What are the best Japanese books? Check out these books about Japan to start immersing yourself in the culture before your visit to Japan.
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, assuming not all of you are fluent in Japanese which goes for me as well. I will only recommend what I have read myself. So this list will be updated regularly when I come across interesting reads. 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 books
1) Osamu Dazai - No Longer Human
A very impressive book about a young man caught between two worlds and his attempt to find his place in the world. He just can’t seem to fit in, leading to depression.
The story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself “disqualified from being human” (a literal translation of the Japanese title).
2) Sayaka Murata - Earthlings
A mix of humor, fantasy, and survival on top of everything that is wrong with society. Word of caution: contains graphic descriptions of (sexual) abuse.
Natsuki isn’t like the other girls. She has a wand and a transformation mirror. She might be a witch, or an alien from another planet. Together with her cousin Yuu, Natsuki spends her summers in the wild mountains of Nagano, dreaming of other worlds. When a terrible sequence of events threatens to part the two children forever, they make a promise: survive, no matter what. Now Natsuki is grown. She lives a quiet life with her asexual husband, surviving as best she can by pretending to be normal. But the demands of Natsuki’s family are increasing, her friends wonder why she’s still not pregnant, and dark shadows from Natsuki’s childhood are pursuing her. Fleeing the suburbs for the mountains of her childhood, Natsuki prepares herself with a reunion with Yuu. Will he still remember their promise? And will he help her keep it?
3) Tahi Saihate - Astral Season, Beastly Season
A story about adoration and objectification. What does it take to grow up as a star instead of a beast?
Astral Season, Beastly Season is the debut novel by Japanese writer Tahi Saihate. The story follows Morishita and Yamashiro, two high-school boys approaching the age in life when they must choose what kind of people they want to be. When their favourite J-pop idol kills and dismembers her boyfriend, Morishita and Yamashiro unite to convince the police that their idol’s act was in fact by them. This thrilling novel is a meditation on belonging, the objectification of young popstars, and teenage alienation.
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Read my review of Astral Season, Beastly Season
4) 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.
5) Ryu Murakami - Piercing
Psychothriller about a not-so-average guy becoming obsessed with an ice pick. The build up is very well done.
A renaissance man for the postmodern age, Ryu Murakami—a musician, filmmaker (Tokyo Decadence), TV personality, and award-winning author—has gained a cult following in the West. In Piercing, Murakami, in his own unique style, explores themes of child abuse and what happens to the voiceless among us, weaving a disturbing, spare tale of two people who find each other and then are forced into hurting each other deeply because of the haunting specter of their own abuse as children.
6) Ryu Murakami - In the Miso Soup
An American tourist touring Tokyo’s nightlife. If you’re going to Kabuchiko in Tokyo, don’t skip this one.
It is just before New Year’s. Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo’s sleazy nightlife on three successive evenings. But Frank’s behavior is so strange that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: that his new client is in fact the serial killer currently terrorizing the city. It isn’t until later, however, that Kenji learns exactly how much he has to fear and how irrevocably his encounter with this great white whale of an American will change his life.
7) Masaji Ishikawa - A River of Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea
About the treatment of someone stuck between two worlds. It makes you want to fix the world, but just like the main character, you probably won’t be able to do anything about it.
Half-Korean, half-Japanese, Masaji Ishikawa has spent his whole life feeling like a man without a country. This feeling only deepened when his family moved from Japan to North Korea when Ishikawa was just thirteen years old, and unwittingly became members of the lowest social caste. His father, himself a Korean national, was lured to the new Communist country by promises of abundant work, education for his children, and a higher station in society. But the reality of their new life was far from utopian.
8) Yoko Ogawa - The Memory Police
More than dystopian, this book felt philosophical to me. Especially the last 50 pages impressed me.
On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses – until things become much more serious. Most of the island’s inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with no power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath the floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her wiring as the last way of preserving the past.
9) Ryu Murakami - Audition
With a nice twist, as always. As you might have noticed: I like this type of book.
Documentary-maker Aoyama hasn’t dated anyone in the seven years since the death of his beloved wife, Ryoko. Now even his teenage son Shige has suggested he think about remarrying. So when his best friend Yoshikawa comes up with a plan to hold fake film auditions so that Aoyama can choose a new bride, he decides to go along with the idea.
10) Toshikazu Kawaguchi - Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Beautiful stories about life and death, and making the most of missed opportunities. I kinda want to visit the cafe myself to meet the regulars.
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .
11) Banana Yoshimoto - Asleep
This made for a very relaxing read. Somehow I can’t remember the stories well – I think I got entranced – but I really liked them while reading.
Three stories about women, all bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning a lost lover, finds herself sleepwalking at night. Another, who has embarked on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, finds herself suddenly unable to stay awake. A third finds her sleep haunted by another woman whom she was once pitted against in a love triangle. Sly and mystical as a ghost story, with a touch of Kafkaesque surrealism.
12) 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.
13) Keigo Higashino - Salvation of a Saint
I’m impressed by the plan Ayane came up with, but I can think of some improvement for even better execution. Can you too?
Yoshitaka, who was about to leave his marriage and his wife, is poisoned by arsenic-laced coffee and dies. His wife, Ayane, is the logical suspect—except that she was hundreds of miles away when he was murdered. The lead detective, Tokyo Police Detective Kusanagi, is immediately smitten with her and refuses to believe that she could have had anything to do with the crime. His assistant, Kaoru Utsumi, however, is convinced Ayane is guilty. While Utsumi’s instincts tell her one thing, the facts of the case are another matter. So she does what her boss has done for years when stymied—she calls upon Professor Manabu Yukawa. But even the brilliant mind of Dr. Yukawa has trouble with this one, and he must somehow find a way to solve an impossible murder and capture a very real, very deadly murderer.
14) Keigo Higashino - The Devotion of Suspect X
His best-known book and it certainly is very entertaining.
Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother who thought she had finally escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day to extort money from her, threatening both her and her teenaged daughter Misato, the situation quickly escalates into violence and Togashi ends up dead on her apartment floor. Overhearing the commotion, Yasuko’s next-door neighbor, middle-aged high school mathematics teacher Ishigami, offers his help, disposing not only of the body but plotting the cover-up step-by-step. Detective Kusanagi brings in Dr. Manabu Yukawa, a physicist and college friend who frequently consults with the police. What ensues is a high-level battle of wits, as Ishigami tries to protect Yasuko by outmaneuvering and outthinking Yukawa, who faces his most clever and determined opponent yet.
15) Haruki Murakami - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
At first Tsukuru travels alone but later others join his pilgrimage. It was nice to follow his journey from the start until his new beginning. Tsukuru is not a perfect person and he never will be. It is inspiring to see how he takes the first step and moves from inaction to action to make something of his life.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the remarkable story of a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present. Here Haruki Murakami—one of the most revered voices in literature today—gives us a story of love, friendship, and heartbreak for the ages.
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Read my review of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
16) Sayaka Murata - Convenience Store Woman
A must-read if you also hop in and out of convenience stores when traveling in Japan (and other Asian countries).
Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers’ style of dress and speech patterns so she can play the part of a normal person. However, eighteen years later, at age 36, she is still in the same job, has never had a boyfriend, and has only few friends. She feels comfortable in her life but is aware that she is not living up to society’s expectations and causing her family to worry about her. When a similarly alienated but cynical and bitter young man comes to work in the store, he will upset Keiko’s contented stasis—but will it be for the better?
17) 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.
18) Kikuko Tsumura - There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job
Funny at times, deep at others. An excellent read about finding meaning, burnout, and passion.
A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing – and ideally, very little thinking.
She is sent to a nondescript office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end can be so inconvenient and tiresome. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly – how did she find herself in this situation in the first place?
As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she’s not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful…
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Read my review of There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job
19) Haruki Murakami - A Wild Sheep Chase
A good book with an interesting story. Am I now allowed to join the sheeplessnessclub? A recommended read if you’re visiting Hokkaido.
His life was like a recurring nightmare: a train to nowhere. But an ordinary life has a way of taking an extraordinary turn. Add a girl whose ears are so exquisite that, when uncovered, they improve sex a thousand-fold, a runaway friend, a right-wing politico, an ovine-obsessed professor and a manic-depressive in a sheep outfit, implicate them in a hunt for a sheep, that may or may not be running the world, and the upshot is another singular masterpiece from Japan’s finest novelist.
20) Misumi Kubo - 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.
Narrating each story in the distinctive voice of its protagonist, Misumi Kubo weaves themes including sex, love, the female body, gossip, and the bullying that leaves young people feeling burdened and helpless into a profoundly original novel that lingers in the mind for its affirmation of the raw, unquellable force of life.
21) Fuminori Nakamura - The Gun
About a young man stumbling upon a dead body and getting obsessed with the gun he lifted from the murder scene. The build up is very well done.
In Tokyo a college student’s discovery and eventual obsession with a stolen handgun awakens something dark inside him and threatens to consume not only his life but also his humanity.
On a nighttime walk along a Tokyo riverbank, a young man named Nishikawa stumbles on a dead body, beside which lies a gun. From the moment Nishikawa decides to take the gun, the world around him blurs. Knowing he possesses the weapon brings an intoxicating sense of purpose to his dull university life.
But soon Nishikawa’s personal entanglements become unexpectedly complicated: he finds himself romantically involved with two women while his biological father, whom he’s never met, lies dying in a hospital. Through it all, he can’t stop thinking about the gun—and the four bullets loaded in its chamber. As he spirals into obsession, his focus is consumed by one idea: that possessing the gun is no longer enough—he must fire it.
22) Hiro Arikawa - The Travelling Cat Chronicles
A beautiful and light story until the first absolutely non-subtle hint is dropped about the purpose of their journey.
Nana the cat is on a road trip. He is not sure where he’s going or why, but it means that he gets to sit in the front seat of a silver van with his beloved owner, Satoru. Side by side, they cruise around Japan through the changing seasons, visiting Satoru’s old friends. He meets Yoshimine, the brusque and unsentimental farmer for whom cats are just ratters; Sugi and Chikako, the warm-hearted couple who run a pet-friendly B&B; and Kosuke, the mournful husband whose cat-loving wife has just left him. There’s even a very special dog who forces Nana to reassess his disdain for the canine species.
But what is the purpose of this road trip? And why is everyone so interested in Nana? Nana does not know and Satoru won’t say. But when Nana finally works it out, his small heart will break…
23) Kanae Minato - Confessions
Interesting structure, which helps you to understand the motivations of the characters involved.
Her pupils killed her daughter. Now, she will have her revenge. After an engagement that ended in tragedy, all Yuko Moriguchi had to live for was her four-year-old child, Manami. Now, after a heartbreaking accident on the grounds of the middle school where she teaches, Yuko has given up and tendered her resignation.
But first, she has one last lecture to deliver. She tells a story that will upend everything her students ever thought they knew about two of their peers, and sets in motion a maniacal plot for revenge.
24) Naoki Matayoshi - Spark
A story that is both inspiring and sad.
Tokunaga is a young comedian struggling to make a name for himself in Osaka, when he is taken under the wing of the more experienced, but no more famous, Kamiya. But as much as Kamiya’s indestructible confidence inspires him, it also makes him doubt the limits of his own talent, and his own dedication to comedy.
But first, she has one last lecture to deliver. She tells a story that will upend everything her students ever thought they knew about two of their peers, and sets in motion a maniacal plot for revenge.
Buy from Amazon
Read my review of Spark
25) Masatsugu Ono - Lion Cross Point
The story takes place in Kyushu, Japan. Through it all, you can feel Takeru’s pain without it being explicitly mentioned. Some strong character building in action!
When 10-year-old Takeru arrives at his mother’s home village in the middle of a scorching summer, he’s all alone and in possession of terrible memories. Unspeakable things have happened to his mother and his mentally disabled 12-year-old brother. As Takeru gets to know Mitsuko, his new caretaker, and Saki, his spunky neighbor, he meets more of his mother’s old friends, discovering her history and confronting the terrible acts that have left him alone. All the while he begins to see a strange figure that calls himself Bunji—the same name of a delicate young boy who mysteriously vanished one day on the village’s coastline at Lion’s Cross Point.
At once the moving tale of a young boy forced to confront demons well beyond his age, a sensitive portrayal of a child’s point of view, and a spooky Japanese ghost story, Lion’s Cross Point is gripping and poignant. Acts of heartless brutality mix with surprising moments of pure kindness, creating this utterly truthful tale of an unforgettable young boy.
26) Banana Yoshimoto - Goodbye Tsugumi
Tsugumi was a very intriguing character: weird, but at the same time balanced.
Goodbye Tsugumi is an offbeat story of a deep and complicated friendship between two female cousins. Maria is the only daughter of an unmarried woman. She has grown up at the seaside alongside her cousin Tsugumi, a lifelong invalid, charismatic, spoiled, and occasionally cruel. Now Maria’s father is finally able to bring Maria and her mother to Tokyo, ushering Maria into a world of university, impending adulthood, and a “normal” family. When Tsugumi invites Maria to spend a last summer by the sea, a restful idyll becomes a time of dramatic growth as Tsugumi finds love and Maria learns the true meaning of home and family. She also has to confront both Tsugumi’s inner strength and the real possibility of losing her.
27) Yoko Ogawa - Hotel Iris
Someone help that girl… again a very deep and touching story.
Hotel Iris is a stirring novel about the sometimes violent ways in which we express intimacy and about the untranslatable essence of love.
In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man’s voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari sees in this man something she has long been looking for and begins to visit him on his island. He soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at ease even than the translator. As Mari’s mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari’s sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are recklessly engaged.
28) Natsu Miyashita - The Forest of Wool and Steel
A meandering story that draws parallels between a forest and the tuning of a piano. I wonder whether this will appeal more or actually less to those who play the piano. Set on Hokkaido, Japan.
What he experienced that day wasn’t life-changing . . . It was life-making.
Tomura is startled by the hypnotic sound of a piano being tuned in his school. It seeps into his soul and transports him to the forests, dark and gleaming, that surround his beloved mountain village. From that moment, he is determined to discover more.
Under the tutelage of three master piano-tuners – one humble, one cheery, one ill-tempered – Tomura embarks on his training, never straying too far from a single, unfathomable question: do I have what it takes?
Set in small-town Japan, this warm and mystical story is for the lucky few who have found their calling – and for the rest of us who are still searching. It shows that the road to finding one’s purpose is a winding path, often filled with treacherous doubts and, for those who persevere, astonishing moments of revelation.
29) Kenzaburo Oe - A Personal Matter
A heavy theme to write about and Kenzaburo Oe does it with class. I didn’t like his writing style, but the story is good.
Kenzaburō Ōe, the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, is internationally acclaimed as one of the most important and influential post-World War II writers, known for his powerful accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and his own struggle to come to terms with a mentally handicapped son. The Swedish Academy lauded Ōe for his “poetic force [that] creates an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.”
His most personal book, A Personal Matter, is the story of Bird, a frustrated intellectual in a failing marriage whose utopian dream is shattered when his wife gives birth to a brain-damaged child.
30) Keigo Higashino - Malice
Can you find out who and why before the detective does?
Acclaimed bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found brutally murdered in his home on the night before he’s planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver. His body is found in his office, a locked room, within his locked house, by his wife and his best friend, both of whom have rock solid alibis. Or so it seems. In a brilliantly realized tale of cat and mouse, the detective and the killer battle over the truth of the past and how events that led to the murder really unfolded. And if Kaga isn’t able to uncover and prove why the murder was committed, then the truth may never come out.
31) Yoko Ogawa - The Housekeeper and the Professor
This is actually my least favorite Yoko Ogawa book, as I found the second half a bit boring. Still recommended as the characters really came to life and the links with math were interesting.
He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem–ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities–like the Housekeeper’s shoe size–and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.
32) Banana Yoshimoto - Kitchen
Mikage has her own unique way of dealing with the situation. I know this is the book she is best known for, but I liked Asleep and Goodbye Tsugumi better.
An enchantingly original and deeply affecting book about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine of Kitchen, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, she is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who was once his father), Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale that recalls early Marguerite Duras.
33) 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.
34) Min Jin Lee - Pachinko
As it spans many generations, it’s hard to connect to the characters, but if you see this book as a collection of stories, then the stories become more interesting. I especially liked the first part set in Korea and the part right after they moved to Japan.
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.
35) Keigo Higashino - The Name of the Game is a Kidnapping
A solid read, though not remarkable, if you are looking for a standalone book to read in between heavier reads, then this is a good choice.
Sakuma is a high-profile ad agent who was about to land one of the biggest gigs of his career. But he was betrayed by the owner of the company that just hired him.
Down on his luck and now on his way out career-wise, he planned to go publically chew out the man who brought him down. Instead, upon uncovering a deep secret, he devises a plan to bring down his new rival in a twisted game called kidnapping.
36) Seishi Yokomizo - The Honjin Murders
A locked-room murder, red-ochre-painted walls and the sound of the koto. Can you solve the murder mystery faster than private detective Kosuke Kindaichi?
In the winter of 1937, the village of Okamura is abuzz with excitement over the forthcoming wedding of a daughter of the grand Ichiyanagi family. But amid the gossip over the approaching festivities, there is also a worrying rumour – it seems a sinister masked man has been asking questions about the Ichiyanagis around the village.
Then, on the night of the wedding, the Ichiniyagi family are woken by a terrible scream, followed by the sound of eerie music – death has come to Okamura, leaving no trace but a bloody samurai sword, thrust into the pristine snow outside the house. The murder seems impossible, but amateur detective Kosuke Kindaichi is determined to get to the bottom of it.
37) Mieko Kawakami - Breasts and Eggs
“You could give women something real. Real hope. Precedent. Empowerment.” That’s the type of novel Natsuko Natsume, our main character, considers writing and that Japanese author Mieko Kawakami has delivered with Breasts and Eggs.
An earlier novella published in Japan with the same title focused on the female body, telling the story of three women: the thirty-year-old unmarried narrator, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter Midoriko. Unable to come to terms with her changed body after giving birth, Makiko becomes obsessed with the prospect of getting breast enhancement surgery. Meanwhile, her twelve-year-old daughter Midoriko is paralyzed by the fear of her oncoming puberty and finds herself unable to voice the vague, yet overwhelming anxieties associated with growing up. The narrator, who remains unnamed for most of the story, struggles with her own indeterminable identity of being neither a “daughter” nor a “mother.” Set over three stiflingly hot days in Tokyo, the book tells of a reunion of sorts, between two sisters, and the passage into womanhood of young Midoriko.
38) Hiroko Oyamada - The Factory
The Japanese author Hiroko Oyamada has the uncanny skill to turn you into one of the main characters of the book. When reading The Factory you feel like they feel: there is no escaping The Factory.
In an unnamed Japanese city, three seemingly normal and unrelated characters find work at a sprawling industrial factory. They each focus intently on their specific jobs: one studies moss, one shreds paper, and the other proofreads incomprehensible documents. Life in the factory has its own logic and momentum, and, eventually, the factory slowly expands and begins to take over everything, enveloping these poor workers. The very margins of reality seem to be dissolving: all forms of life capriciously evolve, strange creatures begin to appear… After a while—it could be weeks or years—the workers don’t even have the ability to ask themselves: where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin?
39) Yu Miri - Tokyo Ueno Station
Short book infused with culture, melancholy and facts about the area around Ueno Station in Tokyo.
Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Emperor, Kazu’s life is tied by a series of coincidences to Japan’s Imperial family and to one particular spot in Tokyo; the park near Ueno Station – the same place his unquiet spirit now haunts in death. It is here that Kazu’s life in Tokyo began, as a labourer in the run up to the 1964 Olympics, and later where he ended his days, living in the park’s vast homeless ‘villages’, traumatised by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and enraged by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics.
40) 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.
41) Keigo Higashino - A Midsummer’s Equation
Detective Galileo is at it again and this time at a place that really reminds you of being on holiday (recommended for that reason!). I do hope he finds a more interesting case next time.
Manabu Yukawa, the physicist known as “Detective Galileo,” has traveled to Hari Cove, a once-popular summer resort town that has fallen on hard times. He is there to speak at a conference on a planned underwater mining operation, which has sharply divided the town. The night after the tense panel discussion, one of the resort’s guests is found dead on the seashore at the base of the local cliffs. The local police at first believe it was a simple accident-that he wandered over the edge while walking on unfamiliar territory in the middle of the night. But when they discover that the victim was a former policeman and that the cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning, they begin to suspect he was murdered, and his body tossed off the cliff to misdirect the police.
As the police try to uncover where Tsukahara was killed and why, Yukawa finds himself enmeshed in yet another confounding case of murder.
42) Osamu Dazai - The Setting Sun
Less impressive than No Longer Human (which holds the number one spot in this list), but it gives a good insight in life’s struggles at that time in Japan.
The post-war period in Japan was one of immense social change as Japanese society adjusted to the shock of defeat and to the occupation of Japan by American forces and their allies. Osamu Dazai’s The Setting Sun takes this milieu as its background to tell the story of the decline of a minor aristocratic family.
The story is told through the eyes of Kazuko, the unmarried daughter of a widowed aristocrat. Her search for self meaning in a society devoid of use for her forms the crux of Dazai’s novel. Kazuko’s mother falls ill, and due to their financial circumstances they are forced to take a cottage in the countryside. Her brother, who became addicted to opium during the war is missing. When he returns, Kazuko attempts to form a liaison with the novelist Uehara. This romantic displacement only furthers to deepen her alienation from society.
43) Mieko Kawakami - Ms Ice Sandwich
Not much happens, but somehow it keeps your attention until the end. Nice light story with a deeper layer.
A boy is obsessed with a woman who sells sandwiches. He goes to the supermarket almost every day, just so he can look at her face. She is beautiful to him, and he calls her “Ms Ice Sandwich”, and endlessly draws her portrait.
But the boy’s friend hears about this hesitant adoration, and suddenly everything changes. His visits to Ms Ice Sandwich stop, and with them the last hopes of his childhood.
A moving and surprisingly funny tale of growing up and learning how to lose, Ms Ice Sandwich is Mieko Kawakami at her very best.
Other Japanese books
I also read and considered the following books set in Japan or by Japanese authors, but they didn’t stand out to me.
