If what gripped you in The Employees was the chorus of numbered testimonies—the committee transcripts that let human and humanoid workers reveal themselves in fragments while the New Discovery objects hum in the background—you'll love how this novel unfolds entirely through clandestine letters. As Red and Blue trade missives across battlefields of time, their voices sharpen, swerve, and contradict, much like the crew statements aboard the Six-Thousand Ship. You get that same revelation-by-document thrill: personal confessions smuggled through official conflict, where what’s written becomes more dangerous—and more tender—than the mission itself.

In The Employees, the inexplicable cargo from New Discovery quietly rewires the crew’s desires, memories, and sense of purpose, prompting those haunting interviews about work, love, and embodiment. Solaris channels that same searching mood: Kris Kelvin arrives at a station orbiting a living ocean that answers human consciousness with disturbing, intimate visitations. Like the crew’s fascination and dread around the ship’s artifacts, the scientists on Solaris face a presence that refuses to be reduced to data, forcing them—through their own "reports" and logbooks—to interrogate grief, memory, and the limits of understanding.

If the uncanny pull of those scent-laden New Discovery objects—and the corporate committee’s clinical follow-ups—hooked you in The Employees, Annihilation delivers that same atmosphere of institutional procedure meeting the inexplicable. The biologist’s field journal documents a mission into Area X where a tower/tunnel writes living words on its walls and the team’s identities dissolve under protocols and secrets. As with the shipboard interviews, official language frays around the inexplicable, and what begins as data collection becomes a bodily, disorienting transformation.

The way The Employees turns workplace questionnaires and cargo logs into a meditation on how objects shape our selves finds a powerful echo here. On an island ruled by the Memory Police, things—roses, ribbons, birds—vanish from collective memory; what remains are habits and jobs emptied out by edict. Like the crew whose testimonies circle the New Discovery artifacts and their effects, Ogawa’s narrator confronts how possessions, routines, and even bodies become sites of control. It’s the same cool, lucid dread of an impersonal system erasing meaning, one object at a time.

If you loved how The Employees builds its world through brief, crystalline statements—the crew’s clipped anecdotes, sudden yearnings for Earth, the stray sensory notes about the cargo—The Emissary works in similar, luminous fragments. Through short, tender sketches of a frail child and his aging guardian in a post-disaster Japan, Tawada layers feelings and ideas rather than exposition. As on the Six-Thousand Ship, what lingers are sensations and small rituals: food, language, work; the spaces between scenes do the heavy lifting, letting you read the silence as much as the words.