books tagged “japanese fiction”

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After the Quake
by Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin

ISBN 0375713271 (0-375-71327-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Haruki Murakami, a writer both mystical and hip, is the West's favorite Japanese novelist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Murakami lived abroad until 1995. That year, two disasters struck Japan: the lethal earthquake in Kobe and the deadly poison gas attacks in the Tokyo subway. Spurred by these tragic events, Murakami returned home. The stories in After the Quake are set in the months that fell between the earthquake and the subway attack, presenting a world marked by despair, hope, and a kind of human instinct for transformation. A teenage girl and a middle-aged man share a hobby of making beach bonfires; a businesswoman travels to Thailand and, quietly, confronts her own death; three friends act out a modern-day Tokyo version of Jules and Jim. There's a surreal element running through the collection in the form of unlikely frogs turning up in unlikely places. News of the earthquake hums throughout. The book opens with the dull buzz of disaster-watching: "Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at the crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways." With language that's never self-consciously lyrical or show-offy, Murakami constructs stories as tight and beautiful as poems. There's no turning back for his people; there's only before and after the quake. --Claire Dederer [via]
More editions of After the Quake:
- After the Quake : Stories: ISBN 0375413901 (0-375-41390-1)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
- After the Quake: ISBN 0375713271 (0-375-71327-1)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Asleep
by Banana Yoshimoto, Michael Emmerich

ISBN 0802138209 (0-8021-3820-9)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
Banana Yoshimoto's Asleep is actually three novellas: "Night and Night's Travelers", "Love Songs" and "Asleep". The death of those close to the narrator is a recurring theme in the stories with sleep being used as a vehicle in which the everyday is denied whilst more important spiritual matters--coming to terms with the death, and life, of loved ones--can be achieved. In "Night and Night's Travelers" the narrator's brother has died and his lover has begun sleepwalking--her night-walks are a communion, a curse and a blessing, and a route through to understanding. In "Love Songs", a woman involved with a man whose wife is in a coma begins to sleep uncontrollably. In "Asleep" the narrator is haunted by an old rival in a love triangle--again, through sleep, and perhaps through dreams or a certain kind of sensibility, a hitherto forbidden or foreclosed communion flourishes. Yoshimoto has a wonderfully light touch and whilst the characterisation in these novellas is slight and the mysticism a little cloying, the optimism is infectious and the sadness beautifully articulated. "Asleep" is well worth staying awake for.. [via]
More editions of Asleep:
- Asleep: ISBN 0802116698 (0-8021-1669-8)
  Hardcover, Grove Pr
- Asleep: ISBN 0802138209 (0-8021-3820-9)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
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Confessions of a Mask
by Yukio Mishima

ISBN 081120118X (0-8112-0118-X)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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Book summary:
One of the classics of modern Japanese fiction.
Confessions of a Mask is the story of an adolescent who must learn to live with the painful fact that he is unlike other young men. Mishima's protagonist discovers that he is becoming a homosexual in polite, post-war Japan. To survive, he must live behind a mask of propriety.

Christopher Isherwood comments"One might say, 'Here is a Japanese Gide,'....But no, Mishima is himselfa very Japanese Mishima; lucid in the midst of emotional confusion, funny in the midst of despair, quite without pomposity, sentimentality or self-pity. His book, like no other, has made me understand a little of how it feels to be Japanese. I think it is greatly superior, as art and as a human document to his deservedly praised novel, The Sound of Waves." [via]
More editions of Confessions of a Mask:
- Confessions of a Mask: ISBN 081120118X (0-8112-0118-X)
  Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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Cronica Del Pajaro/bird Chronicles
by Haruki Murakami, Lourdes Porta Fuentes, Jun'ichi Matsuura

ISBN 8483101718 (84-8310-171-8)
Softcover, Tusquets Editor

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Book summary:
Tooru Okada, un joven japonés que acaba de dejar voluntariamente su trabajo en un bufete de abogados, recibe un buen día la llamada anónima de una mujer. A partir de ese momento la vida de Tooru, que había transcurrido por los cauces de la más absoluta normalidad, empieza a sufrir una extraña transformación. A su alrededor van apareciendo personajes cada vez más extraños, y la realidad, o lo real, va degradándose hasta convertirse en algo fantasmagórico.

The masterpiece of Japanese cult writer Haruki Murakami, the story of Tooru Okada, a young lawyer whose life begins to undergo a bizarre transformation. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle presents a collection of characters as surprising as they are real. [via]
More editions of Cronica Del Pajaro/bird Chronicles:
- Cronica Del Pajaro/bird Chronicles: ISBN 8483101718 (84-8310-171-8)
  Softcover, Tusquets Editor
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Dance, Dance, Dance
by Alfred Birnbaum, Haruki Murakami

ISBN 0679753796 (0-679-75379-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
In this propulsive novel by the author of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Elephant Vanishes, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work in any language fuses science fiction, the hard-boiled thriller, and white-hot satire into a new element of the literary periodic table.

As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Haruki Murakami's protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls; plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic; and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Dance Dance Dance is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through the cultural Cuisinart that is contemporary Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs. [via]
More editions of Dance, Dance, Dance:
- Dance, Dance, Dance: ISBN 0679753796 (0-679-75379-6)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Dance, Dance, Dance
by Haruki Murakami, Alfred Birnbaum

ISBN 4770016832 (4-7700-1683-2)
Hardcover, Kodansha Amer Inc

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Book summary:
He burst upon the international scene with the wildly acclaimed A Wild Sheep Chase. He quickly came to represent the quirky voice of a new generation of Japanese writers. Now Haruki Murakami gives us his wittiest, boldest, most daring work to date. Dance dance dance continues the extraordinary adventure of an ordinary man. At thirty something, Murakami's nameless hero lives in a hi-tech, high-rise world where old virtues die fast and success is all that matters. He has shared in the glittering city's spoils, and while he has not sold his soul, he knows that something is lacking in his life. Now, in dreams, a mysterious woman weeps softly - for him. Yet, even as he tries to understand why, the voice that beckons is not hers. And still he dreams. Bizarre dreams that propel him down byways of his life in search of ... ? His is a strange odyssey: en route, a thirteen-year-old girl, distressingly beautiful and clairvoyant, is his constant companion; a classmate, now oozing charm on TV soaps, grapples with murder; a lady of the night becomes his guardian angel; and an eccentric Sheep Man materializes to counsel and cajole. What's a fellow to do? Dance. You gotta dance as long as the music plays. And dance is what our hero does ... in the most unexpected ways! [via]
More editions of Dance, Dance, Dance:
- Dance, Dance, Dance: ISBN 4770016832 (4-7700-1683-2)
  Hardcover, Kodansha Amer Inc
The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories
by Yasunari Kawabata, J. Martin Holman

ISBN 1887178945 (1-887178-94-5)
Softcover, Counterpoint

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Book summary:
One of the most influential figures in modern Japanese fiction, Yasunari Kawabata is treasured for the intensity of his perception and the compressed elegance of his style. This new collection compiles twenty-two stories now appearing in English for the first time in book form. In moving selections that sketch the outlines of the young author's life of survivorship, Martin Holman's graceful translation captures the delicate nuances of Kawabata's enduring prose. [via]
More editions of The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories:
- The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories: ISBN 1887178147 (1-887178-14-7)
  Hardcover, Counterpoint
- The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories: ISBN 1887178945 (1-887178-94-5)
  Softcover, Counterpoint
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The Elephant Vanishes
by Haruki Murakami

ISBN 0679750533 (0-679-75053-3)
Softcover, Vintage Books

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Book summary:
With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.

By turns haunting and hilarious, The Elephant Vanishes is further proof of Murakami's ability to cross the border between separate realities -- and to come back bearing treasure.

From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]
More editions of The Elephant Vanishes:
- The Elephant Vanishes: Stories: ISBN 0679420576 (0-679-42057-6)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
- The Elephant Vanishes: ISBN 0679750533 (0-679-75053-3)
  Softcover, Vintage Books
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The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
by Haruki Murakami, Alfred Birnbaum

ISBN 0679743464 (0-679-74346-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
By the author of "A Wild Sheep Chase", which won the Noma Literary Award for New Writers, this novel combines science-fiction, satire and a warning of the dangerous powers of corporations. [via]
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The Izu Dancer and Other Stories
by Edward Seidensticker

ISBN 0804811415 (0-8048-1141-5)
Softcover, Tuttle Pub

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Book summary:
Originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, in 1958, The Izu Dancer, a story about a young man's travels through the Izu Peninsula, introduced Kawabata's prodigious talent to the West. Since its first printing, Kawabata, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize, has been recognized as one of Japan's most distinguished writers. Also included in this collection are three stories by the prolific author Yasushi Inoue, the recipient of every major prize in Japanese literature: "The Counterfeiter," "Obasute," and "The Full Moon." Inoue's stories, each of which are at least partially autobiographical, all reveal his great compassion for his fellow human being. [via]
More editions of The Izu Dancer and Other Stories:
- The Izu Dancer and Other Stories: ISBN 0804811415 (0-8048-1141-5)
  Softcover, Tuttle Pub
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Kafka On The Shore
by Haruki Murakami, J. Philip Gabriel, Philip Gabriel

ISBN 1400079276 (1-4000-7927-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.

This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddleyet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.

Extravagant in its accomplishment, Kafka on the Shore displays one of the worlds truly great storytellers at the height of his powers. [via]
More editions of Kafka On The Shore:
- Kafka On The Shore: ISBN 1400043662 (1-4000-4366-2)
  Hardcover, Random House Inc
- Kafka on the Shore: ISBN 1400079276 (1-4000-7927-6)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Kitchen
by Banana Yoshimoto, Megan Backus

ISBN 0671880187 (0-671-88018-7)
Softcover, Pocket Books

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Book summary:
Two stories, "Kitchen" and "Moonlight Shadow," told through the eyes of a pair of contemporary young Japanese women, deal with the themes of mothers, love, transsexuality, kitchens, and tragedy. Reprint. NYT. [via]
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Kitchen
by Alan Ayckbourn, Megan Backus

ISBN 0802142443 (0-8021-4244-3)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
With the publication of Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, the literary world realized that Yoshimoto was a young writer of enduring talent whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. Kitchen is an enchantingly original book that juxtaposes two tales 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, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother who is really his cross-dressing father Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart.In a whimsical style that recalls the early Marguerite Duras, "Kitchen" and its companion story, "Moonlight Shadow," are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a very special writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul. [via]
More editions of Kitchen:
- Kitchen: ISBN 0802142443 (0-8021-4244-3)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
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Kokoro
by Natsume Soseki

ISBN 1576465853 (1-57646-585-3)
Softcover, Quiet Vision Pub

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It was during the Meiji era, which lasted from 1868 to 1912, that Japan emerged as a modern nation; and it was towards the latter part of this period that the modern Japanese novel reached its maturity, and true masters of what was essentially a western literary form began to appear.Of these novelists, Natsume Soseki was perhaps the most profound and the most versatile.
Soseki was born in Tokyo in 1867, when the city was still known as Yedo. He was educated at the Imperial University, where he studied English literature. In 1896, he joined the staff of the Fifth National College in Kumamoto, and in 1900, he was sent to England as a government scholar. He returned to Japan in 1903 as lecturer in English literature at the Imperial University. He was dissatisfied with academic life, and in 1907 decided to devote all his time to writing novels and essays. [via]
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Kokoro
by Edwin McClellan, Soseki Natsume

ISBN 0486451399 (0-486-45139-9)
Softcover, Dover Pubns

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More editions of Kokoro:
- Kokoro: ISBN 0486451399 (0-486-45139-9)
  Softcover, Dover Pubns
Kokoro
by Soseki Natsume

ISBN 0720600405 (0-7206-0040-5)
Hardcover, Peter Owen

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More editions of Kokoro:
- Kokoro: ISBN 0720600405 (0-7206-0040-5)
  Hardcover, Peter Owen
The Lake
by Yasunari Kawabata

ISBN 0870113658 (0-87011-365-8)
Softcover, Kodansha Amer Inc

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Book summary:
The Lake is the history of an obsession. It traces a man's sad pursuit of an unattainable perfection, a beauty out of reach, admired from a distance, unconsummated. Homeless, a fugitive from an ambiguous crime, his is an incurable longing that drives him to shadow nameless women in the street and hide in ditches as they pass above him, beautiful and aloof. For their beauty is not of this world, but of a dream-the voice of a girl he meets in a Turkish bath is "an angel's," the figures of two students he follows seem to "glide over the green grass that hid their knees." Reality is the durable ugliness that is his constant companion and is symbolized in the grotesque deformity of the hero's feet. And it is the irreconcilable nature of these worlds that explains the strangely dehumanized, shadowy quality of the eroticism that pervades this novel.

In a sense The Lake is a formless novel, a "happening," making it one of the most modern of all Kawabata's works. Just as the hero's interest might be caught by some passing stranger, so the course of the novel swerves abruptly from present to past, memory shades into hallucination, dreams break suddenly into daylight. It is an extraordinary performance of free association, made all the more astonishing for the skill with which these fragments are resolved within the completed tapestry. [via]
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Lizard
by Banana Yoshimoto, Ann Sherif

ISBN 0671532766 (0-671-53276-6)
Softcover, Washington Square Pr

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Book summary:
A collection of short stories by the bestselling author of Kitchen and N.P. demonstrates her magic realism and her very Japanese postmodernism--a blend of the traditional with the latest in popular culture. 75,000 first printing. [via]
More editions of Lizard:
- Lizard: ISBN 0802115640 (0-8021-1564-0)
  Hardcover, Grove Pr
- Lizard: ISBN 0671532766 (0-671-53276-6)
  Softcover, Washington Square Pr
The Makioka Sisters
by Jun Ichiro Tanizaki, Edward Seidensticker

ISBN 0679424520 (0-679-42452-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc

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The four Makioka sisters lead very complicated, strenuous lives, although on the surface nothing much ever happens to them. Part of a fading Japanese aristocracy in the years leading up to World War II, they cannot escape the wide net of the family name--something always brings them back to the reality of "being a Makioka." Running out of money, living in falling-apart houses, growing older beneath the sunlight of the modern world, they do their best to preserve the rituals of the past. The two older sisters work diligently to arrange a marriage for the third sister, Yukiko. Desperate to find someone to take care of her, they keep lowering their standards. One night they find themselves out with a drunk, selfish crackpot who has no money, but who is supposed to be related to a man who works for an important utility company. The fact that he is even a candidate for their sister's hand is a sign of how far they have fallen.
There are other signs in this remarkable, utterly compelling Japanese epic. At one point, a flood overwhelms their small town of Osaka. The youngest sister, Taeko, is having tea at the impeccably decorated home where her sewing teacher, Mrs. Tamaki, lives with her son Hiroshi. When the rain first appears beneath the door,
the three were still rather enjoying themselves, shouting at each other in the best of spirits. They all had a good laugh when Hiroshi, reaching to grab the briefcase in which he had brought home his school books, bumped his head on the bobbing radio. But after perhaps a half hour, there came a moment when the three fell silent. Almost immediately, Taeko remembered afterwards, the water was above her waist. As she clutched at a curtain, a picture fell from over her head; the curtain had probably brushed against it. It was a picture Mrs. Tamaki was especially fond of.
Junichiro Tanizaki wrestled throughout his career with the idea of a country where tribes of aristocrats live as relics, grasping at the past through gestures, manners, small and intricate private laws. The narrative suspense of The Makioka Sisters is rooted in this single-minded nostalgia, this strict attention to the details of domestic life as the outer world becomes more and more incomprehensible. Pages are devoted to musing about whether Yukiko should "risk" meeting a potential husband when there is a spot above her eye--maybe she should play it safe and go to the doctor about it; maybe the potential husband will interpret it as bad luck. Tanizaki manages to make the struggle over this small, dark spot wildly compelling. I could not sleep until I discovered its fate.
If epic literature is based in the dramatic and forward-moving narrative of a male hero's journey, The Makioka Sisters is a female epic of inaction--trying to figure out what to wear, crying for no reason at the same time every afternoon. With each perilous, pathetic step, the sisters are heroes setting out for the new world. They're like Odysseus, except without the ship and without the sea. --Emily White [via]
More editions of The Makioka Sisters:
- The Makioka Sisters: ISBN 0399505202 (0-399-50520-2)
  Softcover, Perigee
- The Makioka Sisters: ISBN 0679424520 (0-679-42452-0)
  Hardcover, Random House Inc
The Makioka Sisters
by Edward Seidensticker, Jun Ichiro Tanizaki

ISBN 0679761640 (0-679-76164-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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More editions of The Makioka Sisters:
- The Makioka Sisters: ISBN 0679761640 (0-679-76164-0)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Master of Go
by Yasunari Kawabata, Edward Seidensticker

ISBN 0679761063 (0-679-76106-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Go is a game of strategy in which two players attempt to surround each others black or white stones. Simple in its fundamentals, infinitely complex in its execution, Go is an essential expression of the Japanese spirit. And in his fictional chronicle of a match played between a revered and heretofore invincible Master and a younger, more modern challenger, Yasunari Kawabata captured the moment in which the immutable traditions of imperial Japan met the onslaught of the twentieth century.

The competition between the Master of Go and his opponent, Otaké, is waged over several months and layered in ceremony. But beneath the games decorum lie tensions that consume not only the players themselves but their families and retainerstensions that turn this particular contest into a duel that can only end in death. Luminous in its detail, both suspenseful and serene, The Master of Go is an elegy for an entire society, written with the poetic economy and psychological acumen that brought Kawabata the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker [via]
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N.P.
by Banana Yoshimoto, Ann Sherif

ISBN 0802115454 (0-8021-1545-4)
Hardcover, Grove Pr

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More editions of N.P.:
- N.P.: ISBN 8472234401 (84-7223-440-1)
  Softcover, Ediciones Urano
- N.P.: ISBN 0802115454 (0-8021-1545-4)
  Hardcover, Grove Pr
N.p.
by Ann Sherif, Bernard E. Clair

ISBN 0802142990 (0-8021-4299-0)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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More editions of N.p.:
- N.p.: ISBN 0802142990 (0-8021-4299-0)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
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Noruwei No Mori
by Haruki Murakami

ISBN 4062035162 (4-06-203516-2)
Hardcover, Kodansha

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Book summary:
Noruwei no mori, Vol. 2 (Japanese Edition) by Murakami, Haruki [via]
More editions of Noruwei No Mori:
- Noruwei No Mori: ISBN 4062035162 (4-06-203516-2)
  Hardcover, Kodansha
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Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami

ISBN 1860468004 (1-86046-800-4)
Softcover, Random House

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Book summary:
In 1987, when Norwegian Wood was first published in Japan, it promptly sold more than 4 million copies and transformed Haruki Murakami into a pop-culture icon. The horrified author fled his native land for Europe and the United States, returning only in 1995, by which time the celebrity spotlight had found some fresher targets. And now he's finally authorized a translation for the English-speaking audience, turning to the estimable Jay Rubin, who did a fine job with his big-canvas production The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Readers of Murakami's later work will discover an affecting if atypical novel, and while the author himself has denied the book's autobiographical import--"If I had simply written the literal truth of my own life, the novel would have been no more than fifteen pages long"--it's hard not to read as at least a partial portrait of the artist as a young man.
Norwegian Wood is a simple coming-of-age tale, primarily set in 1969-70, when the author was attending university. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the novel's backdrop. But the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs, and the pain and pleasure and attendant losses of growing up. The collapse of a romance (and this is one among many!) leaves him in a metaphysical shambles:
I read Naoko's letter again and again, and each time I read it I would be filled with the same unbearable sadness I used to feel whenever Naoko stared into my eyes. I had no way to deal with it, no place I could take it to or hide it away. Like the wind passing over my body, it had neither shape nor weight, nor could I wrap myself in it.
This account of a young man's sentimental education sometimes reads like a cross between Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women. It is less complex and perhaps ultimately less satisfying than Murakami's other, more allegorical work. Still, Norwegian Wood captures the huge expectation of youth--and of this particular time in history--for the future and for the place of love in it. It is also a work saturated with sadness, an emotion that can sometimes cripple a novel but which here merely underscores its youthful poignancy. --Mark Thwaite [via]
More editions of Norwegian Wood:
- Norwegian Wood: ISBN 0375704027 (0-375-70402-7)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
- Norwegian Wood: ISBN 1860468004 (1-86046-800-4)
  Softcover, Random House
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NP
by Banana Yoshimoto, Jane Rosenman

ISBN 0671898264 (0-671-89826-4)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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Book summary:
"Bananamania" has returned in an enchanting new novel of uncanny sulbtlety, style, magic, and mystery that Frank Ramirez of the South Bend Tribune declares is "every bit as good as Yoskimoto's first book ... perhaps better." A celebrated Japanese writer has committed suicide, leaving behind a collection of stories written in English, N.P. But the book may never be published in his native Japan: each translator who takes up the ninety-eighth story chooses death too -- including Kazami Kano's boyfriend, Shoji. Haunted by Shoji's death, Kazami is inexorably drawn to three young people whose lives are intimately bound to the late writer and his work. Over the course of an astonishing summer, she will discover the truth behind the ninety-eighth story -- and she will come to believe that "everytking that had happened was shockingly beautiful enough to make you crazy." [via]
More editions of NP:
- NP: ISBN 0671898264 (0-671-89826-4)
  Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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Out
by Natsuo Kirino, Stephen Snyder

ISBN 1400078377 (1-4000-7837-7)
Softcover, Vintage Books

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Book summary:
Nothing in Japanese literature prepares us for the stark, tension-filled, plot-driven realism of Natsuo Kirinos award-winning literary mystery Out.

This mesmerizing novel tells the story of a brutal murder in the staid Tokyo suburbs, as a young mother who works the night shift making boxed lunches strangles her abusive husband and then seeks the help of her coworkers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime. The coolly intelligent Masako emerges as the plots ringleader, but quickly discovers that this killing is merely the beginning, as it leads to a terrifying foray into the violent underbelly of Japanese society.

At once a masterpiece of literary suspense and pitch-black comedy of gender warfare, Out is also a moving evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds, and the friendships that bolster them in the aftermath. [via]
More editions of Out:
- Out: ISBN 1400078377 (1-4000-7837-7)
  Softcover, Vintage Books
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Out
by Stephen Snyder, Natsuo Kirino

ISBN 4770029055 (4-7700-2905-5)
Hardcover, Kodansha Amer Inc

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OUT was awarded the Grand Prix of the Mystery Writers of Japan in 1997-the Asian equivalent of an Edgar.
It is a dynamic example of the work of a new breed of Asian women writers excelling in the smart, hard-nosed, well-written, and realistically plotted mystery novel. Kirino' crime story can stand comparison with the work of other top-notch Western women writers in this genre, like Sarah Paretsky and Ruth Rendell.
The story-though a bare summary makes it seem merely brutal and bloodthirsty, when it is much more than that-focuses on four women who work together in a lunch-box factory in the suburbs of Tokyo. One of them suffers from spouse abuse and, unable to take it any longer, murders her husband and appeals to her co-workers to help her dispose of the corpse. One of these friends---the brain behind the coverup-after cutting up the body in the bathroom of her house, has the other two dump it as garbage. The money from the man's life insurance is then divided among them. But this is only the beginning. The successful, unpremeditated crime and the rewards it brings are the seed of other, premeditated schemes, escalating from one localized use of violence to a rash of similar deeds, with unpredictable outcomes for the women behind them.
As a study in the psychology of domestic repression and the dynamics of violent crime, OUT works on several levels, gripping the reader from its smoldering beginning to the fireburst of its finale.
In hardcover in its original language it sold over 300,000 copies, and a movie version will have its premiere in Tokyo at the end of 2002, with international distribution under discussion. [via]
More editions of Out:
- Out: ISBN 4770029055 (4-7700-2905-5)
  Hardcover, Kodansha Amer Inc
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Palm-Of-The-Hand Stories
by Yasunari Kawabata, Lane Dunlop, J. Martin Holman

ISBN 0374530491 (0-374-53049-1)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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Book summary:
Translated by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, Yasunari Kawabata is perhaps best known in the United States for his deeply incisive, marvelously lyrical novel Snow Country. But according to Kawabata himself, the essence of his art was to be found in a series of short stories-which he called "Palm-of-the-Hand Stories"-written over the entire span of his career. He began experimenting with the form in 1923 and returned to it often. In fact, his final work was a "palm-sized" reduction of Snow Country, written not long before his suicide in 1972. Dreamlike, intensely atmospheric, at times autobiographical and at others fantastical, these stories reflect Kawabata's abiding interest in the miniature, the wisp of plot reduced to the essential. In them we find loneliness, love, the passage of time, and death. Palm-of-the-Hand Stories captures the astonishing range and complexity of one of the century's greatest literary talents.
[via]
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The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea
by Yukio Mishima, John Nathan

ISBN 0679750150 (0-679-75015-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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"The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea" tells of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'ojectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part and react violently. [via]
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Snow Country
by Yasunari Kawabata, Edward Seidensticker

ISBN 0679761047 (0-679-76104-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece: a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan. At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages - a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness. [via]
More editions of Snow Country:
- Snow Country: ISBN 0399505253 (0-399-50525-3)
  Softcover, Perigee
- Snow Country: ISBN 0679761047 (0-679-76104-7)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
The Sound of the Mountain
by Yasunari Kawabata, Edward Seidensticker

ISBN 0679762647 (0-679-76264-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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The apparently fixed constellations of family relationships, the recurrent beauties of nature, the flaming or flickering patterns of love and lustall the elements of Kawabatas fictional world are combined in an engrossing novel that rises to the incantatory fascination of a NM drama. Saturday Review

Few novels have rendered the predicament of old age more beautifully than The Sound of the Mountain. For in his portrait of an elderly Tokyo businessman, Yasunari Kawabata charts the gradual, reluctant narrowing of a human life, along with the sudden upsurges of passion that illuminate its closing.
By day Ogata Shingo is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he hears a distant rumble from the nearby mountain, a sound he associates with death. In between are the relationships that were once the foundation of Shingos life: with his disappointing wife, his philandering son, and his daughter-in-law Kikuko, who instills in him both pity and uneasy stirrings of sexual desire. Out of this translucent web of attachmentsand the tiny shifts of loyalty and affection that threaten to sever it irreparablyKawabata creates a novel that is at once serenely observed and enormously affecting.
Translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker [via]
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South of the Border, West of the Sun
by Haruki Murakami

ISBN 1860465943 (1-86046-594-3)
Softcover, Harvill Pr

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Book summary:
In South of the Border, West of the Sun, the arc of an average man's life from childhood to middle age, with its attendant rhythms of success and disappointment, becomes the kind of exquisite literary conundrum that is Haruki Murakami's trademark. The plot is simple: Hajime meets and falls in love with a girl in elementary school, but he loses touch with her when his family moves to another town. He drifts through high school, college, and his 20s, before marrying and settling into a career as a successful bar owner. Then his childhood sweetheart returns, weighed down with secrets:
When I went back into the bar, a glass and ashtray remained where she had been. A couple of lightly crushed cigarette butts were lined up in the ashtray, a faint trace of lipstick on each. I sat down and closed my eyes. Echoes of music faded away, leaving me alone. In that gentle darkness, the rain continued to fall without a sound.
Murakami eschews the fantastic elements that appear in many of his other novels and stories, and readers hoping for a glimpse of the Sheep Man will be disappointed. Yet South of the Border, West of the Sun is as rich and mysterious as anything he has written. It is above all a complex, moving, and honest meditation on the nature of love, distilled into a work with the crystal clarity of a short story. A Nat "King" Cole song, a figure on a crowded street, a face pressed against a car window, a handful of ashes drifting down a river to the sea are woven together into a story that refuses to arrive at a simple conclusion. The classic love triangle may seem like a hackneyed theme for a writer as talented as Murakami, but in his quietly dazzling way, he bends us to his own unique geometry. --Simon Leake [via]
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Spring Snow
by Yukio Mishima

ISBN 0679722416 (0-679-72241-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Tokyo, 1912. The closed world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders - rich provincial familes, a new and powerful political and social elite. Kiyoaki has been raised among the elegant Ayakura family - members of the waning aristocracy - but he is not one of them. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new, and his feelings for the exquisite, spirited Satoko, observed from the sidelines by his devoted friend Honda. When Satoko is engaged to a royal prince, Kiyoaki realises the magnitude of his passion. [via]
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Sputnik Sweetheart
by Haruki Murakami, J. Philip Gabriel, Philip Gabriel

ISBN 0375726055 (0-375-72605-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Sputnik Sweetheart finds Haruki Murakami in his minimalist mode. Shorter than the sweeping Wind-up Bird Chronicle, less playfully bizarre than A Wild Sheep Chase, the author's seventh novel distills his signature themes into a powerful story about the loneliness of the human condition. "There was nothing solid we could depend on," the reader is told. "We were nearly boundless zeros, just pitiful little beings swept from one kind of oblivion to another."
The narrator is a teacher whose only close friend is Sumire, an aspiring young novelist with chronic writer's block. Sumire is suddenly smitten with a sophisticated businesswoman and accompanies her love object to Europe where, on a tiny Greek island, she disappears "like smoke." The schoolteacher hastens to the island in search of his friend. And there he discovers two documents on her computer, one of which reveals a chilling secret about Sumire's lover.
Sputnik Sweetheart is a melancholy love story, and its deceptively simple prose is saturated with sadness. Characters struggle to connect with one another but never quite succeed. Like the satellite of the title they are essentially alone. And by toning down the pyrotechnics of his earlier work, Murakami has created a world that is simultaneously mundane and disturbing--where doppelgängers and vanishing cats produce a pervasive atmosphere of alienation, and identity itself seems like a terribly fragile thing. --Simon Leake [via]
More editions of Sputnik Sweetheart:
- Sputnik Sweetheart : A Novel: ISBN 0375411690 (0-375-41169-0)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
- Sputnik Sweetheart: ISBN 0375726055 (0-375-72605-5)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Tale Of Genji
by Murasaki Shikibu, Royall Tyler

ISBN 014243714X (0-14-243714-X)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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Book summary:
NA [via]
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The Tale Of Genji
by Royall Tyler, Murasaki Shikibu

ISBN 0143039490 (0-14-303949-0)
Softcover, Penguin Classics

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In the tradition of Robert Fagles's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Viking presents a stunning translation of Lady Murasaki's exquisite portrait of courtly life in medieval Japan. Written in the eleventh century, The Tale of Genji is widely celebrated as the world's first novel, but as Donald Keene has observed, it is also "one of its greatest." Genji the Shining Prince, the son of an emperor, is a passionate character whose tempestuous nature, family circumstances, love affairs, alliances, and shifting political fortunes form the core of this magnificent epic. Throughout, The Tale of Genji offers a lively and well-rounded glimpse of golden age Japan with a cast of characters as richly conceived and nuanced as those of Proust. Royall Tyler's superb translation, detailed and poetic, is scrupulously true to the Japanese original but appeals immediately to the modern reader as well. Tyler includes detailed notes, glossaries, character lists, and chronologies to help the reader navigate the multigenerational narrative and its references. Magnificently packaged in a two-volume set with a slipcase, this is a literary event comparable to Seamus Heaney's bestselling translation of Beowulf. It will spark interest in this masterpiece of world literature and serve as the standard edition for many years to come.

Translated by Royall Tyler. [via]
More editions of The Tale Of Genji:
- The Tale Of Genji: ISBN 0670030201 (0-670-03020-1)
  Hardcover, Viking Pr
- The Tale Of Genji: ISBN 0143039490 (0-14-303949-0)
  Softcover, Penguin Classics
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Tale of Genji
by Donald Keene, Murasaki Shikubu, Masayuki Miyata, H. MacK Horton, Setouchi Jakucho

ISBN 4770027729 (4-7700-2772-9)
Softcover, Kodansha Amer Inc

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Book summary:
A lushly illustrated edition of a world classic

The third in this series of illustrated Japanese classics, The Tale of Genji again combines Miyata's captivating paper cut-outs with a modern retelling of a vintage story. This well-known tale of the amorous adventures of Prince Genji is widely considered world literature's first novel, and with its precise and poetic prose, it is also considered one of its finest.

Written with precision by a lady of the Japanese court, Genji's Don Juan-like clandestine rendezvous with lovers in their perfumed boudoirs or on mossy moonlit garden paths, continues to intrigue lovers of literature. What sets Genji apart from the typically carefree playboy is the intensity of his emotional attachment for each of his lovers. Long after an affair has ended, Genji continues to cherish the encounter. His is an age-old tale, as well as a poignant and brilliant portrait of Japan's ancient court life. [via]
More editions of Tale of Genji:
- Tale of Genji: ISBN 4770027729 (4-7700-2772-9)
  Softcover, Kodansha Amer Inc
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The Tale Of Genji
by Kencho Suematsu, Murasaki Shikibu

ISBN 0804832560 (0-8048-3256-0)
Softcover, Tuttle Pub

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This biographical novel centers around the amorous exploits of Prince Hikaru Genji, whose elegance and talent epitomized the values of Heian Japan, an era in which indigenous Japanese culture still held prominence over the Chinese culture that would come to dominate Japan. [via]
More editions of The Tale Of Genji:
- The Tale Of Genji: ISBN 0804832560 (0-8048-3256-0)
  Softcover, Tuttle Pub
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The Tale of Genji
by Shikibu Murasaki, Arthur Waley

ISBN 0679424679 (0-679-42467-9)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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One of the world's oldest novels and the greatest single work of Japanese literature, this 11th-century romance centers on the lives and loves of an emperor's son. It offers a vast tapestry of the intrigues and rivalries of court life, as well as an exquisitely detailed portrayal of a decaying aristocracy.
[via]
More editions of The Tale of Genji:
- The Tale of Genji: ISBN 0679424679 (0-679-42467-9)
  Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Tale of Genji-One
by L. Murasaki

ISBN 038509275X (0-385-09275-X)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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Book summary:
brilliant account of courtly life in medieval Japan, [via]
More editions of Tale of Genji-One:
- Tale of Genji-One: ISBN 038509275X (0-385-09275-X)
  Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
A Wild Sheep Chase
by Haruki Murakami, Alfred T. Birnbaum

ISBN 0870119052 (0-87011-905-2)
Hardcover, Kodansha America, Incorporated

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Murakami has crafted a taut and suspenseful novel that is equal parts detective story, fantasy, and Kafkaesque allegory. In a Japan of the imagination, an advertising executive is sent on a harrowing journey in pursuit of a mythical sheep reported to embody an irresistible will to absolute power. [via]
More editions of A Wild Sheep Chase:
- A Wild Sheep Chase: ISBN 0452265169 (0-452-26516-9)
  Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
- A Wild Sheep Chase: ISBN 0870119052 (0-87011-905-2)
  Hardcover, Kodansha America, Incorporated
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A Wild Sheep Chase: Library Edition
by Alfred Birnbaum, Haruki Murakami

ISBN 037571894X (0-375-71894-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
A marvelous hybrid of mythology and mystery, A Wild Sheep Chase is the extraordinary literary thriller that launched Haruki Murakamis international reputation.

It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance companys advertisement. What he doesnt realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself. Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best. [via]
More editions of A Wild Sheep Chase: Library Edition:
- A Wild Sheep Chase: Library Edition: ISBN 037571894X (0-375-71894-X)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami

ISBN 1860464696 (1-86046-469-6)
Softcover, Harvill Pr

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Book summary:
Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.
Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.
If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake [via]
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