Nobuko

by Trisha Ready, Gretchen Douma (Narrator)

An innovative hybrid of memoir and fiction, Noboku is kind of like Call Me by Your Name, but the two main characters are women, and it's set in Japan.

Nobuko is based on author Trisha Ready's experiences teaching English in the 1980s in Japan, where she fell for a woman who lived in a rustic cabin and made dentures for a living. A twisting maze of subplots involve the yakuza, the Japanese organized crime syndicate—as well as food, art, adventure, samurai swords, and marriage.

At its core, this is a true-life love story in which Ready reflects on what she's learned and what might have been.

Audible Audio

Published August 27, 2025

Reviews

[Ben Evans-Duran · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t want this to end, or I wish that this was the first in a long series of bound bento collections. This goes down as one of the best reading experiences I have and I could not recommend this book more to anyone in my life!!

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a phenomenal read. It’ll break you and put you back together all in one go.

[Sidney Kuri Poor · Rating 5 out of 5]

the ready sequence will stick with me for a long time. nobuko frames “what if” into something a little more simple and a little less terrifying. thanks mariel for the book.

[Mariel Povolny · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Ready Sequence will take the literary world by storm. Nobuko is beautiful, brief, and moving. A million worlds spring from the pages of 108 bentos.

[Matt Briggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ready has created a work that is accessible in its language and engaging in its vignette-driven storytelling, yet also richly layered for those who listen to its syntax. Nobuko is an invitation to consider the smallest units of writing: the choice of a period or a conjunction, the decision to repeat a word. In this way, Ready’s book joins a literary tradition that spans Stein to Kawakami, affirming that style and morality, form and feeling, are deeply intertwined. A quiet revelation of a novel, Nobuko asks us to find meaning not in high drama, but in the spaces between the words.

I reviewed Nobuko in The Stranger.