The Third Love

The Third Love by Hiromi Kawakami is a quietly mesmerising novella from one of Japan’s most celebrated contemporary writers — a story of memory, longing, and the strange persistence of past love. A woman revisits a relationship from her youth, circling its emotional residue with the understated precision that characterises Kawakami’s best work. Her prose — beautifully rendered in translation — has a quality of stillness that belies its emotional depth: each sentence is precise and unhurried, accumulating into an experience that is deeply moving without ever resorting to sentimentality. Published by Portobello Books, The Third Love is essential for readers who have discovered Kawakami through Strange Weather in Tokyo or her other translated works, and a perfect introduction for those new to one of contemporary Japanese literature’s most distinctive voices.