I read The Seoul Letter Shop while I was in Korea, which made this warm story about letters, love, family and finding your way back to yourself even more fun.

Djuna’s Memoir of a Joseon Bride moves through vampires, aliens, memory transfer, monsters, zombies, and Korean history without ever feeling repetitive. Strange, inventive, and a lot of fun.

Sonoko Machida’s The Woman, the Boy, and the Whale, translated by Sam Bett, is a dark and painful story, but never a hopeless one. At its center is the idea of what can happen when someone finally finds a person willing to listen.

After a deadly virus collapses society, survival becomes dangerous and trust even more so. Choi Jin-young’s Everything Happened at Once, translated by Soje, finds hope and love in an extraordinarily brutal world.

Chen-Fu Hsu begins with a search for a snow leopard on the Tibetan Plateau and builds something much larger around it, bringing together fiction, travel writing, history, ecology, religion and the people he meets along the way.

The Formosa Exchange imagines the populations of Taiwan and Cuba suddenly switching places. Huang Chong-Kai turns that strange premise into an enormous geopolitical thought experiment about history, identity, politics and how nations understand themselves.

Funny, warm and unexpectedly sweet, How Can My Manager Be So Stupid? looks at bookstore life, workplace frustrations and how little we may actually know about the people we work beside every day.

The Healing Season of Pottery by Yeon Somin is a tender Korean novel about stepping away from burnout and finding comfort in creativity, friendship, and the quiet rhythm of making something with your hands.

A reflective novel of three intersecting lives at a small Tokyo café. Each story holds both sadness and hope, showing how people continue and connect in deeply human ways.

Incredibly sad and quietly devastating, Tokyo Ueno Station made me see the unseen. Through Kazu, a common man who lived an ordinary life and then slipped into homelessness, Yu Miri shows how every loss, every choice, and every silence adds up. It is about not being seen in life or in death about being ignored even when you are right there.

This was not the Dazai I was expecting. The familiar shadows of despair are here, but fleeting, part of the melodrama of youth rather than the heaviness of adulthood. What struck me most was how much this really felt like a teenager’s diary: messy, cocky, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes piercingly honest.