Given the way that Japanese pop culture filters into the west, youre no doubt familiar with the very best in Japanese film, television (both anime and crazy game shows), music, and manga. But its possible that you havent had a chance to read some of Japans fabulous literary canon. With this in mind, weve prepared a list of must-read Japanese authors, both modern and classic.
This list contains some of our favouritesKawabatas Palm of the Hand Stories, Oes Rise Up O Young Men of the New Age, Mishimas The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, Endos Silence,'and Murakamis Wind-Up Bird Chronicleas well as a good deal of others weve enjoyed (and a few weve not yet got to).
As always, this list is in no way comprehensive, but should make a reasonable starting point for kicking off your Japanese literature reading. Click on any of the book covers for more information or purchasing information.
Haruki Murakami
Best known for:
Blurb: When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
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Kenzaburo Oe (Nobel Laureate)
Best known for:
Blurb: Two brothers, Takashi and Mitsu, return from Tokyo to the village of their childhood. The selling of their family home leads them to an inescapable confrontation with their family history. Their attempt to escape the influence of the city ends in failure as they realize that its tentacles extend to everything in the countryside, including their own relationship. In 1994, Kenzaburo Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Signalling out The Silent Cry, the Nobel Committee stated that his poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament. Kenzaburo Oe is one of the great writers of the century and The Silent Cry is his masterpiece.
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Yasunari Kawabata (Nobel Laureate)
Best known for:
Blurb: The competition between the Master of Go and his opponent, Otake, is waged over several months, and layered in ceremony. But beneath the games decorum lie tensions that not only consume the games players themselves but their families and retainerstensions that turn this particular duel into a contest that can only end in one mans death.
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Yukio Mishima
Best known for:
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
Blurb: A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call objectivity. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ships officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disallusionment as an act of betrayal on his part and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.
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Junichiro Tanizaki
Best known for:
Blurb: Na-o-mi. The three syllables of this name, unusual in 1920s Japan, captivate a 28-year-old engineer, who soon becomes infatuated with the girl so named, a teenaged cafe waitress. Drawn to her Eurasian features and innocent demeanor, Joji is eager to whisk young Naomi away from the seamy underbelly of post'World War I Tokyo and to mold her into his ideal wife. But when the two come together to indulge their shared passion for Western culture, Joji discovers that Naomi is far from being the naive girl of his fantasies, and his passion descends into a comically helpless masochism.'A literary masterpiece that helped to establish Junichiro Tanizaki as Japans greatest novelist,'Naomi is both a hilarious story of one mans obsession and torment, and a brilliant evocation of a nations cultural confusion.
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Shusaku Endo
Best known for:
Blurb: Silence is a novel of historical fiction by Japanese author Shusaku Endo. It is the story of a Jesuit missionary sent to seventeenth century Japan, who endured persecution in the time of Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians) that followed the defeat of the Shimabara Rebellion.'Written mostly in the form of a letter by its central character, the theme of a silent God who accompanies a believer in adversity was greatly influenced by the Catholic Endos experience of religious discrimination in Japan, racism in France and debilitating tuberculosis.'The recipient of the 1966 Tanizaki Prize,'Silence has been called Endo's supreme achievement and one of the twentieth century's finest novels
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Natsume Soseki
Best known for:
Blurb: Written over the course of 1904-6, Soseki's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the follies of upper-middle-class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him.
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Sawako Ariyoshi
Best known for:
Blurb: The River Ki dominates the lives of the people who live in its fertile valley and imparts a vital strength to three women mother, daughter and granddaughter around whom this novel is built. It provides them with the courage to cope with the unprecedented changes that occurred in Japan around the late 19th, early 20th centuries.
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Eiji Yoshikawa
Best known for
Blurb: Miyamoto Musashi was the child of an era when Japan was emerging from decades of civil strife. Lured to the great Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 by the hope of becoming a samuraiwithout really knowing what it meanthe regains consciousness after the battle to find himself lying defeated, dazed and wounded among thousands of the dead and dying. On his way home, he commits a rash act, becomes a fugitive and brings life in his own village to a standstilluntil he is captured by a weaponless Zen monk.'The lovely Otsu, seeing in Musashi her ideal of manliness, frees him from his tortuous punishment, but he is recaptured and imprisoned. During three years of solitary confinement, he delves into the classics of Japan and China. When he is set free again, he rejects the position of samurai and for the next several years pursues his goal relentlessly, looking neither to left nor to right.'Ever so slowly it dawns on him that following the Way of the Sword is not simply a matter of finding a target for his brute strength. Continually striving to perfect his technique, which leads him to a unique style of fighting with two swords simultaneously, he travels far and wide, challenging fighters of many disciplines, taking nature to be his ultimate and severest teacher and undergoing the rigorous training of those who follow the Way. He is supremely successful in his encounters, but in the Art of War he perceives the way of peaceful and prosperous governance and disciplines himself to be a real human being.'He becomes a reluctant hero to a host of people whose lives he has touched and been touched by. And, inevitably, he has to pit his skill against the naked blade of his greatest rival.
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Natsuo Kirino
Best known for:
Blurb: In the Tokyo suburbs four women work the draining graveyard shift at a boxed-lunch factory. Burdened with chores and heavy debts and isolated from husbands and children, they all secretly dream of a way out of their dead-end lives. A young mother among them finally cracks and strangles her philandering, gambling husband then confesses her crime to Masako, the closest of her colleagues. For reasons of her own, Masako agrees to assist her friend and seeks the help of the other co-workers to dismember and dispose of the body. The body parts are discovered, the police start asking questions, but the women have far more dangerous enemies -a yakuza connected loan shark who discovers their secret and has a business proposition, and a ruthless nightclub owner the police are convinced is guilty of the murder. He has lost everything as a result of their crime and he is out for revenge. OUT is a psychologically taut and unflinching foray into the darkest recesses of the human soul, an unsettling reminder that the desperate desire for freedom can make the most ordinary person do the unimaginable.
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Hitomi Kanehara
Best known for:
Blurb: This tale of sex and darkness is narrated by Lui, an alienated young Japanese woman who becomes disastrously involved with two dangerous men. Lui first meets her boyfriend Ama in a bar after finding herself mesmerised by his forked tongue. She immediately moves in with him and begins following him down the path to body modification by having her tongue pierced and planning a beautiful tattoo for her back. Amas friend Shiba creates this exquisite tattoo and as he works on it Lui begins an illicit and brutal sexual relationship with him. Then, after a violent encounter on the back streets of Tokyo, Ama goes missing and Lui must face up to her choices
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Ryu Murakami
Best known for:
Blurb: Its just before New Year, and Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyos nightlife. But, Franks behaviour is so odd that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: his client may in fact have murderous desires. Although Kenji is far from innocent himself, he unwillingly descends with Frank into an inferno of evil, from which only his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Jun, can possibly save him.
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Wendy Nelson Tokunaga recently posted..Nozomi no Hoshi The Wishing Star Title Track