March 23–29, 2026
Going back to where it started — a childhood town, a family home, a country left behind. Five novels about what we find when we retrace our steps.
A woman returns to herself by a lake after her mother's death, finding in a neighbour's quiet presence what words cannot express. Yoshimoto's gift is making the unspoken — a shared meal, a tolerated silence — feel like the deepest kind of homecoming.
A young man returns to feelings he thought he'd outgrown—only to find them transformed into something dangerous and irretrievable. Mishima's 1912 Tokyo gleams with aesthetic precision, a world of ritual and restraint that Kiyoaki's awakening passion cannot help but shatter.
A boy enters a library to return books and emerges into a Kafkaesque labyrinth where the familiar becomes sinister. Murakami's illustrated novella proves that the deepest prisons are the ones we walk into willingly — and that sometimes we need a sheep man to find our way home.
A college student returns to his coastal hometown for one listless summer, then spends years chasing a pinball machine through Tokyo's forgotten corners — Murakami's debut novels capture that peculiar ache of searching for something already lost.
A man returns to the pleasure houses of his youth — Saikaku's 17th-century classic traces one libertine's long drift through desire, regret, and the world he once knew intimately, now irretrievably changed.