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October Feature: Moonlit Reads

Moonlit Reads
Moonlit Reads

October is here, and with it comes the full moons that so many traditions look forward to—the Harvest Moon, the Hunter’s Moon, the Mid-Autumn Festival moon.


This October, we gather under that glow with our feature, Moonlit Reads, to reflect everything about the moon and its power.


At the middle of autumn, a slight ache often sets in. Perhaps it is the exhaustion of summer finally catching up with us, or the difficulty of saying goodbye to warm evenings, holidays, and the leisure of sitting by the water. Many people carry this melancholy quietly, without saying much.


But autumn is also the season when we show our true colors -- when the beloved moon shines its brightest and most beautiful light of the year. Across countless cultures and for thousands of years, the moon has been more than just a celestial body. As it waxes and wanes through its phases, it has carried with it the most mysterious of powers: the power to inspire stories, dreams, and revelations.


This year, October brings us the full moon that so many traditions look forward to -- the harvest moon, the hunter's moon, the mid-autumn festival moon. East and West alike, civilizations have long believed that moonlight not only unhinges the mind, but the moon also represents femininity, mother, physical desire, material fortune, water, blood in our body, gender, comfort, the East, the global market, borders, foreigners, silver, Monday, dream, and drugs.


The moon is powerful. It shines, it confuses, it awakens. It makes us think and dream, and from those dreams, stories unfold—one after another, in endless succession.


This October, we gather under that moonlight with our feature: Moonlit Reads. Stories that glow with mystery, solitude, and enchantment—books to accompany you through the long nights, as the moon keeps watch above.



Water by Rumi — oh my god, this book is all love. The word love appears ninety-six times, and every time it feels different. Love as thirst, love as reflection, love as disappearance. To Rumi, love is the water — the thing that carries, cleanses, and returns us to what we are.


The moon rules water, and in these poems, it feels like the moon is also the keeper of love. “Still water tells stories of the moon and stars,” he writes. “Bodies give body to intellect and soul.” And then, the line that stays with me: “One moon hovers in the sky. Another moon hides in the heart. To live in its light — that’s what I long for.”


Even the translator’s note at the end — where they write about the translation process — is one of the best parts of the book. You can feel how language itself becomes water, how it moves from one soul to another. This little book feels like standing in that light — soft, endless, and full of love that keeps flowing.



According to The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu, much of The Tale of Genji was written under the moonlight — the same moon that, in Japanese tradition, represents desire, beauty, and reflection. The world she lived in, the Heian court, became the source of her story: its silks, whispers, and fleeting romances all turning into words that still glow centuries later.

It’s said she often wrote through the night, her brush catching the shimmer of the moon.


People often call Shikibu “sensitive to life and death,” but I think she was more than that — she was conscious. She saw the world with a writer’s eye, aware that every gesture, every silence, holds meaning. When she later wrote her diary, she wasn’t just recording her days — she was studying herself as if she were a character in her own story.


How wonderful — that a story born under that light continues to move us now. Truly one of the best for our Moonlit Reads.



This book asks what if every emotion were a beast? What if the monsters we fear actually live with us, eat with us, sleep under the same city streets? These beasts are not far away; they are mirrors, reflections of who we are and what we attract. Yan Ge writes about them with both wonder and sorrow — the kind that makes you realize how close love and loneliness truly are.


For readers in Toronto, translator Jeremy Tiang will be here at the end of October for the International Festival of Authors — a rare chance to meet the mind behind this brilliant translation. Here’s the link to learn more and join the event!



I haven’t fully read it yet, but I’ve been drawn into Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, translated by Douglas J. Weatherford — and I can already feel the shadows it casts. The novel begins with Juan Preciado traveling to Comala to find his father, Pedro Páramo, only to find not a living town but a place haunted by voices, ghosts, and half-remembered stories.


The more I read, the more I realize this book is about the mind under moonlight — how memory, grief, and longing can become spectral, how the past and present bleed together. Time unravels. The boundaries between life and death dissolve. Weatherford’s translation is praised for restoring lost segments and preserving Rulfo’s cryptic, haunting tone.


Maybe someday I’ll finish it (again, because I suspect it demands multiple readings). But for now, I’m holding onto this: in Pedro Páramo, the moon is less a lantern and more a mirror — reflecting not what is, but what haunts us from within.



Mani Steinn, a young man in 1918 Reykjavik, whose life exists in the margins: her exchanges sex, he watches films obsessively, and her drifts between desire and illusion.


Moon is the gender, sex, and also the film -- the illusion -- all of those are mutable, translucent, refusing to settle. The moon casts light on what society wants to hide, revealing the fluid spaces between man and woman, presence and absence. This story whispers in the ear, as much as it shouts.



Each story reminds us that books can be places of refuge, where stories help us find our way back to ourselves. This series inspired us deeply at Found in Translation Bookshop, even planting the seed for our Found in Moon Astrology Workshop. Under the full moon, reading our chart helps us let go — of regret, jealousy, and obsession — and return to clarity.



Around the full moon and new moon, do your dreams go really real? Moon feels like both promise and mirage. It is where dreams are born, where memory flutters between what was and wat we long to forget. This novel takes us into a hidden district where dreams are manufactured, sold, and sometimes returned -- and in that delicate space, what is real is always, shifting.


Here, each customer complaint, each missing dream, each lost regular is a crack in the illusion. Lee leans into that edge: is the moon's glow a lie or a light?



This little book is everything a moon can cover — the female body, desire, memory, faith, madness, and the quiet changes that never stop happening. Reading Tezer Özlü feels like stepping into the night and realizing the darkness has its own kind of warmth. Her voice is not afraid to touch what hurts. Ayşegül Savaş, who wrote the introduction, calls her one of the writers who shaped her own work in The Anthropologists — and you can feel that echo, the same way both women write from the edge of being alive. “What we need most to understand what life is,” Özlü once said, “is to come to terms with it.” This book does that — it looks straight at life and doesn’t look away.



In Cold Moons, the moon hovers behind every quiet image — the frost on a branch, the shadow under a city light, the breath between lines. Magnús Sigurðsson’s poems (in translation by Meg Matich) are small but infinite: they map the mind’s tremors, those places where consciousness bends. He notices the “minute revelations of nature,” letting language travel from a dwarf wasp to cosmic time, as though the moon is both witness and architect of thought.


Here the moon is not just a symbol, it is the thinking self — the quiet, shifting mind that sees everything at once.



Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet drifts like moonlight across memory — shadows, half-glimpsed emotions, echoes of what was. Written under his semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, it reads less like a novel and more like a mind tracing the border between past and present.


Every line feels like a memory waking — the rustle of leaves, the hum of a city street, the ache of longing. When the moon is memory, the novel becomes a quietly haunted space, where the self tries again and again to return to what is already gone.



In The Dilemmas of Working Women, the moon hides beneath everyday lives — the expectations, the sacrifices, the unspoken pressures. Yamamoto’s stories (now in Brian Bergstrom’s translation) illuminate how women navigate roles that often feel imposed, how their voices flicker in margins.


Under the moon of femininity, we see not softness but strength, not only suffering but resistance — these women’s dilemmas become lunar refrains: cycles, silences, yet persistent light in darkness.



The classic -- in The Little Prince, the moon is not just light — it is a world, a presence, a companion in solitude. The prince travels from one asteroid to another, and in his innocence he teaches us to see beyond surfaces. The moon in this book is its own character — the night sky, the loneliness of a planet, the echo of a fox’s secret.


When the moon is itself, the story becomes a quiet lullaby: the smallness of planets, the infinity of stars, and the child’s insistence that the essential is invisible to the eye.



This book is a story about meeting the souls we’ve lost — asking them questions, and learning, slowly, to let go. Under the full moon, Mizuki Tsujimura writes about regret with such honesty that it feels like she already knows how human we all are — how we keep searching, circling, unable to release what once was. The spiritual world in this book isn’t far away; it reflects us, quietly, tenderly. ✨


We’re hosting an online conversation on October 22 (Toronto) / October 23 (Tokyo) with the book’s translator Yuki Tejima, who will share about the translation process and what it means to bring this luminous story into English. We’re also collecting questions from readers — you can send yours to info@foundbook.ca or leave us a message on Instagram @foundbook.ca 🌕



Dinner at the Night Library by Hika Harada, translated by Philip Gabriel, is not as easy or cozy as it first seems — and that’s exactly why it’s so good. Yes, it’s a story about books, food, and the people who love them, but it’s also full of hidden puzzles and quiet truths waiting for the reader to notice. Beneath the warmth of midnight dinners and library stacks, Harada reveals something raw — the fading presence of public libraries, the underpaid labor of librarians, and how women are still undervalued in the worlds of knowledge and care.


The moon, in its quiet way, always stands for the secret and the feminine power — and Harada truly wrote from that light. With Philip Gabriel’s elegant translation (yes, the same translator who’s been bringing Murakami’s works into English for decades), this novel feels both sharp and tender. A strong recommendation — one of those reads that stays with you long after closing the cover.



This book is one of those books that quietly rewrites what we think time means. Time itself doesn't have a shape -- it is people who try to give it one, to feel in control -- the power.


In this story, someone writes a letter, slip it through the slot of an old general store, and somehow, an answer comes back. But the people replying might be in the future... or maybe in another dimension altogether. Every question -- about love, failure, dreams, forgiveness -- crosses that strange distance between time and heart.


So, here is the thought that lingers after reading: if you could write to the Namiya General Store, what would you ask about?



In Under the Neomoon, the moon feels less like a distant satellite and more like a twilight pulse in memory — that place where dreams roam and shadows dwell. Hilbig’s landscapes are industrial, half-ruined, “oozing, odorous,” as one critic describes, filled with furnace pits, split identities, and the quiet echoes of unfulfilled lives.


These stories read like dreams half remembered, where the margins between waking and sleep blur. Under that neomoon, what is real is fragile, and what is dreamed is just as tangible.



In Cocoon, memory, guilt, history, and identity swirl through every page like currents in the mind. This story opens a door into what lies underneath — the childhood bonds, the family secrets.


The moon, here, is thought: it lights up corners of consciousness we barely notice, and it also hides what we fear to face. As Jiaqi and Cheng Gong search for the truth of a night in 1967, they confront their own inner landscapes. Memory is a mind wearing the moon’s face.










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