Wat zijn de beste Japanse verhalenbundels? Bekijk deze boeken uit Japan om je alvast in de cultuur onder te dompelen voor je bezoek aan Japan.
De afgelopen jaren zijn er veel spannende, ongewone, ontroerende en fantastische verhalenbundels uit het Japans vertaald naar het Engels. En wat nog mooier is: er komen er steeds meer bij. Ik heb de interessantste verhalenbundels uit Japan verzameld in deze boekenlijst. Als je ook geïnteresseerd bent in romans, bekijk dan mijn lijst met de beste Japanse boeken met Nederlandse vertaling.
In de aanloop naar mijn vakantie lees ik graag boeken die zich afspelen in het land waar ik van plan ben heen te gaan. Als inspiratie voor de route, maar ook uit interesse in de cultuur en literatuur van het land dat ik ga bezoeken. Als dat voor jou ook geldt, dan is deze lijst voor jou.
Ik zal de lijst regelmatig updaten met nieuwe interessante verhalenbundels van Japanse auteurs en andere boeken die zich in Japanse afspelen. Onder de gerangschikte lijst met sterwaardering vind je de boeken met Engelse vertaling die ik zelf nog graag wil lezen.
Beste Japanse verhalenbundels
Yoko Ogawa - Revenge
Otsuichi - Goth
Lees dit als je van duistere en bizarre verhalen houdt. Het is moeilijk om je in te leven in de personages, maar hun belevingen passen goed bij hun rol.
Morino is the strangest girl in school-how could she not be, given her obsession with brutal murders? And there are plenty of murders to grow obsessed with as the town in which she lives is a magnet for serial killers. She and her schoolmate will go to any length to investigate the murders, even putting their own bodies on the line. And they don’t want to stop the killer, but simply to understand him.
Yoko Ogawa - Het zwembad
Drie pakkende verhalen over mensen die net iets anders met alledaagse situaties omgaan.
Een eenzaam tienermeisje wordt verliefd op haar adoptiebroer – een bevlieging die duistere mogelijkheden schept. Een jonge vrouw houdt een zwangerschapsdagboek bij voor haar zwangere zus, maar haar aantekeningen worden steeds naargeestiger. Een vrouw bezoekt haar oude studentenhuis, maar komt in een geïsoleerde, vervallen en mysterieuze wereld terecht…
Misumi Kobo - So We Look to the Sky
Misumi Kobo verkent (seksuele) relaties tussen mensen die het beste proberen te maken van hun leven met de kansen die ze bij geboorte hebben gekregen.
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.
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Matsuda Aoko - Where the Wild Ladies Are
Matsuda Aoko verbindt het heden met het verleden door Japanse spook- en yokai-verhalen in een modern jasje te gieten.
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.
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Edogawa Rampo - Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination
Een diverse verzameling korte verhalen, geïnspireerd door Edgar Allen Poe (woordpuzzel). Sommige verhalen zijn echt goed geschreven, zoals het verhaal over de stoel, andere zijn niet opmerkelijk. Deze bundel was misschien schokkender en indrukwekkender geweest in de jaren 1920. Het is nog steeds interessant om te lezen vanuit literair perspectief.
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 van Asako Serizawa speelt zich af in de VS en Japan en toont het effect van WWII op gezinnen via levensverhalen van verschillende generaties familieleden.
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.
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Haruki Murakami - Eerste persoon enkelvoud
Murakami belicht het perspectief van de eerste persoon terwijl hij je meeneemt op een reis door zijn herinneringen.
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.
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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.
