Summer at Mount Asama

Masashi Matsuie, Margaret Mitsutani

$29.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Indigo
01 October 2025

Architecture; Fiction & Literature; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945); Romance; Fiction in translation

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*Winner of The Yomiuri Prize for Literature, 2012
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The Japanese novel comes of age in this gripping story of love, art and life as a group of architects competes to design the new National Library of Modern Literature in Tokyo.

In 1980s Japan, newly-graduated Toru Sakanishi joins a small, prestigious architecture firm founded by a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright. As the sweltering summer months approach, the team migrates from the bustling centre of Tokyo to the beautiful rural surroundings of Mount Asama, where several love stories are woven together and Sakanishi encounters four remarkable women who change the course of his life.

From honouring ancestors to illustrating the complexities of the living, Summer at Mount Asama is a prize-winning novel beautifully translated by National Book Award winner Margaret Mitsutani, offering a moving and elegant portrait of the clash of modernity and tradition.

'Packed with ideas about art, life, and love.'

Kirkus Reviews

'The more I read, the more I fell in love with this beautiful novel.'

Hiromi Kawakami

'Expertly-crafted.'

Mariko Ozaki

By: Masashi Matsuie
Translated by: Margaret Mitsutani
Imprint: Indigo
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm,
ISBN: 9781917378000
ISBN 10: 1917378009
Pages: 396
Publication Date: 01 October 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Masashi Matsuie began his literary career as a fiction editor for the Shinchosha Publishing Company, where he worked with writers such as Yoko Ogawa, Banana Yoshimoto, and Haruki Murakami and launched Shincho Crest Books. His debut novel, Summer at Mount Asama, received the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. Margaret Mitsutani is a translator of Yoko Tawada and Japan's 1994 Nobel Prize laureate Kenzabur e. She was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Award for her translation of Yoko Tawada's The Emissary.