Melanie Tamaki is an outsider. As the unpopular and impoverished only child of a loving but neglectful mother, she is just barely coping with school and life. But everything changes on the day she returns home to find her mother is missing, lured back to Half World by a vile creature calling himself Mr. Glueskin. Soon Melanie embarks on an epic and darkly fantastical journey to Half World to save her mother. What she does not yet realize is that the state of the universe is at stake.... Award-winning author Hiromi Goto’s novel is an adventurous, genre-bending fantasy of shape-shifting characters, tortured half-lives, and redemption.

Half World

Children's Books

Goto, Hiromi

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Razorbill Canada

The breathtaking follow-up to the award-winning Half World 
Adopted as an infant, Gee has been kept ignorant of his troubled past. Now, at sixteen, he is a loner both despised and feared by his classmates. Dark feelings slowly grow inside him, but as he struggles to control them, his past catches up with him. Abandoning his adoptive grandmother and the place he has called home, Gee is compelled to travel to Half World, one of the Three Realms all living things must pass through. Fractured at one time, the Realms of the Flesh, Spirit and Half World have been reunited, but they are at risk: their fate rests on Gee's own journey of self-discovery. With two unlikely companions, a heartless cat and a self-destructive Neo Goth girl, Gee must fight the monstrous and the horrific—and, most difficult of all, he must overcome his own propensity for evil. Gripping and mesmerizing, Darkest Light is a compelling journey through despair in a desperate search for redemption.

Darkest Light: Half World Series

Melanie Tamaki is human?but her parents aren?t. They are from Half World, a Limbo between our world and the afterlife, and her father is still there. When her mother disappears, Melanie must follow her to Half World?and neither of them may return alive. Imagine Coraline as filmed by the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (Howl?s Moving Castle), or Neil Gaiman collaborating with Charles de Lint. Half World is vivid, visceral, unforgettable, a combination of prose and images that will haunt you.

Viking Books for Young Readers

The breathtaking follow-up to the award-winning Half World Adopted as an infant, Gee has been kept ignorant of his troubled past. Now, at sixteen, he is a loner both despised and feared by his classmates. Dark feelings slowly grow inside him, but as he struggles to control them, his past catches up with him. Abandoning his adoptive grandmother and the place he has called home, Gee is compelled to travel to Half World, one of the Three Realms all living things must pass through. Fractured at one time, the Realms of the Flesh, Spirit and Half World have been reunited, but they are at risk: their fate rests on Gee's own journey of self-discovery. With two unlikely companions, a heartless cat and a self-destructive Neo Goth girl, Gee must fight the monstrous and the horrific—and, most difficult of all, he must overcome his own propensity for evil. Gripping and mesmerizing, Darkest Light is a compelling journey through despair in a desperate search for redemption.

Puffin Canada

James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award for Science Fiction and Commonwealth Writers' Prize Winner, 2001 Sunburst Award Nomination for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, 2002 
From the award-winning author of Chorus of Mushrooms, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canadian Region and was co-winner of the Canada Japan Book Award, The Kappa Child is the tale of four Japanese Canadian sisters struggling to escape the bonds of a family and landscape as inhospitable as the sweltering prairie heat. 
In a family not at all reminiscent of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, four Japanese-Canadian sisters struggle to escape the bonds of a family and landscape as inhospitable as the sweltering prairie heat. Their father, moved by an incredible dream of optimism, decides to migrate from the lush green fields of British Columbia to Alberta. There, he is determined to deny the hard-pan limitations of the prairie and to grow rice. Despite a dearth of both water and love, the family discovers, through sorrow and fear, the green kiss of the Kappa Child, a mythical creature who blesses those who can imagine its magic...

The Kappa Child (Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Action & Adventure

Red Deer Press

Chorus of Mushrooms heralds the debut of a young Japanese Canadian feminist, Hiromi Goto. Until the publication of Chorus of Mushrooms in 1994, the primary voice heard from Japanese Canadians was that of the people interned during World War II. Hiromi Goto examines the immigration experience of the Japanese Canadian beyond war and into present day Alberta. Celebrating cultural differences as a privilege, Chorus of Mushrooms explores the shifts and collisions of culture through the lives of three generations of women in a Japanese family living in a small prairie town.

Chorus of Mushrooms (Nunatak Series)

United States

Newest Pr

One day Sayuri and her little brother Keiji explore the dark root cellar and are transported from Ganola AB to Middle World, a woodland full of figures from Japanese folklore.

The Water of Possibility (In the Same Boat)

Coteau Books

“Hopeful monsters” are genetically abnormal organisms that, nonetheless, adapt and survive in their environments. In these devastating stories, the hopeful monsters in question are those who will not be tethered by familial duty nor bound by the ghosts of their past.
Home becomes fraught, reality a nightmare as Hiromi Goto weaves her characters through tales of domestic crises and cultural dissonance. They are the walking wounded—a mother who is terrified by a newborn daughter who bears a tail; a “stinky girl” who studies the human condition in a shopping mall; a family on holiday wih a visiting grandfather who cannot abide their “foreign” nature. But wills are a force unto themselves, and Goto’s characters are imbued with the light of myth and magic-realism. With humor and keen insight, Goto makes the familiar seem strange, and deciphers those moments when the idyllic skews into the absurd and the sublime.
From “Stinky Girl”:
The unbearable voices of mythic manatees, the cry of the phoenix, the whispers of kappa lovers beside a gurgling stream. The voice of the moon that is ever turned away from our gaze, the song of suns colliding. The sounds which permeate from my skin on such a level of intensity that mortal senses recoil, deflect beauty into ugliness as a way of coping. And my joy. Such incredible joy. The hairs on my arms stand electric, the static energy and the heat amplifies my smell/sound with such exponential dizzying intensity, that the plastic which surrounds me bursts apart, falls away from my being like an artificial cocoon.
I hover, twenty feet in the air.
Hiromi Goto is the author of the novels Chorus of Mushrooms (winner of a Commonwealth Writers Prize and co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award) and The Kappa Child (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award). She lives in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Hopeful Monsters: Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

Arsenal Pulp Press

Poet and novelist Hiromi Goto effortlessly blends wry, observational slice-of-life literary fiction with poetic magical realism in the tender and surprising graphic novelShadow Life, with haunting art from debut artist Ann Xu. When Kumiko's well-meaning adult daughters place her in an assisted living home, the seventy-six-year-old widow gives it a try, but it's not where she wants to be. She goes on the lam and finds a cozy bachelor apartment, keeping the location secret even while communicating online with her eldest daughter. Kumiko revels in the small, daily pleasures: decorating as she pleases, eating what she wants, and swimming in the community pool. But something has followed her from her former residence--Death's shadow. Kumiko's sweet life is shattered when Death's shadow swoops in to collect her. With her quick mind and sense of humor, Kumiko, with the help of friends new and old, is prepared for the fight of her life. But how long can an old woman thwart fate?

Shadow Life

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

First Second

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Goto, Hiromi. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Goto, Hiromi

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Goto, Hiromi. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Half World

Darkest Light: Half World Series

Half World

Darkest Light: Half World Series

Half World

The Kappa Child (Fiction)

Chorus of Mushrooms (Nunatak Series)

The Water of Possibility (In the Same Boat)

Hopeful Monsters: Stories

Shadow Life