Emily Itami

Combining the incisive intimacy of Sally Rooney with the sharp wit of Helen Fielding, a compulsively readable and astonishingly relatable debut novel about marriage, motherhood, love, self and the vibrant, surprising city that is modern Tokyo Mizuki is a Japanese housewife. She has a hardworking husband, two adorable children, and a beautiful Tokyo apartment. It’s everything a woman could want, yet sometimes she wonders whether she would rather throw herself off the high-rise balcony than spend another evening not talking to her husband and hanging up laundry. Then, one rainy night, she meets Kiyoshi, a successful restaurateur. In him, she rediscovers freedom, friendship, and the neon, electric pulse of the city she has always loved. But the further she falls into their relationship, the clearer it becomes that she is living two lives—and in the end, we can choose only one. Funny, provocative, and startlingly honest, Fault Lines is for anyone who has ever looked in the mirror and asked, who am I and how did I get here? A bittersweet love story and a piercing portrait of female identity, it introduces Emily Itami as a debut novelist with astounding resonance and wit.

Rei, Kiki and Ai are three sisters whose lives have taken them on very different paths. They have lost both parents, one way or another, and found their own ways of carrying on. Eldest daughter Rei is spiky and sensible, distracting herself with an all-consuming job at a financial corporation in London. Big-hearted Kiki is a single mother in Tokyo, juggling the demands of her young son and the cantankerous elderly residents of the retirement home she works in. Ai, the free-spirited youngest, is a Japanese pop idol who has found fame and fortune but lost herself along the way. When Ai is embroiled in a scandal and thrust into the spotlight, Rei must pick up the pieces of her family once more. Over the course of a summer in their childhood home on the Japanese coast, the sisters reunite with their sharp-tongued grandmother, entertain Kiki's irrepressible son and silently worry about Ai, carefully avoiding the subject of their mother's death fifteen years before. But silence between sisters can only last for so long . . . Transporting, funny and moving, Kakigori Summer is an uplifting exploration of love and loss, sisterhood and family, the stories we tell ourselves about the past and how they determine our future.

Veux-tu préparer ma soupe miso pour le reste de ta vie ? C'est la manière traditionnelle de faire sa demande en mariage ici. Anna et Tsubasa se sont connus enfants à Tokyo. Ils se croisent par hasard vingt ans plus tard et commencent à s'écrire. Anna est devenue londonienne, et Tsubasa lui raconte la culture qui aurait pu être la sienne si elle était restée, cette ville à l'organisation d'autant plus minutieuse qu'elle menace à chaque instant de s'enfoncer dans le chaos, où s'offrir des cadeaux est devenu un art, s'endormir en réunion un signe de motivation, et où il ne faut jamais, jamais, mettre de sauce soja sur le riz. Peut-on vraiment comprendre un Japonais ? L'humour d'Anna nous sert de clé d'entrée.