Japanese Literature Part III
Explore the best of Japanese literature with our curated list of must-read books. Discover classic and contemporary novels, authors, and timeless stories from Japan's rich literary heritage.
Book
Darkness in Summer
by Takeshi Kaiko
"This intensely modern novel … provides vivid insights into the alienated condition of a certain type of Japanese whom we may so often glimpse in the streets of Rome or New York—intelligent, perceptive, and desperately lost between two worlds."—Ivan Morris, author of The Nobility of Failure Darkness in Summer is the first serious work of Japanese fiction to focus on the Japanese experience in the West. A man and a woman, separated for ten years, meet again, traveling together in Germany. They had been lovers long ago, in Tokyo; now, incapable of love, they are brought together by sexual desire and by their mutual desperation. No new passion, but their old obsession, may give them back the key to their lives, release them from their terrors, their rootlessness. The woman is a scholar who has come to hate the Japan that allowed her no seriousness, forcing her to pursue a career in the West; the man is a novelist-reporter, lethargic, an uncommitted observer of other people's wars, sunk into detachment by his professional familiarity with tragedy and chaos. They need each other, and yet they cannot fulfill each other's needs. They savor their world together with urgency as they move restlessly from place to place, finally parting again, to survive separately as best they can.
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Geisha in Rivalry
by Kafu Nagai
Geisha in Rivalry, first published as Udekurabe in 1918, has a secure place among Kafu Nagai's masterpieces. Set against the backdrop of Tokyo's Shimbashi geisha district, a company of vivid characters play out their drama of illicit love, shady intrigue, and unrelenting rivalry. In the forefront are the geisha: some powerful and spiteful like the imperious Rikiji, some crude and obvious like the gaudy Kikuchiyo, some naive and pathetic like the heroine Komayo, and all engaged in finding a place for themselves in a world that offers no easy route of escape from their profession. Here, too, are the patrons of the geisha: the playboys, the actors, the successful businessmen, and the "upstart gentlemen" of late Meiji society. And here, again, are those who make the machinery of this world function: the geisha house proprietors, the teahouse mistresses, the actors' retainers, the servants. And, finally, here are the parasites of the demimonde, who live off its other denizens through guile and deceit. Through this often sordid but fascinating pageant move the figures of the geisha Komayo, her lovers, and the women who conspire to steal them from her.
Book
Fires on the Plain
by Shohei Ooka
Anti-war novel as seen from the point of view of a losing army.
Book
Battle Royale
by Kōshun Takami
This classic yet controversial Japanese novel is available for the first time in English--a high-octane thriller about senseless youth violence that is a potent allegory of what it means to be young and survive in today's dog-eat-dog world.
Book
Musashi
by 吉川英治
Musashi Miyamoto fights in 1600 for the losing side of the battle at Sekigahara when the Tokugawa Shogunate begins its reign.
