September 14–20, 2026
Not supernatural ghosts — historical ones. The massacres no one speaks of. The policies that shaped generations. Five novels haunted by what actually happened.
A man returns again and again to a geisha who loves him, yet withholds the commitment that might actually matter — Kawabata's masterpiece is haunted by all the devotion Japan's rigid class system made impossible to acknowledge, let alone reciprocate.
by Yang Jiang
A literary institute in 1950s Beijing becomes a crucible where intellectuals weaponize gossip and intrigue against each other — Yang Jiang maps the soul's corruption not through ideology, but through the smallest, most human betrayals.
by Kobo Abe
A young man raised in Japanese-occupied Manchuria finds himself unable to return home after the war — Abe transforms one soldier's impossible journey into a searing inquiry about what "nation" even means when history has fractured it beyond recognition.
A Japanese novelist arrives in 1938 colonial Taiwan to write imperial propaganda, but her growing intimacy with her Taiwanese guide becomes a quiet rebellion against the very narrative she's been sent to construct.
An elderly woman in England drifts through memories of postwar Nagasaki — a landscape of devastation where a crucial moment of moral failure dissolves into unreliable recollection. Ishiguro's debut traces how we haunt ourselves with what we choose not to see.