Sinking Francis

The touching story of a woman who finds new love and purpose in the natural beauty of northern Japan, told in evocative prose reminiscent of Murakami—from the critically acclaimed author of The Summer House.

After breaking up with her live-in boyfriend, Keiko quits her job in Tokyo and makes up her mind to move to Hokkaidō. There, she finds a job at a post office in a small village of 800 people. Now in her mid-30s, she still has vivid memories of living in Hokkaidō during junior high school—encountering deer on a mountain road or seeing baby foxes playing in the grass—and had been longing to return.

One day, while delivering mail, she meets a middle-aged man, apparently single. She takes a liking to him, and they grow closer. He works as the caretaker for “Francis”—a hydroelectric mill powered by a Francis turbine, on the riverbank behind his house, that supplies electricity to the village. Soon, however, her idyllic days of romance in these peaceful surroundings are thrown into confusion by the specters of multiple women in his past.

With a keen understanding of the human heart and an appreciation of the power of our environment, Masashi Matsuie immerses us in one woman’s journey—through crises both internal and external—to a fresh understanding of life.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, an imprint specializing in translations of foreign works. His debut novel, The Summer House (Other Press, 2025), received the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, an award that normally goes to seasoned authors who are well along in their careers.

Margaret Mitsutani is a translator of Yoko Tawada and Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburō Ōe. She was a finalist for the National Book Award for her translation of Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth and winner of the National Book Award for her translation of Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary.