Translated with excellence by Albert Nolla, Piercing is a first-class novel written by the Japanese filmmaker and writer Ryu Murakami (1952). In the prologue —titled 'You are a strange child, and when you grow up you will go mad'— Jordi Nopca describes the author as one of the great references of psychothriller, "a literary subgenre in which psychopaths have as much weight as their pursuers and victims". The story begins with a minuscule and domestic gesture —a father waking up at night beside his daughter Rie's crib— and, in a matter of lines, turns it into a scene of extreme anguish. What seemed like a moment of paternal vigilance in a Tokyo home becomes a nocturnal ritual governed by a fixed idea: the possibility of plunging an ice pick into the creature's flesh. He does not do it; but what matters is that he contemplates the idea with a chilling lucidity.

Visibly moved, Ribas explains that this is how she discovered the poet Suzuki Shizuko, a woman who, in post-World War II Japan under US occupation, broke with the rules of haiku and "made it her refuge." Shizuko was little known even in her own country, partly due to a reluctance to acknowledge the institutionalized sexual violence of the postwar years. The co-director of the Pepe Sales Festival had to undertake an exhaustive search to be able to read her work. She consulted newspaper archives and came across a symposium featuring Jaime Lorente, a writer and professor from Toledo, passionate about haiku and Japanese culture. He had self-published a translation of Shizuko's haiku, which, far from simply describing landscapes, beauty, and seasons in a traditional style, championed a fiercely independent poetry in the first person, achieving the remarkable ferocity of creating beauty in a harsh life and climate.

In The ceremonySayaka Murata (Inzai, 1979), one of the most interesting writers on the Japanese narrative scene, has decided to reflect on the concept of normality. Humor and fantasy combine in a writer determined to defend difference, people who do not fit into a society full of pre-established, often stupid, norms. Themes such as family, friendship, sex, loneliness, and selfishness hover throughout the stories of the author of best-seller The girl from the 24-hour store (2016), motifs that he analyzes from a perspective tinged with strangeness and grotesquery.