A Personal Matter is Kenzaburo Oe's novel about Bird, a young man thrown into fear, flight, and self-disgust after the birth of a disabled child. As his dream of Africa collides with immediate responsibility, the novel follows his movement toward accepting his fate.

A young man longing to escape is forced by his child's birth to face his own ethics.

The House of Nire is Morio Kita's long novel about the Nire psychiatric hospital in Aoyama, Tokyo, and three generations of the family around it. Against the movement from Meiji into Showa, it layers comedy, loneliness, and decline around the expansive Dr. Kiichiro Nire.

A lively family chronicle around a great hospital reflects the light and shadow of modern Japan.

A novel centered on the image of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, where past events, memory, love, and death overlap. Beneath its lyrical prose, it follows guilt and loss that cannot be erased simply by trying to forget.

Forgetfulness becomes both a form of release and a mirror of the sorrow of people who cannot escape the past.

A novel in which kinship, sexuality, and memory become entangled through a father's death and the awareness of a young man who resembles him. Its urbane, restrained style brings the characters' twisted emotions into sharp relief.

Like plants trying to root themselves in sand, the characters search for life within unstable relationships.