Answerless Journey, by Han Song (author), Alex Woodland (translator)

Published in Adventures in Space: New Stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers, Flame Tree Press, ISBN 9781787588158, April 2023

A person wakes up, in a chair, alone. There are two other identical chairs in the otherwise empty room. The person has no memory, and can find no way to identify themself than as "Creature." After a while, another person walks in. Creature's retained language is slight enough that they can only call the new person "Same Kind." The two start talking, exploring the space they're in, gradually retrieving more language.

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata (author), Ginny Tapley Takemori (translator), Nancy Wu (narrator)

Blackstone Audio, ISBN 9781538584552, June 2018 (original publication July 2016)

Keiko Furukara is thirty-six years old, and was a misfit everywhere, in her family and at school, until at the age of eighteen she began working in a new branch of national convenience store chain Smile Mart. The store employee manual gives her a set of rules. The uniform relieves issues of how to dress during the work day. Her coworkers provide her with examples of how to talk--and what to appear excited, happy, or angry about. She learns the rhythms and needs of the store, and even working only part-time, she becomes the store's best worker, and outlasts fellow part-timers and a total of seven managers. She's on her eighth manager when she realizes her family and her small number of friends are really worried about her, and want her to adopt a more normal, and to their minds happier, lifestyle.

Go, by Kazuki Kaneshiro (author), Takami Nieda (translator), Brian Nishii (narrator)

Brilliance Audio, May 2018, (original publication January 2000)

Sugihara is a student in a Japanese high school, but he's not Japanese. Born, raised, and educated in Japan, he is still Korean, a citizen of South Korea, and legally a resident alien. This places some legal restrictions on him; it also makes him a target of bullying and prejudice.

He has had to become a fighter, while keeping his eyes on the prize of passing the entrance exams for a Japanese university. When he meets and falls in love with a Japanese girl named Sakurai, they bond over classical music and foreign films.

Ten Women, by Marcela Serrano (author), Beth Fowler (translator) Marisol Ramirez (narrator)

Brilliance Audio, February 2014 (original publication October 2004)

In Santiago, Chile, ten women--nine patients and their therapist--meet. Normally the women receive individual therapy, but this time the therapist, Natasha, wants them all together in a group session. They will all talk about their lives.

They're all very different women, different backgrounds, different experiences. An elderly former actress, a nineteen-year-old computer whiz, a housekeeper, a woman from a wealthy, connected family, women who have struggled to become or remain middle class. The last story we get is Natasha's own, an immigrant with a broken and traumatic past of her own.

The Travelling Cat Chronicles, by Hiro Arikawa (author), Philip Gabriel (translator)

Berkley, ISBN 9780451491336, October 2018

Satoru and Nana meet when Nana is, no longer a kitten, but sill a young cat, and Satoru is perhaps around thirty. Initially, Satoru is just feeding the feral Nana, but when a car hits Nana and breaks his (yes, his) leg, Satoru takes him in, and takes him to a veterinarian. The name Nana comes from the fact that the cat's tail is hooked, roughly in the shame of a seven. Nana is the word for seven.

It's Nana who tells us this story, with a cat's judgment on the strange behavior of humans. Nana and his human live together happily for several years, and then one day, Satoru announces that he's very sorry, but he has no choice, and Satoru and Nana are off in the silver van, to visit an old childhood friend of Satoru's.

He wants the friend to take in Nana, and take care of him, because he can no longer do so. We don't, yet, find out why. It does not work out; yet by the time Satoru and Nana leave, the friend has a new plan for both mending his broken relationship with his wife, and a new direction for the photography studio he took over from his father.

Closed Circles (Sandhamn #2), by Viveca Sten (author), Laura A. Wideburg (translator), Angela Dawe (narrator)

Brilliance Audio, March 2016 (original publication April 2009)

It's a year later, the summer after the events in Still Waters, and an important yacht race is happening at Sandhamn. Thomas is a spectator, a guest on the marine police boat he once captained, when the starting gun fires--and the prominent lawyer, commanding a yacht favored to win, collapses to the deck of his yacht.

It wasn't the starting gun that killed him, of course, but someone used the starting gun as cover for the sound of t was the rifle they used to shoot Oscar Juliander.

The Great Passage, by Shion Miura (author), Juliet Winters Carpenter (translator), Brian Nishii (narrator)

Brilliance Audio, June 2017 (original publication January 2011)

Kohei Araki falls in love with words and dictionaries as a boy. When a university education makes it clear to him that he's a good but not academic-level lexicographer, he goes to work for Gembu Books, and makes dictionaries.

More than thirty years later, he's nearing retirement. His greatest work, The Great Passage, a top-level dictionary of the Japanese language, is well under way, but not yet complete, and he needs to recruit a successor.

He finds Mitsuya Majimi, a disheveled, seemingly unpromising, young man, who nevertheless proves to share his love of words and their power.

Still Waters (Sandhamn #1), by Viveca Sten (author), Marlaine Delargy (translator), Angela Dawe (narrator)

Brilliance Audio, October 2015 (original publication 2008)

A body washes up on the beach of the island of Sandhamn, in Sweden, and at first it looks like an accident. It takes a while to identify him, but Krister Berggren seemingly just had an accidental fall off a boat, and wasn't noticed in time. Police Detective Thomas Andreasson identifies him, and talks to Krister's only close relative, his cousin Kicki Berggren, in Stockholm, and is about to close the case when Kicki turns up dead, apparently badly beaten, in a bed-and-breakfast on Sandhamn.