International Authors Book Club

International Authors Book Club

Read the author of your choosing from a predetermined country. We will meet each third Thursday of the month to discuss your author, their works, and any themes they explore. At this first meeting, we will discuss authors from Japan and then determine the next few months’ countries. To get you started, check out our list of a few literary award-winning Japanese authors with a synopsis of their most well-known work. These books are all available through your Santa Fe library.

Contact Joe at jrpaisley@santafenm.gov with any questions.

Suggested Authors:

Kazuro Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day

Here is Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England.

Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington.

But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness," and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi, author of the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series (four books)

In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than 100 years.

Local legend says that this shop offers coffee -- and the chance to travel back in time.

Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey.

There are rules that must be followed. And the most important one: the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.

Haruki Murakami, author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

While searching for his missing wife, Japanese lawyer Toru Okada has strange experiences and meets strange characters.

A woman wants phone sex; a man describes wartime torture; Okada finds himself in a netherworld at the bottom of a well.

Along the way he examines his disintegrating marriage -- and the buried secrets from Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II.

Sayaka Murata, author of Convenience Store Woman

Keiko's parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her.

For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers' style of dress and speech patterns so that she can play the part of a normal person.

With some laugh-out-loud moments prompted by the disconnect between Keiko's thoughts and those of the people around her, she provides a sharp look at Japanese society and the pressure to conform, as well as penetrating insights into the female mind.

Yoko Ogawa, author of The Housekeeper and the Professor

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem -- ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only 80 minutes of short-term memory.

She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a 10-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.