A Dark Night's Passing
10 best books like A Dark Night's Passing (Naoya Shiga): Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale, Fires on the Plain, Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories, The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan, In The Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life of Higuchi Ichiyo, With Nine of Her Best Stories, The River Ki, Inside and Other Short Fiction: Japanese Women by Japanese Women, The Wild Geese, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, Modern Japanese Literature: From 1868 to the Present Day
| Author | Kafū Nagai |
| ISBN | 0231141181 |
Originally published in 1918, Rivalry is regarded as the masterpiece of Nagai Kafu, a Japanese novelist known for his brilliant renderings of Tokyo in the early years of modern Japan. Stephen Snyder offers the first English translation of the complete, uncensored text, which has long been celebrated...
| Author | Shōhei Ōoka |
| ISBN | 0804813795 |
"Written with precise skill and beautifully controlled power. The translation by Ivan Morris is outstanding." —The New York Times
**Winner of the 1952 Yomiuri Prize**
This haunting novel explores the complete degradation and isolation of a man by war. Fires on the Plain is set...
Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories
| Author | Taeko Kōno |
| ISBN | 0811213919 |
"A sense of unease permeates this disturbing and exceptional collection of stories centered on unhappy women in postwar Japan...," wrote Publishers Weekly. World Literature Today proclaimed: "Reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s works, Kono’s stories explore the dark, terrifying...
| Author | Michitsuna no Haha |
| ISBN | 0804811237 |
Kagero Nikki, translated here as The Gossamer Years, belongs to the same period as the celebrated Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikuibu.
This remarkably frank autobiographical diary and personal confession attempts to describe a difficult relationship as it reveals two tempestuous decades...
In The Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life of Higuchi Ichiyo, With Nine of Her Best Stories
This rating is solely for Ichiyo's works; I didn't bother to read any of the biography, this was simply the only book I could find with all of her tales. They are fantastic. I think this should be read by anybody who is interested in feminist literature - they aren't feminist per se, but surprising for the...
| Author | Sawako Ariyoshi |
| ISBN | 4770030002 |
The River Ki, short and swift and broad like most Japanese rivers, flows into the sea not far south of Osaka. On its journey seaward, it passes through countryside that has long been at the heart of the Japanese tradition. And it flows too past the mountains and the villages, past the dams, ditches and rice...
| Author | Cathy Layne |
| ISBN | 4770030061 |
Inside and other short fiction showcases the very best of recent writing by Japanese women writers today-including prize-winning novelists and authors never before published in English-as they explore the issue of female identity in a rapidly changing society.
AMY YAMADA ("Fiesta"), widely...
| Author | Ōgai Mori |
| ISBN | 0804810702 |
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...
| Author | Yasunari Kawabata |
| ISBN | 0520241827 |
In the 1920s, Asakusa was to Tokyo what Montmartre had been to 1890s Paris and Times Square was to be to 1940s New York. Available in English for the first time, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, captures the decadent allure of this entertainment district, where beggars...
| Author | Donald Keene |
| ISBN | 0802150950 |
Modern Japanese Literature is Donald Keene’s critically acclaimed companion volume to his landmark Anthology of Japanese Literature. Now considered the standard canon of modern Japanese writing translated into English, Modern Japanese Literature includes concise introductions to the writers,...
| Author | Takeda Izumo |
| ISBN | 0231035314 |
Chushingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers), also known as the story of the Forty-Six (or Forty-Seven) Ronin, is the most famous and perenially popular of all Japanese dramas. Written around 1748 as a puppet play, it is now better know in Kabuki performances. In the twentieth century, cinema and...
Most Americans would describe Japanese science fiction with one word: Godzilla. However, true fans of the genre know that for decades, Japan has been turning out some of the most innovative stories ever published. Unfortunately, those that make it into English are often difficult to find. The Best...
| Author | Saikaku Ihara |
| ISBN | 0811201872 |
[From back.]
One of the great writers of Japan, Ihara Saikaku (1623-93) wrote of the lowest class in the Tokugawa world — the townsmen who were rising in wealth and power but not in official status. The title story in this collection of 12 works, told by an aging beauty whose highly erotic nature...
| Author | Natsume Sōseki |
| ISBN | 0399506128 |
Despite the surface fact that not a lot really happens, I was quite engrossed by this book. The tone is fairly unchanging throughout, there's not a ton of excitement, the characters aren't always very likable, and it can be pretty depressing sometimes, but for me this didn't detract from the overall...
| Author | Tōson Shimazaki |
| ISBN | 0860081915 |
Espeluznante, a la par que bellísima, imagen de uno de los lados de la sociedad nipona que menos nos gusta considerar: su clasismo y su racismo, representado en esta ocasión en el trato que se da a los "etas", o miembros de castas inferiores.
Toson, en la estela de Zola, nos da una visión de Japón...
Self Portraits: Tales from the Life of Japan's Great Decadent Romantic
| Author | Osamu Dazai |
| ISBN | 0870117793 |
Dazai's frail sunken chest and haunted handsome gaze says it all - dissolution, sickness, deep feeling, and beauty are authentic pathways through an inauthentic and decaying world.
Going into this I thought him a self-absorbed hedonist unconcerned with the heartbreak and death he left...
"Why do pure and simple people like Flatfish have to die?
A plain, unassuming fellow. A fellow maybe a little cunning, but one who, somewhere in his heart, embraced a purity that made him treasure the first love of his youth. Fellows like that probably existed everywhere in the world. But this...
| Author | Takiji Kobayashi |
| ISBN | 8493780901 |
«Vamos hacia el infierno.» Así empieza la historia del Hakko Maru, un pesquero que faena en las gélidas aguas de Kamchatka, al este de Rusia, y de su tripulación: una variopinta colección de curtidos lobos de mar arruinados por la bebida y las mujeres, estudiantes y universitarios en deuda con...
The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi & Arrowroot
| Author | Jun'ichirō Tanizaki |
| ISBN | 0375719318 |
From a Japanese master of romantic and sexual obsession come two novels that treat traditional themes with sly wit and startling psychological sophistication. In The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, Junichir Tanizaki reimagines the exploits of a legendary samurai as a sadomasochistic dance...
