Non-Japanese have written great books about Japan. Almost all of these masterpieces are nonfiction: essays, memoirs, monographs, histories, travel books. One might place, for example, Alan Booth’s “The Roads to Sata,” Donald Richie’s “Ozu,” Edward Seidensticker’s “Genji Days,” and Nicolas Bouvier’s “The Japanese Chronicles” among those exalted works. However, trying ...
With only a few words, a Haiku master can paint a picture so vivid it’s as if the reader is ...
The final installment of Lian Hearn’s “The Tale of Shikanoko” series delivers on the promise of the previous three books, ...
The Haras were a quiet, rather ordinary Japanese couple — until they resolved to burn down their house and drive themselves and their 20-year-old daughter off a cliff. True Crime Japan, by Paul Murphy256 pagesTuttle, Nonfiction. With their beloved home repossessed, they couldn’t endure ...
First published in 1992, “Underground in Japan” is Rey Ventura’s account of his life as a illegal day laborer in the construction areas and docks of Yokohama’s Kotobukicho district. Underground in Japan, by Rey Ventura208 pagesSt. Edmundsbury Press, Nonfiction. After studying political science at ...
In “One Hundred Million Philosophers,” Historian Adam Bronson profiles “one of the longest lasting and most influential intellectual groups” of the postwar era: Science of Thought (Shiso no Kagaku). He focuses on the tumultuous period between its founding in 1946 and the 1960 Anpo ...
“Postmodernism and Japan” opens with editors H.D. Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi declaring that postmodernism is a Western phenomenon that cannot be exported globally. The essays that follow draw connections and expose dissonances between postmodernism and Japan. Topics range from close readings of works of ...
Revisit the end of World War II with Japan’s all-time best-selling paperback, “The Eternal Zero” by Naoki Hyakuta, originally published in Japanese in 2006. Although the movie adaptation sparked controversy with its nationalistic ending, the book does not glorify war. Hyakuta’s storytelling structure, however, ...
Thomas Blake Glover, the “Scottish Samurai,” arrived in Japan in 1859 and over the next 52 years made and lost more than one fortune. He helped set up Mitsubishi and Kirin, developed shipbuilding and coal-mining in Japan and arranged for the first steam train ...
In tetralogies, the third book is perhaps the most difficult. A master storyteller, like a chess player, must move their ensemble cast toward an endgame, but the strategy for getting them there should remain obscure to the reader. Lord of the Darkwood: The Tale ...
Japan’s postwar years were marked by raw needs and wounds, as well as great societal change. A glimpse of the era is offered in this collection of stories by Nobuo Kojima (1915-2006), most of which appear in English for the first time. Long Belts ...
The bulk of “Demythologizing Pure Land Buddhism” is a collection of essays by Rijin Yasuda (1900-1982), a Shin Buddhist thinker in the modernizing tradition of Kiyozawa Manshi (1863-1903). Yasuda “taught a conception of Amida and the Pure Land that made them existential realities in ...
Academic Norma Field spent the summer of 1995 in Tokyo, observing the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. This is the book that came out of that experience, a compilation of observations, snatched dialogues, musings, anecdotes, fragments and ruminations. The author ...
From the 17th to the 19th century, Japan’s only official window on the West was the Dutch factory in Nagasaki. The trickle of scientific and geopolitical information that came through with the merchant ships was gradually curated by enthusiasts into rangaku or “Dutch learning,” ...
Written in 1951 and translated into English in 1968, the title of “Forbidden Colours” represents taboo desires and beliefs, most notably homosexuality and misogyny. Shunsuke is an aging writer whose vile views on women are given the opportunity for physical manifestation in Yuichi, a ...
