\"A conspicuously gifted writer…To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare, and her stories continue to haunt....

This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water...Dive into Yoko Ogawa\"s world and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen\" New York Times Each morning, the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to one another....

Hat, ribbon, bird, rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed....

A woman goes into a bakery to buy a strawberry cream tart. Another customer comes in. The woman tells the new arrival that she is buying her son a treat for his birthday. Every year she buys him his favourite cake; but her son died in an accident when he was six years old....

He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper who is entrusted to take care of him....

In a crumbling, seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet, seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother fusses over the off-season customers....

Beautiful, twisted and brilliant - discover Yoko Ogawa. A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster-brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool - sparking an unspoken infatuation that draws out darker possibilities....

Life was good for Sumire Iwaya... until the day she discovers her boyfriend is cheating on her, she gets demoted at work and her life spirals toward the dumps. Things take a turn for the better when she crosses paths with Momo, a homeless guy with a colorful past who puts a bounce in her step and a shake in her hips....

Book DescriptionLife was good for Sumire Iwaya... until the day she discovers her boyfriend is cheating on her, she gets demoted at work and her life spirals toward the dumps. Things take a turn for the better when she crosses paths with Momo, a homelessguy with a colorful past who puts a bounce in her step and a shake in her hips....