What are the best Japanese short story collections? Check out these books from Japan to start immersing yourself in the culture before your visit to Japan.
In recent years, many exciting, unusual, touching and fantastic short story collections have been translated from Japanese. And what’s even better: more translations are forthcoming. I have gathered the most interesting stories from Japan in this booklist. If you are also interested in full-length novels, please check out my Best Japanese Books list.
When I’m planning a trip I like to read books originating from that country to start getting immersed and learn more about the culture. If you feel the same then look at the list below for inspiration.
For this list I’ll limit myself to books with English translations and I will only rate what I have read myself. So this list will be updated regularly when I come across interesting reads. I have added a list of other books by Japanese authors that I still want to read. If you have read any good books about Japan or by a Japanese author, please recommend them to me in the comment section below.
Best Japanese Short Stories
Yoko Ogawa - Revenge
Eerie short story collection with a touch of the supernatural and bizarre. All stories are connected in a very interesting way.
An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Years later, the writer’s stepson reflects upon his stepmother and the strange stories she used to tell him. Meanwhile, a surgeon’s lover vows to kill him if he does not leave his wife. Before she can follow-through on her crime of passion, though, the surgeon will cross paths with another remarkable woman, a cabaret singer whose heart beats delicately outside of her body. But when the surgeon promises to repair her condition, he sparks the jealousy of another man who would like to preserve the heart in a custom-tailored bag. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders—their fates converge in a darkly beautiful web that they are each powerless to escape.
Otsuichi - Goth
Read this if you like dark and twisted stories. It’s hard to relate to the characters, but their descriptions fit their role well.
Intertwined short stories about two teenagers and their obsession with murder and torture, showing the dark side of humanity.
Yoko Ogawa - The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
Three very engaging stories. I really like Yoko Ogawa’s books and will check out any new releases.
A haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may contain a hairline crack of cruel intent. A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool—a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life. A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy that may or may not be a hallucination—but whose hallucination is it, hers or her sister’s? A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg.
Misumi Kobo - So We Look to the Sky
Misumi Kobo explores (sexual) relationships between people who make the most of life with the cards they were dealt at birth.
Searingly honest and sexually explicit, So We Look to the Sky is a novel told in five linked stories that begin with an affair between a student and a woman ten years his senior, who picks him up for cosplay sex in a comics market. Their scandalous liaison, which the woman’s husband makes public by posting secretly taped video online, frames all of the stories, but each explores a different aspect of the life passages and hardships ordinary people face. A teenager experimenting with sex and then, perhaps, experiencing love and loss; a young, anime-obsessed wife bullied by her mother-in-law to produce the child she and her husband cannot conceive; a high school girl, spurned by the student, realizing that being cute and fertile is all others expect of her; the student’s best friend, who lives in the projects and is left alone to support and care for his voracious, senile grandmother; and the student’s mother, a divorced single parent and midwife, who guides women bringing new life into this world and must rescue her son, crushed by the twin blows of public humiliation and loss, from giving up on his own.
Matsuda Aoko - Where the Wild Ladies Are
Matsuda Aoko links the present to the past by incorporating Japanese ghost and yokai tales into a modern world.
I never thought of Okon and Oiwa as terrifying monsters. If they were terrifying, so was I. If they were monsters, that meant I was a monster too.
Witty, inventive, and profound, Where the Wild Ladies Are is a contemporary feminist retelling of traditional ghost stories by one of Japan’s most exciting writers.
In a company run by the mysterious Mr Tei, strange things are afoot – incense sticks lead to a surprise encounter; a young man reflects on his mother’s death; a foxlike woman finally finds her true calling. As female ghosts appear in unexpected guises, their gently humorous encounters with unsuspecting humans lead to deeper questions about emancipation and recent changes in Japanese women’s lives.
Edogawa Rampo - Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination
A diverse short story collection, taking inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe (scramble the name). Some stories are really well written, like the story about the chair, others are not remarkable. This collection might have been more shocking and impressive in the 1920s. It is still an interesting read from a cultural immersion perspective.
Collected in this chilling volume are some of the famous Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo’s best stories—bizarre and blood-curdling expeditions into the fantastic and the perverse.
Asako Serizawa - Inheritors
Inheritors by Asako Serizawa shows the effects of WWII on families through stories spanning decades. Set in the USA and Japan, it explores how history is lived.
Spanning more than 150 years, and set in multiple locations in colonial and postcolonial Asia and the United States, Inheritors paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of its characters as they grapple with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war.
Written from myriad perspectives and in a wide range of styles, each of these interconnected stories is designed to speak to the others, contesting assumptions and illuminating the complicated ways we experience, interpret, and pass on our personal and shared histories. A retired doctor, for example, is forced to confront the horrific moral consequences of his wartime actions. An elderly woman subjects herself to an interview, gradually revealing a fifty-year old murder and its shattering aftermath. And in the last days of a doomed war, a prodigal son who enlisted against his parents’ wishes survives the American invasion of his island outpost, only to be asked for a sacrifice more daunting than any he imagined.
Haruki Murakami - First Person Singular
Murakami gives you a first person’s perspective as he takes you on a trip down memory lane.
The eight masterful stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator: a lonely man. Some of them (like With the Beatles, Cream and On a Stone Pillow ) are nostalgic looks back at youth. Others are set in adulthood–Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova, Carnaval, Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey and the stunning title story. Occasionally, a narrator who may or may not be Haruki himself is present, as in The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides. The stories all touch beautifully on love and loss, childhood and death . . . all with a signature Murakami twist.
Izumi Suzuki - Terminal Boredom
In a future where men are contained in ghettoized isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia – until a boy escapes and a young woman’s perception of the world is violently interrupted.
The last family in a desolate city struggles to approximate 20th century life on Earth, lifting what notions they can from 1960s popular culture. But beneath these badly learned behaviors lies an atavistic appetite for destruction.
Two new friends enjoy drinks on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems, and the air itself seems to carry a treacherously potent nostalgia. Back on Earth, Emma’s not certain if her emotionally abusive, green-haired boyfriend is in fact an intergalactic alien spy, or if she’s been hitting the bottle and baggies too hard.
Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder
A housewife takes up bodybuilding and sees radical changes to her physique–which her workaholic husband fails to notice. A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking businessmen struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon–until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A woman working in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won’t come out of the fitting room–and who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her husband’s features are beginning to slide around his face–to match her own.
In these eleven stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien–and, through it, find a way to liberation. The English-language debut of one of Japan’s most fearlessly inventive young writers.
Taeko Kōno - Toddler Hunting & Other Stories
Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories introduces a startlingly original voice. Winner of Japan’s top literary prizes for fiction (among them the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri), Taeko Kono writes with a strange beauty, pinpricked with sadomasochistic and disquieting scenes.
In the title story, the protagonist loathes young girls, but compulsively buys expensive clothes for little boys so that she can watch them dress and undress. The impersonal gaze Taeko Kono turns on this behavior transfixes the reader with a fatal question: What are we hunting for? And why?
Multiplying perspectives and refracting light from the strangely facing mirrors of fantasy and reality, pain and pleasure, these ten stories present Kono at her very best.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa - Murder in the Age of Enlightenment
The stories in this fantastical, unconventional collection are subtly wrought depictions of the darkness of our desires. From an isolated bamboo grove, to a lantern festival in Tokyo, to the Emperor’s court, they offer glimpses into moments of madness, murder, and obsession. Vividly translated by Bryan Karetnyk, they unfold in elegant, sometimes laconic, always gripping prose.
Akutagawa’s stories are characterised by their stylish originality; they are stories to be read again and again.
