The story follows Atono, an elderly woman living alone in Hiroshima, who carries memories of her mother, a dementia patient who disappeared without a trace. Through her days with a neighborhood walking group and nights caring for a friend, an eerie rumor spreads about a woman in a red vest. The novella cultivates a sense of unease through collective psychological tension among the elderly and the unreliable narration of its protagonist, artfully rendered in Hiroshima dialect.

She says there is a woman in a red vest at the house -- an unverifiable rumor circulating in the walking group casts an unsettling air over the town.

Xing Yao, a high school girl born in Hong Kong and raised in Japan by immigrant foster parents, struggles with questions about her identity: Is she Hongkonese? Chinese? Japanese? What is a homeland? What is a mother tongue? What is family? What are her feelings for her best friend? A raw and radiant debut novel by an 18-year-old author, racing through the tremors of identity at full speed.

"What am I, really," she thinks, wiping her reddened legs with a tissue, tears and words spilling out, impossible to stop.

When three coworkers in the same department begin a string of absences, the narrator finds her frustration mounting as her own workload grows. One day she is let in on their love triangle by Shimomura, a capable senior colleague who has been abandoned by her fiancé. Drawn into the orbit of Shimomura's inscrutable "dance"—impossible to read as grief or defiance—the narrator is forced to confront the opaque, inviolable interior of another person. A prize-winning debut novel set in the uneasy terrain of the Japanese workplace.

Today is the day I slap them both. An Akutagawa Prize-nominated debut that renders the murky disquiet of the modern workplace.

A graduate student of architecture who works part-time in male escort services moves from Tokyo to Amami Oshima and works as a tour guide, drawing on the island's dialect, folk songs, and a multilingual atmosphere of Japanese, English, and Chinese. The title is drawn from an essay by Shimao Toshio, and the work is praised for its unique, sensual prose that evokes the island's pervasive loneliness.

I walk down from my room to the sea. It begins just 345 steps from my front door.