The origins of Japanese and Korean healing fiction are intertwined, but the recent wave of Korean healing fiction demonstrates its unique fusion with European and American cultures.
If you’ve visited a bookstore recently, chances are you’ll have seen displays filled with healing fiction titles such as Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking For Is in the Library (2023, US) and Hwang Bo-reum’s Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop (2022, US). These are slim volumes with eye-catching covers that evoke the colourful symmetry of Chris Ware and Wes Anderson. These books sometimes entice with their understated magic realism, sometimes beguile with their stories of quitting the rat race to enjoy a traditional hobby, and sometimes infuriate with their platitudinous “live, laugh, love” responses to trauma and abuse.
Whatever your take on these books, it is undeniable that 2024 was the year that “healing fiction” from Japan and South Korea was everywhere in English-speaking countries, and 2025 promises to continue that trend, with numerous titles slated for release this year. Although it may seem like a new trend, the roots of healing fiction reach back at least 30 years to a series of unsettling events in Japan. The genre took off in the English-speaking world with the COVID-19 lockdowns, and it has been growing ever since, especially among English speakers looking for an exoticized escape from an era of declining Anglo-American influence.
Iyashikei: Japanese Healing Fiction
Japanese manga and anime storytellers created the iyashikei or “healing type” genre in the 1970s when Japan was at the top of its game, so to speak. It had one of the strongest economies in the world, a celebrated education system that was supposed to prepare graduates for excellent, high-quality jobs guaranteeing lifetime employment, and an electronics and automobile industry envied the world over. By 1989, the real estate in Tokyo alone was supposed to have been worth the price of all the real estate in the United States combined.
Banana Yoshimoto published Kitchen in Japan in the late 1980s; it was translated into English and published in 1993. The novel received critical acclaim in both Japanese and English. The story centers around a young woman mourning the death of her grandmother. Kitchen isn’t really prototypical healing fiction—Banana Yoshimoto’s work is more literary than the typical healing fiction novel—but it’s something like a progenitor of the genre in prose form.
The Japanese “bubble” burst by the end of 1989. Real estate prices plummeted. Jobs disappeared. By the mid-1990s, students in the “Lost Generation” were graduating into what came to be known as the “Employment Ice Age” with virtually no professional prospects. Then, on 17 January 1995, the Great Hanshin Earthquake killed more than 5,000 people in and around the city of Kobe. A little more than two months later, the new religious movement Aum Shinrikyo carried out a terrorist attack on the Tokyo Underground using the chemical weapon sarin. The attack killed 14 people and injured more than 1,000 others.
The economic downturn, earthquake, and terrorist attacks combined sent many people in Japan into a kind of psychological spiral. Many Japanese works of literary fiction are responses to the Japan of the mid-’90s, from Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (2011, US) and to Keiichiro Hirano’s recently translated Akutagawa-winner Eclipse (2024, US). Other fictional responses included manga, anime, and light fiction in the sekaikei genre—fiction aimed at young men that combined apocalyptic storytelling and school romance.
One of the more enduring legacies of this Japanese identity crisis, however, is the rapid growth of healing fiction. Japan has never really recovered its pre-1989 optimism, and healing fiction has remained a popular genre for three decades.
Representative healing fiction titles include The Miracles of the Namiya General Store by popular thriller writer Keigo Higashino, which was published in 2012 and translated into English in 2019. In the novel, three wayward youths find newfound hope after a mysterious letter is dropped through the abandoned store’s mail slot.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, was published in Japan in 2015 and in English in 2017. Patrons of a coffee shop can time travel to the past or the future, but only for the length of time it takes a cup of coffee to cool. Today, six books from the series are available in Japanese, while five have been translated into English.
Felines in Healing Fiction
Cats have become an iconic feature of Japanese healing fiction in English. They are so iconic that they often feature on the covers of healing fiction titles that don’t include cats at all, including Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Sanaka Hiiragi’s The Lantern of Lost Memories (2024, US), and What You Are Looking For Is in the Library. The association between cats and iyashikei wasn’t created by English-language publishers, and there are certainly Japanese books that exploit the association by dropping cats into books that are barely a part of the story at all, such as Hiashi Kashiwai’s The Kamogawa Food Detectives (2024, US).
There is a long history of cat fiction in Japan, stretching back at least as far as the appearance of a cat in Murisaki Shikibu’s 10th-century classic The Tale of Genji, now widely regarded as one of the greatest works of Japanese literature. Natsume Soseki, one of the most famous modern Japanese novelists, introduced a cat who narrated his own story in the popular serial novel, I Am a Cat. “Cat books” certainly are widely read in Japan, where they overtook “dog books” in popularity in the early 2000s. Approximately 5,400 cat books were published in Japan between 2007 and 2017.
However, the number of cat books appearing in English over the last few years creates a misleading picture of the publishing scene in Japan, not only in the healing fiction genre but also in fiction in general. They represent a higher percentage of Japanese fiction in English than they do of Japanese fiction in Japan. It isn’t just that these cat books appear in English; it is also how they are marketed and the eagerness with which they are consumed. Of 60 or so Japanese fiction translations into English last year, only eight featured cats in the plot; 10 featured cats on the cover. Yet these books—including The Kamogawa Food Detectives and its sequel—were among the most widely read and discussed books in translation of the year.
Korean Healing Fiction
It may appear that Korean healing fiction has enjoyed great success thanks to iyashikei in Japan. After all, The Dallergut Dream Department Store by Lee Mi-Ye created a sensation when it was published in Korean in 2020, long after the post-1995 growth in the same kind of Japanese stories. The origins of Japanese and Korean healing fiction are intertwined, but the recent wave of Korean healing fiction demonstrates its unique fusion with European and American cultures.
The German author Hermann Hesse’s short novel Demian (1919) isn’t one of his better-known books, especially in the English-speaking world. However, it has enjoyed a long-standing popularity in South Korea, where it has found its way onto university literature syllabi. Although not a healing novel, it has a formalized structure in which Demian meets a succession of people with whom he has long conversations, and each influences his life in some profound way.
This narrative blueprint is now reflected in the structure of the Korean healing novel, which often flips it: a protagonist with magical powers or unique insight meets a series of people and transforms their lives one by one. The K-Pop star RM of BTS recommended Demian to his fans, shooting it onto bestseller lists in Korea in 2016.
RM has also recommended Into the Magic Shop by James R. Doty (2016), a non-fiction book with elements of prototypical healing fiction. In this book, Doty, an American neurosurgeon, imparts his extended mindfulness lessons through stories of a stage magician’s shop he visited as a child. Doty’s magic shop calls to mind the store-centered novels that appear so frequently among translated Korean healing fiction, including not only The Dallergut Dream Department Store and Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, but also Yun Jung-eun’s Marigold Mind Laundry (2024, US) and You Young-gwang’s The Rainfall Market (2025, US).
Healing Fiction’s Shared Emotions
The popularity of Japanese and Korean healing fiction originates from different circumstances, but the novels often share common themes and motifs. For example, many healing fiction novels from both countries demonstrate the domestic audience’s craving for cozy or nostalgic settings. The 1940s (Japan) and the 1950s (Korea) saw a colossal number of buildings razed to the ground during wartime. Buildings in both countries don’t carry much value themselves; the value lies in the land they stand on. Particularly in cities, the places where young people’s parents and grandparents grew up have often long been redeveloped. Younger people tend to live alone in small, one-room apartments, so they congregate in Starbucks and its many domestic competitors to socialize.
The uncanny sense of history—the new built on top of the old—in the major cities of both Japan and South Korea frequently appears in Japanese and South Korean books, both in literary fiction and popular fiction. So does the need for welcoming spaces to gather.
Healing fiction, in particular, sets stories in quaint bookstores like the Hynam-Dong Bookshop or the Morisaki Bookshop, as seen in Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (2023, US), as well as in cafes. These are places with character and mystery, rather than sleek, crowded, and interchangeable urban spaces. In Japan, some healing fiction titles set in the countryside feature young characters returning to villages that have been long abandoned by their peers, such as in Shion Miura’s The Easy Life in Kamusari (2009, US).
The nature of Japanese and Korean publishing industries has likely shaped their shared episodic structures—the kind of narrative structure shared by Hesse’s Demian and many works of healing fiction where, say, each chapter focuses on a different character. In Japan, novels often appear serially, with each installment published over time in a popular magazine or newspaper. For example, The Kamogawa Food Detectives originally appeared in Japan as a series of short stories.
In Korea, writers use blogging platforms such as Kakao Brunch to publish their work in installments. Writers like Hwang Bo-reum (Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop) use Kakao Brunch to gather an audience of readers that they can then show to a more traditional publishing house. Though the authors must be approved, once they are approved, they have some control over their content and schedule.
The Healing Fiction Genre Can Be Misleading
Japanese and Korean healing fiction enjoy considerable domestic popularity; however, it has now become an international phenomenon, with a substantial English-language market for these novels. Healing fiction is now big business. It can be cheering to see new authors using new platforms to reach new audiences, but these books may offer a problematic escape. In the hands of some English-language publishers, for example, the escape may be tinged with an exoticism that conflates and represents the cultures of Japan and South Korea as indistinguishable sites of simpler pleasures and homespun wisdom.
Both Japanese and Korean healing fiction often portray traumatized protagonists, perhaps victims of familial abuse, of extramarital affairs, or on the brink of suicide due to financial pressure or societal expectations. In many ways, these open displays of vulnerability serve as an essential counterbalance to the glamorized images of Japan and Korea presented in popular music and TV dramas. These narratives reveal the emotional consequences of a hyper-competitive and hierarchical society.
On the one hand, though, narratives can sometimes be an unreflective “trauma dump”. Perhaps it’s useful and even comforting for international readers to see this trauma happening in an exotic-seeming location rather than worryingly close to home.
Some works of healing fiction from Japan evoke Japan’s famous “ganbaru” attitude, either implicitly or explicitly. “Ganbaru” is a Japanese verb meaning “to persevere” or “to hang on” or “to do one’s best”. (It may be more familiar to English-language anime viewers in the imperative form, “Ganbatte!”, which comes up often when characters encourage one another.)
While there are positive things to be said for a can-do attitude, Japan’s “culture of ganbaru” has come under increasing fire, especially since the Triple Disasters of March 2011, when the people of the devastated Tohoku region were blithely encouraged to persevere in the face of mass devastation. Some problems cannot be overcome through willpower alone, and there are circumstances too far outside of a person’s control to tell them to keep moving forward.
While an otherwise charming book, Miru’s The Easy Life in Kamusari depicts a protagonist who is forced to take a difficult forestry job and then actively prevented from quitting. His co-workers even steal his cell phone and chase him down on a motorcycle when he attempts to return to Tokyo!
Korean healing fiction takes more than one approach to healing. Yeon Somin’s The Healing Season of Pottery (2024, US), for example, shows a burned-out TV producer slowly regaining confidence through a creative hobby and a supportive network. Other Korean healing novels can take a more fantastical approach.
Some of these more magically-tinged healing novels—notably Jung-eun’s’ The Marigold Mind Laundry and Young-gwang’s The Rainfall Market present the healing process as magical, a washing away of bad memories rather than confronting, reframing, and mastering one’s trauma. The root causes of such problems are rarely explored, and social change is not part of the vocabulary of Korean healing fiction. It will be interesting to see if the notion of a magical washing away of problems retains its appeal in the wake of the political upheaval surrounding President Yoon Suk-yeol’s recent attempt to instigate martial law and the subsequent political turmoil.
It is, of course, important to note that English language “cozy fiction” can be equally banal or blind to the problematic situations in which characters find themselves. Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library (2020), for example, is about a library that allows readers to live a life where they didn’t make a particular mistake. “Maybe there was no perfect life for her, but somewhere, surely, there was a life worth living,” the protagonist concludes after several iterations of mistake-free living. Many readers have noted that the story implies the protagonist can treat her depression with the power of positive thinking.
East Asia Healing Fiction That Isn’t
For aficionados of translated fiction from East Asia, the healing fiction trend has been something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it has most definitely contributed to a boom in translated fiction, first from Japan and then from Korea. In 2021, just over 20 translated fiction titles from Japan debuted in English; in 2024, the number increased to nearly 60. While some of these titles are considered healing fiction, the increased interest in this genre has been part of a broader trend in Japanese fiction.
The Akutagawa Prize is one of Japan’s top literary accolades. The year 2021 saw the translation of two new Akutagawa Prize winners, and 2024 saw the translation of four new Akutagawa Prize winners: Qudan Rie for Tokyo Sympathy Tower, Matsunaga K. Sanzō for Expert Route Mountain Climbing, and Asahina Aki for The Forty-Ninth Day of the Salamander, as well as reprints of three additional works.
Nevertheless, healing fiction has set certain expectations among English-language readers, especially those who have not explored Japanese or Korean fiction beyond the genre’s boundaries. It isn’t uncommon to read reviews that describe the “gentle cuteness” of Japanese fiction or how Korean writers can create “an elusive technicolor dream”. Readers come to assume that the attributes of healing fiction are the attributes of all Japanese and Korean fiction. It takes some time and reading breadth to realise that Japanese and Korean literature—like all literatures—are rich and diverse.
When publishers begin to make nationality or geography into a genre, e.g., “East Asian comfort fiction”, they conflate Japanese and Korean fiction entirely, as though differences between these countries’ cultures don’t exist. For countries with a relationship as fraught as that between Japan and Korea, the tension over differences is especially problematic. There may also be a degree of exploitation by English-language publishers trying to capitalize on a trend they have helped create, while ignoring or perhaps even being unaware of the circumstances that led to this genre’s emergence in Japan and South Korea in the first place.
Now, publishers seem to package books by authors who aren’t Japanese or Korean to appear as part of the “East Asian healing fiction boom”. They seem to be encouraging readers to overlook issues like the culture in which a book was written altogether. Surely, encountering another culture is one of the greatest pleasures of reading fiction in translation.
Notably, almost all of the titles that top Goodreads’ list of “Healing Fiction Books” are either translated from Japanese or Korean, or designed to look as though they are translated from either Japanese or Korean. For example, English author Nick Bradley’s Four Seasons in Japan (2023) is not only set in Japan, but the cover also evokes the Japanese flag and includes both cherry blossoms and the requisite cat. Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, the cozy sci-fi novel A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) by American Becky Chambers, and French author Stéphane Garnier’s non-fiction book How to Think Like a Cat (2017) are the only exceptions to this deception.
When You’re in Need of Real Healing (Fiction)
Whether you love them, hate them, or would like to learn more, we leave you with a list of the many works of healing fiction from Japan and South Korea to look out for in 2025:
From Japanese:
- Best Wishes from the Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki is a follow-up on The Full Moon Coffee Shop, about a mysterious coffee shop whose patrons are only invited after they show kindness to a particular cat. The story revolves around Satomi, her sister-in-law, and her intern, all of whom struggle to come to terms with their past and present struggles, while simultaneously trying to find contentment in their lives. It will be published in October.
- The Blanket Cats by Kiyoshi Shigematsu debuted in the UK last year and came out in North America in February. This story centers on seven cats available for temporary adoption. Each cat comes with a special blanket, and while their magic to help humans is not defined, it is guaranteed.
- The Cat Who Saved the Library by Sosuke Natsukawa is a follow-up to The Cat Who Saved Books. It centers around 13-year-old Nanami and her discovery that her favorite books are disappearing from the public library. She finds assistance in the most unlikely of characters: a talking tabby cat named Tiger. The Cat Who Saved the Library comes out this spring.
- The Convenience Store by the Sea by Sonoko Machida was released in the UK earlier this year and will be published in North America in July. It takes place in a Kyushu convenience store called Tenderness. The store dishes out advice to employees and customers, offering unique recipes for a fulfilling life.
- The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen by Yuta Takahashi is already out in the UK as The Chibineko Kitchen. (“Chibineko” is Japanese for “small cat”.) The North America edition came out in February. The story centers on Kotoko, a young woman who discovers a restaurant in a seaside town near Tokyo that serves meals in remembrance of a departed loved one, promising a reunion with them.
- The Calico Cat at the Chibineko Kitchen by Yuta Takahashi is a follow-up to The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen. It revolves around Nagi Hayakawa and her dilemma: should she marry her chronically ill boyfriend, or spare him further heartbreak? Her mother died years ago, and she has no one to turn to for advice until she visits the Chibineko Kitchen. The novel comes out this summer.
- The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park by Michiko Aoyama features a hippo ride at an amusement park that provides healing from wounds and ailments. It comes out later this year.
- How to Hold Someone in Your Heart by Mizuki Tsujimura is the companion to Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon. In the story, Ayumi struggles to balance his ability to connect the grief-stricken with the dead, all while trying to navigate his own life in the living world. Only the UK release has been announced so far; it is planned for the summer.
- Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon by Mizuki Tsujimura is a companion to How to Hold Someone in Your Heart. In this story, Ayumi reunites people with the afterworld under a full moon. It debuts in the UK this spring and in North America this fall.
- The Passengers on the Hankyu Line by Hiro Arikawa is about five characters who ride the Hankyu commuter train and encounter emotional dilemmas that will be resolved six months later. The novel comes out this summer.
From Korean:
- The Healing Season of Pottery by Yeon Somin is about a burnt-out office worker who quits her job and finds joy in a new hobby. This book came out in North America last fall and in the UK at the end of January.
- The Rainfall Market by You Yeong-Gwang centers around an abandoned house outside Rainbow Town. If people mail letters to the house describing their problems, they are eligible to receive a ticket to the Rainfall Market and the chance to turn their lives around. The novel debuted in the UK last fall and in North America this February.
- The Second Chance Convenience Store by Kim Ho-Yeon tells the story of a retired teacher who owns a convenience store and takes in a homeless man, thereby transforming the neighborhood. The novel comes out this summer.
- The Wizard’s Bakery by Gu Byeong-Mo is a magical coming-of-age story about charmed sweets that come with a promise of escaping one’s problems. Expected in North America and the UK this summer.
- Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat by Kim Jiyun features a notebook at a cozy laundromat. When patrons pen their problems in the notebook, they receive solutions from other patrons who also read the notebook. This book came out in the UK last fall and in North America in January.