Naoko Higashi Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Naoko Higashi is a Japanese poet, novelist, screenwriter, and children’s writer.

She has won multiple awards and has received a lot of recognition for her writing. She is recognized the most for the work that she has done in the Japanese Tanka poetry form.

Her work in fiction extends to The House in the Forest of Threads. This work won the 31st Tsubota Joji Literature ward and was adapted into a television drama. Her novel The Soul Catchers was adapted into a film in 2024.

Musings on Love- A Tanka Collection is a collection by Naoko Higashi, illustrated by Tatsuro Kiuchi and translated by Jonathan Leask. If you have been searching for something that is unique and is going to allow you to meditate on some deeper reflections through stanza format, this might be the book for you.

Naoko is a Japanese poet who expresses her many feelings including intimacy and love by putting them into Japanese Tanka form. This world has been expanded upon by illustrator Tatsuro Kiuchi, who has been able to capture the depth of these feelings through beautifully done illustrations. This combination makes the art form all the more impactful, as Tanka’s simplicity is paired with elegant illustrations to make a world that is intensely emotional and artistic.

Readers get the full benefit of the talents of Jonathan Leask, who has completed an English translation that has managed to preserve the original meaning as well as rhythm of the Tanka, giving a reading that is all the more enjoyable.

This book has sixty Tanka stanzas and has also thirty-six gorgeous color illustrations making up a total of seventy-one pages. It also includes an appendix that has a full bilingual line to line rendition of the original Japanese text and the English translation, something that readers will no doubt appreciate. The book first came out in 2004 with the Kindle Japanese edition being released in 2013.

Whether readers are familiar with novelist and poet Naoko Higashi’s work or not, they will no doubt be able to appreciate this work. The artist received the 7th Kadan Award and has come out with many different works and collections through the course of her career, also writing with others and penning essay collections on her own.

Readers will also have the benefit of becoming more familiar with the work of Tatsuro Kiuchi, the illustrator. He was born in 1966 in Tokyo, Japan and graduated from the Division of Natural Sciences inside the College of Liberal Arts at International Christian University in Tokyo. He then relocated to the U.S. to study illustration and graduated from the Art Center College of Design in California.

He has been a freelance illustrator ever since he came back to Japan in 1992, where he was commissioned to illustrate other things like picture books, book jackets, magazines, and different publications. His works include a picture book ‘Akaninja’ and ‘The Earthling’, a serial comic strip. He has won the Kodansha Publishing Culture Award for Illustration and belongs to the Tokyo Illustrators Society.

In addition to working together on this book, Higashi and Kiuchi have also collaborated on picture books. For this book, readers will also get to witness the work of translator Jonathan Leask, who lives in Kanagawa, Japan.

The Soul Catchers is a recent novel by Naoko Higashi. It has been translated by Lucy North. If you have been looking for something that is unique and interesting, check out this book!

With the same heart and wisdom that made readers fall in love with Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this novel brings a magical concept to life as eleven people get the chance to come back to the same loved ones that they left behind in a way that is truly unusual. Fans of Chicken Soup for the Soul and The Five People You Meet in Heaven are likely to really enjoy this book.

If you had the chance to come back after you had passed in order to watch over someone you loved with your soul inside of an object that is special to them, would you do it? Would you want to reside in the simple pages of a diary, inside of a hearing aid, inside of a beloved mug, or a jungle gym, and be able to keep an eye on those who you care about the most?

Eleven people have recently passed on, including a boy of five years and a homeless man. They are all extended the unique chance in order to be able to stay on the earthly plane instead of moving on and to be close to those who they love. Each of them has their own reasons for saying yes or no and people who they care about to consider.

This novel was so popular and well-received that it ended up being adapted into a movie in Japan in 2021. There is a Japanese folk belief that objects are able to hold the spirits of the dead and turns it into a story that is surprisingly heartfelt and touching.

There’s a bit of fantasy and the supernatural in this book, but Naoko Higashi has also been able to showcase a story that is surprisingly down to earth along the way. The magical realism is so believable that readers may end up finding that they become absorbed in a story that is charming and moving and only break the spell when they get to the last page! Get a copy of The Soul Catchers to follow along with everything that happens and check out a book that is as engaging as it is unique.