Before I Go Home (Paperback)

At forty-two, Naoki Ishida begins secretly living in an apartment that belongs to no one.

After twelve years with Sayaka, he is left with a home full of memories and a life he no longer knows how to inhabit.

Naoki manages other people's homes for a living. He knows where everything belongs, what needs fixing, and when something has been left behind.

His own life is harder to organize.

It starts with one night in 603, an empty corporate apartment. Then a charger. A toothbrush. A change of clothes. Little by little, Naoki builds a second life inside a place where nothing is expected of him-and where no memory knows his name.

Then Eri enters his life.

And suddenly, the temporary refuge he has created begins to demand a choice he has spent months avoiding.

Because leaving someone is one thing. Knowing where to go afterward is another.

Before I Go Home is an intimate, psychologically sharp novel about love, loneliness, memory, and the strange spaces we inhabit when one life has ended but the next has not yet begun.

From bestselling author Takeri Katsuhiro, whose emotionally intense fiction explores the contradictions people understand perfectly-and repeat anyway.

Takeri Katsuhiro is a bestselling author known for emotionally intense fiction that explores love, loss, memory, human fragility, and the consequences of irreversible choices. His novels are distinguished by their psychological depth, restrained prose, and refusal to rely on conventional redemption or idealized endings.

His work focuses on complex relationships, fractured lives, and the emotional residue left behind when something important is lost. Through intimate character-driven narratives, Takeri examines the contradictions of affection, resentment, desire, absence, and acceptance with a direct and unsentimental approach.

Rather than offering simple resolutions, his fiction embraces ambiguity and the unfinished nature of real life. Takeri Katsuhiro has developed a distinctive literary voice centered on emotional truth, moral complexity, and the lasting impact of the experiences people carry with them long after a story appears to have ended.