May 4–10, 2026
Sharp wit, dark humour, and characters who absolutely should not be doing what they’re doing. Five novels that make you laugh uncomfortably.
A nameless man chases a vanished girlfriend through hotels and wind tunnels, accumulating absurd encounters with a Sheep Man oracle — Murakami's bewildering satire of consumer Japan spirals into something genuinely unsettling, then somehow funny again.
by Han Kang
A woman's refusal to eat meat becomes an act of radical defiance — Han Kang watches her family implode from everyone's perspective but hers, finding dark comedy in their desperate attempts to reclaim control over a body that's finally stopped obeying.
A bestselling novelist murdered in his locked home — and the real crime, it turns out, is the resentment that metastasizes silently between those closest to us. Higashino's detective peels back layers of motive so baroque and patient they make conventional jealousy look quaint.
by Makoto Shinkai, Naruki Nagakawa
A woman and her cat exchange wordless understandings on Tokyo's margins — Shinkai's gift for the transcendent finds its truest home in silence, in the space between a trembling hand and a purring presence.
by Yu Hua
A man gambles away his family's fortune in a single night, then spends decades paying for that one catastrophic choice — Yu Hua's unflinching chronicle of survival treats catastrophe with such matter-of-fact clarity it becomes darkly comic, a life so thoroughly wrecked it achieves a kind of terrible grace.