The vice and virtues of middle age are espied with an eagle eye in this hardboiled story about a mid-career gangster. Unfolding through chiseled sketches and run through with tantalizing motifs, Kitakata's masterpiece follows the fortunes of a yakuza mobster as his moment of truth approaches. Cool, real, and cleansing, Ashes is a literary tonic.

Kazuya Takino leads a quiet life running a supermarket in the Tokyo suburbs. But when an extortionist tries to force him out of business, he finds himself drawn into the yakuza underworld-a world he once called home and thought he had left behind. Pursuing him is Detective Takagi, an aficionado of French cigarettes and modernist poetry, the most decorated inspector on the Tokyo police force. As the shadowy Maruwa gang engages Takino in an escalating cycle of violence and retaliation, Detective Takagi can only stand by and watch as the beast within Takino is lured further and further out of his cage.A towering masterpiece of the hardboiled genre, The Cage is at once a searing portrayal of the violence of the Japanese underworld and a tender mediation of the ties of love and friend that can save men from madness-or plunge them deeper into it.

The legendary Japanese master's Winter Sleep take you into the hardboiled world of art—where ex-cons are philosophers, young lovers are combustible, and aesthetics is life. An artist's quest for growth from one of the world's greatest stylists.Nakagi, an ex-con painter who has sequestered himself in a mountain cabin, is trying to elevate his art. The only thing breaking his solitude are the visits of two women: an art dealer who wants him to produce the sort of paintings that she would like to buy from him, and a young aspiring, and soulful apprentice. When Nakagi welcomes an escaped felon into the emotionally fraught fold, and begins to teach him to pain well. Winter Sleep awakens to a literally incendiary climax.

He killed them. No regrets, no excuses. Now, all he needs to do is run. if that means having to kidnap a boy, then together they ll find a city of refuge.The fourth and latest novel by the Japanese don of hardboiled to be translated into english, City of Refuge was also Kitakata's first foray into the crime genre after a decade of penning literary fiction. Pick up this gem to find out why North American reviewers have been comparing him to Mickey Spillane, James M. Cain, Takeshi Kitano, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.