The Kyoto School of philosophy — which offers stimulating ideas, a distinctive critique of Western philosophy and applies a Western methodology to Japanese thought — represents Japan's greatest contribution to world philosophy in the 20th century.

"The Ark Sakura," Kobo Abe's puzzling, dream-like narrative about an obese recluse living in a vast underground bunker, is a dense interlacing of punning wordplay, psychological excavation and surreal imagery.

Andrew Clare has published an impressive array of translations of novels by Japanese authors, all while putting in long hours at the corporate coalface. Now, Clare is launching his translation — the first in English — of a classic, but little-known, Yukio Mishima novel, ...

Dazai is the ultimate bad boy of Japanese literature and "Ningen Shikkaku," recently re-translated by Mark Gibeau as "A Shameful Life," is his supreme masterpiece, a novel that still shocks today with its brutal honesty and unflinching, strangely thrilling pessimism.

Through the poetry of William Blake, Kenzaburo Oe takes a new approach to probing the emotional consequences of his father's death, and parenting a severely disabled son.

In Oe's "Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness," the lifelong sense of obsession and profound sense of guilt engendered within his own familial history finds acute literary expression.

Written in dialogue with Oe's own, earlier works on similar subjects "Death by Water" is a careful, multilayered contemplation on the methodology and potential of art itself.

Compiled and edited by Kenzaburo Oe, "The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath" is a multifaceted look at the nightmarish horrors of the atomic bomb.

Oe's first novel, published in 1958 when he was only 23, tells of a group of school children evacuated to a remote village to escape wartime bombing raids, only to be cut off and abandoned when plague breaks out.

In 1962, Ian Fleming, the author of James Bond, visited Japan. His journey here, and the characters he met, would go on to inspire 007's adventures in "You Only Live Twice." But in 2018, how possible is it to retrace the author's footsteps across ...