If your novel can get a publisher’s attention, they will likely expect a list of comparable titles. I have been searching on my own and asking others who have read Under Shōko’s Bed for suggestions. I have yet to find any that are directly comparable in many respects, although there are some that are like Under Shōko’s Bed in one way or another. It is good for the novel to be unique. It may be harder to sell, though, when it cannot be pigeonholed, making its readership and profitability less predictable.
Spoiler alert! If you read the next paragraph, you may learn too much about the novel to most fully enjoy reading it.
Under Shōko’s Bed is a story of love and loss, and has strong elements of psychological pain. David suffers from depression and Shōko from post-traumatic stress disorder, and their healing influence on each other is a key part of their cross-cultural love story. Another important element of their recovery is Shōko leading David back to his true vocation, painting, something they shared when they loved each other many years before, but which David drifted away from in his life with his wife, Kelly. Unbeknownst to David and Shōko, however, they are part of a love triangle, as Kelly has not abandoned him as he thinks, but has only gone home to America. David, who has been too sick to leave the refuge of Shōko’s bedroom, has told no one where he is, and soon the police begin searching for him, and Kelly, now lost in worry, returns to Japan. It all comes to a head when Shōko’s parents suddenly discover David. He now has to make the impossible choice between the love he thought he had lost and the love he has just rekindled. Shōko must decide whether to fight for the man she loves or do her duty and step aside. Kelly too is faced with the awful choice of how to deal with David’s newfound love.
Under Shōko’s Bed is cross-cultural contemporary psychological literary fiction with mature characters set in Japan. Is that a category on Amazon?
The feedback I have gotten so far on Under Shōko’s Bed has led me to The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman as one of the most comparable titles, since it has much the same sense of impending heartache. Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami, a tranquil Japanese love story in a confined setting, is another. Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and Nicolas Sparks’s The Notebook, stories of rekindling lost love, are two more. When We Collided by Emery Lord has broadly similar psychological themes, although it is about teens. I also feel some kinship with authors such as Barry Lancet, Micheal Pronko, and David Peace who have lived for an extended period in Japan and used Japan as a setting for novels (although they write in completely different genres from Under Shōko’s Bed).
Still, I have found no novel comparable to Under Shōko’s Bed in more than one or two aspects. My search continues.