BooksList.Best
Search

1000 Poems from the Manyōshū

10 best books like 1000 Poems from the Manyōshū (Ōtomo no Yakamochi): Kokoro, The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book, The Diary of Lady Murasaki, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Yuasa), The Kojiki: Records of Ancient Matters, Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Eye in the Sky, The Wild Geese, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan

Kokoro
AuthorNatsume Sōseki
ISBN0809260956
A languid, melancholic dream of a novel which pierces the heart of the reader with its quiet intensity.

Cautious in its narrative tread on the ground of contentious issues, delicate in its broaching of subjects like the indignity of death, sin and redemption, existentialist ennui, self-recrimination...
The Tale of Genji
AuthorMurasaki Shikibu
A princess likes stories. One of her ladies-in-waiting is good at making them up. Over years, the lady spins a long, elaborate story containing the princess's favorite theme: hot dudes nailing chicks. Crucially, the lady writes it down and here we are with history's first novel, the origin story of...
The Pillow Book
AuthorSei Shōnagon
ISBN0231073372
"The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon" is a fascinating, detailed account of Japanese court life in the eleventh century. Written by a lady of the court at the height of Heian culture, this book enthralls with its lively gossip, witty observations, and subtle impressions.

Lady Shonagon was an erstwhile...
The Diary of Lady Murasaki
AuthorMurasaki Shikibu
'When I go out to sit on the veranda and gaze,
I sem to be always conjuring up visions of the past'

The Diary recorded by Lady Murasaki (c. 973 c. 1020), author of The Tale of Genji, is an intimate picture of her life as tutor and companion to the young Empress Shoshi. Told in a series of vignettes,...
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Yuasa)
AuthorMatsuo Bashō
ISBN0140441859
In later life Basho turned to Zen Buddhism, and the travel sketched in this volume relfect his attempts to cast off earthly attachments and reach out to spiritual fulfillment. The sketches are written in the "haibun" style--a linking of verse and prose. The title piece, in particular, reveals Basho...
The Kojiki: Records of Ancient Matters
AuthorŌ no Yasumaro
ISBN0804836752
Translation is a tough work, and the challenge is compounded when the original is written in archaic language because the meaning of words change over time.

I've been wondering why the Japanese gods Izanagi and Izanami have been accused of incest. It's because of the word 妹. In modern Japanese,...
Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century
AuthorDonald Keene
ISBN0802150586
The sweep of Japanese literature in all its great variety was made available to Western readers for the first time in this anthology. Every genre and style, from the celebrated No plays to the poetry and novels of the seventeenth century, find a place in this book. An introduction by Donald Keene places...
Eye in the Sky
AuthorPhilip K. Dick
ISBN1400030102
While sightseeing at the Belmont Bevatron, Jack Hamilton, along with seven others, is caught in a lab accident. When he regains consciousness, he is in a fantasy world of Old Testament morality gone awry—a place of instant plagues, immediate damnations, and death to all perceived infidels. Hamilton...
The Wild Geese
AuthorŌgai Mori
ISBN0804810702
3.5 stars

It was a nice, simple read. I wish the storyline had been developed a little bit more thoroughly and I didn’t like the ambiguity of the ending. Books like this always surprise me, how women can be used as pawns. In this case, a young girl has been chosen by a well-off Japanese man to be...
As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan
AuthorLady Sarashina
ISBN0140442820
In the mainstream of Japan's literary tradition, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams not only reveals much that is most appealing in Japanese literature but also stands on its own as a remarkable and haunting portrait of a woman.
Born in A.D. 1008 at the height of the Heian period, Lady Sarashina (as she...
Karlsson on the Roof
AuthorAstrid Lindgren
ISBN0749710373
Imagine Smidge's delight when, one day, a little man with a propeller on his back appears hovering at the window! It's Karlson and he lives in a house on the roof. Soon Smidge and Karlson are sharing all sorts of adventures, from tackling thieves and playing tricks to looping the loop and running across...
The Selected Poems of Tu Fu
AuthorDu Fu
ISBN0811211002
Tu Fu radically altered poetry as he found it in the High T’ang period. In addition to making formal innovations in language and structure, he extended the range of acceptable subject matter to include all aspects of public and private experience, thus becoming in the words of translator David Hinton,...
On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho
AuthorMatsuo Bashō
ISBN0140444599
Basho, one of the greatest of Japanese poets and the master of haiku, was also a Buddhist monk and a life-long traveller. His poems combine 'karumi', or lightness of touch, with the Zen ideal of oneness with creation. Each poem evokes the natural world - the cherry blossom, the leaping frog, the summer...
The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter
AuthorAnonymous
ISBN4770023294
Preface by Donald Keene
Taketori Monogatari, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter is the oldest surviving Japanese work of fiction; The Tale of Genji (written about 1010) referred to it as the "ancestor of all romances." The names of five suitors, resembling those of members of the Japanese court of the...
The Tales of Ise
AuthorAnonymous
List of Illustrations
Foreword, by Donald Keene
Introduction & Notes
Further Reading
Note on the Translation and Text

--The Tales of Ise

A Note on the Commentary
Commentary

Appendix 1: Glossary of Literary and Social Conventions
Appendix...
Essays in Idleness and Hôjôki
AuthorYoshida Kenkō
ISBN0141192100
These two works on life's fleeting pleasures are by Buddhist monks from medieval Japan, but each shows a different world-view. In the short memoir Hojoki, Chomei recounts his decision to withdraw from worldly affairs and live as a hermit in a tiny hut in the mountains, contemplating the impermanence...
Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō
AuthorYoshida Kenkō
ISBN0231112556
Written sometime between 1330 and 1332, the Essays in Idleness, with their timeless relevance and charm, hardly mirror the turbulent times in which they were born. Despite the struggle between the Emperor Go-Daigo and the usurping Hojo family that rocked Japan during these years, the Buddhist priest...
Love Poems for People with Children
AuthorJohn Kenney
ISBN0593085248
In the spirit of his wildly popular New Yorker pieces and the New York Times bestseller Love Poems for Married People, Thurber-prize winner John Kenney presents a hilarious new collection of poetry for people with children.

With the same brilliant wit and hilarious realism that made Love...
The Maids
AuthorJun'ichirō Tanizaki
ISBN0811224929
The Maids is a jewel: an astonishing complement to The Makioka Sisters, set in the same house, in the same turbulent decades, but among the servants as much as the masters. The Maids concerns all the young women who work—before, during, and after WWII—in the pampered, elegant household of the famous...
Be With You 今会いにゆきます
AuthorTakuji Ichikawa
There are not enough words to describe how awesome this book is!
I finished reading it in 2 hours and it has really taught me a lot about life and love.
My favourite part was Mio's letter. If you knew you would die at the age of 29 but get to be with the man you love and a son you will have, would you choose...
About
Feedback
© BooksList.Best 2024