exciting Japan-Related Books to Read in 2024” roundup in January of that year.
In interviews, Otani has stressed the importance of exploring the many ambiguities of life in her works and depicting the nuanced relationships between women.
Butter
Asako Yuzuki
(translated by Polly Barton)
Inspired by a true serial murder case, Butter won Book of the Year in the debut fiction category of the 2025 British Book Awards and was the Waterstones Book of the Year 2024. It follows a Tokyo journalist who becomes dangerously obsessed with a gourmet cook, Manako Kajii, accused of killing lonely businessmen with high-calorie, butter-rich meals. The story explores the protagonist’s descent into a world of sensory indulgence as she interviews the suspected killer.
Yuzuki’s ability to blend sensory, decadent prose with unsettling psychological depth has established her as a standout voice in global contemporary fiction. Her works frequently use true crime or domestic satire to expose the friction between personal desire and societal duty, and are often praised for their social critique of the invisible pressures placed on Japanese women.
Strange Pictures
Uketsu
(translated by Jim Rion)
A massive commercial sensation, Strange Pictures is a multidecade horror-mystery that integrates eerie visual clues directly into the narrative. When Shuhei Sasaki discovers a blog filled with foreboding images and a chilling final entry, he is pulled into a complex web of murders that spans generations. Unique for its interactive nature, the book allows readers to connect the dots between different timelines, as secret messages are slowly unraveled. Originally published in 2022 and released in English in 2025, Strange Pictures was shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year 2025.
As an anonymous writer, Uketsu himself is shrouded in mystery. There is little known about his identity, other than that he’s a Japanese man. Starting out as a YouTuber in 2018, Uketsu originally released his first work, Strange Houses, as a short story video, and was prompted to turn it into a book upon its success. Uketsu only ever appears in public clad in all black, with a white papier-mâché mask.
Vanishing World
Sayaka Murata
(translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori)
Originally published in 2015 and released in English in 2025, Vanishing World envisions an alternate Japan where sexual intercourse is considered a taboo, animalistic act and children are born in laboratories. The protagonist struggles with this sterile society and eventually flees to a mysterious town, where the “primitive” concepts of sex and traditional family still exist, searching for a way to connect that feels authentic in a world of artificial purity.
Sayaka Murata became a global star after the immense success of Convenience Store Woman, which draws directly from her experience working part time at a konbini. Her writing is known for blending dark humor with unsettling speculative elements and frequently centers on “outsider” protagonists who struggle against societal expectations.
The Place of Shells
Mai Ishizawa
(translated by Polly Barton)
Awarded the Akutagawa Prize upon its original release in 2021, The Place of Shells is a hypnotic and poetic rendering of trauma, loss and memory. Set in Göttingen during the summer of 2020, the novel follows a Japanese Ph.D. student who is inexplicably reunited with her friend Nomiya, who died nearly a decade earlier in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Drawing comparisons to W. G. Sebald and Yoko Tawada, Ishizawa’s novel viscerally captures the physical manifestations of grief and the destabilizing power of ecological disaster.
Born in Sendai and currently based in Germany, Mai Ishizawa is an art historian and novelist who draws on her expertise in medieval iconography in her works. Her writing is often haunting and meditative, seamlessly blending Japanese and European landscapes to weave dreamlike narratives. The Place of Shells is her debut novel.
The Kamogawa Food Detectives
Hisashi Kashiwai
(translated by Jesse Kirkwood)
Consistently appearing on Goodreads lists and various online reviews throughout 2025, this cozy mystery story follows a father-daughter duo who run a hidden diner in Kyoto and act as “food detectives.” That is, they recreate lost recipes from their customers’ pasts — dishes that hold the key to a cherished memory or a path toward emotional closure.
Before finding international literary fame, Hisashi Kashiwai was a dentist working in his hometown in Kyoto. The Kamogawa Food Detectives series has been translated into over 20 languages and even adapted into a TV series by NHK. His work, often compared to the healing stories of Toshikazu Kawaguchi, explores themes of nostalgia, love, grief and reconciliation.
The Convenience Store by the Sea
Sonoko Machida
(translated by Bruno Navasky)
Set in a 24-hour shop called Tenderness in a small seaside town, this book tells interconnected stories of people finding redemption and connection amid the aisles. Each character — from a grieving widow to a struggling student — finds a sense of healing and sanctuary here, illustrating that even a mundane convenience store can be a site of empathy and community.
Gaining a devoted following for her comforting stories, Sonoko Machida deals with themes of loneliness and grief in ways that feel grounded and approachable. Her works, celebrated for their warmth and emotional depth, tend to highlight societally marginalized voices and chosen families.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Haruki Murakami
(translated by Philip Gabriel)
A New York Times bestseller, Murakami’s newest epic — an altered expansion of his 1980 short story “The City, and Its Uncertain Walls” — revolves around a man’s search for a long-lost love within a mysterious walled city, where shadows are discarded and dreams are “read.” As the protagonist moves between our reality and this surreal landscape, the novel explores themes of identity, memory and the sacrifices one makes to preserve an idealized image of the past.
Murakami needs no introduction as one of Japan’s most famous authors. His distinctive magical realism and fusion of high-brow metaphysical questions with pop-culture accessibility have made him a vital literary figure in the sphere of contemporary global fiction. He has notably been described as a “born translated” author by literary critic Rebecca Walkowitz, crafting a lean, rhythmic prose that feels inherently international and transparent.
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Updated On January 7, 2026
