Five Women Who Loved Love: Amorous Tales from 17th-Century Japan
10 best books like Five Women Who Loved Love: Amorous Tales from 17th-Century Japan (Saikaku Ihara): Seven Japanese Tales, The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan, The River Ki, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, Inside and Other Short Fiction: Japanese Women by Japanese Women, Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World, Thirst for Love, The Wild Geese, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa
| Author | Jun'ichirō Tanizaki |
| ISBN | 0679761071 |
I purchased this book in a bookstore off Piccadilly Circus waiting to meet someone. After hours of conversation, we separated, taking our respective tunnels to catch our trains. Every time I see this book, I remember that goodbye. Funny, the things that serve as fluttering markers to our memories.
I'm...
| 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...
| 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 | Ono no Komachi |
| ISBN | 0679729585 |
Japanese poetry is said to be originated in human heart and mind and grows in to the myriad leaves of words. The collection of poems The Ink Dark Moon is from the Heian era of Japanese literature, the era is considered as Golden Age in the history of Japanese literature. The language in that era was very inflected...
| 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 | Kamo no Chōmei |
| ISBN | 1880656221 |
The single great work of literary witness in medieval Japan, Hojoki is a short social chronicle prompted by a series of calamities that overtook old Kyoto in the late 12th century. By building a rude home in the forest and eliminating desire, poet and Buddhist priest Chomei believed he would be spared...
| Author | Yukio Mishima |
| ISBN | 0375705074 |
In Thirst for Love, Japan's greatest modern writer created a portrait of sexual torment and corrosive jealousy that is as delicately nuanced as Madame Bovary and as remorseless as Justine. Yukio Mishima's protagonist is Etsuko, whose philandering husband has died horribly from typhoid. The young...
| 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 | Lady Sarashina |
| ISBN | 0140442820 |
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...
| 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...
The Daring Spectacle is award-winning San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate columnist and culture critic Mark Morford’s hilarious modern record of sex and media, politics and pop culture, love and lust, as told in ninety-two delectable parts—not including all the delicious photos and terrifying...
| Author | Roald Dahl |
| ISBN | 0965076474 |
For short stories that manage to be funny, sexy, and macabre all at one, here are Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch, two collections by "the absolute master of the twist-in-the-tale," says the Observers. My Uncle Oswald is a hilarious novel that follows the erotic exploits of the "the greatest fornicator of...
| Author | D.H. Lawrence |
| ISBN | 0394700716 |
These two brilliant novels are deservedly among Lawrence's most popular works. Both are at the same time exciting narratives and striking expressions of Lawrence's philosophy. St. Mawr is the story of a splendid stallion in whose vitality the heroine finds the quality that is lacking in the men she...
| Author | Clifton Fadiman |
| ISBN | 0395368057 |
At age 82, Clifton Fadiman continues his prolific publishing career, here presenting 62 of the world's best short stories from 16 countries. His criteria? "Each story had to be both interesting and of high literary merit." Fadiman fulfills both requirements and much more, offering a cornucopia of...
| Author | Gloria K. Fiero |
| ISBN | 0072910127 |
""The Humanistic Tradition" is quite simply the finest book of its type. Fiero manages to integrate the political, cultural, and social history of the world into one coherent and fascinating whole. It is a masterpiece of scholarship . . . balanced, interesting, easy to read, and consummately beautiful....
| 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 | Naoya Shiga |
| ISBN | 0231121571 |
No modern Japanese writer was more idolized than Shiga Naoya. "The Paper Door and Other Stories" showcases the concise, delicate art of this writer who is often called "the god of the Japanese short story." Doyen of Japanese letters Donald Keene ranks some of Shiga's stories "among the most brilliant...
| Author | Chikamatsu Monzaemon |
| ISBN | 0231111010 |
Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) wrote some 130 plays, chiefly for the puppet theater, many of which are still performed today by puppet operators and Kabuki actors. Chikamatsu is thought to have written the first major tragedies about the common man. This edition of four of his most important plays...
| 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...
| Author | Osamu Dazai |
| ISBN | 0804833427 |
Features 11 outstanding works by Osamu Dazai, widely regarded as one of 20th century Japan's most gifted writers and a master teller of tales. Dazai experimented with a wide variety of short story styles and brought to each a sophisticated sense of humor, a broad empathy for the human condition, and...
| Author | Anonymous |
| ISBN | 4770023294 |
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...
| Author | Murasaki Shikibu |
| ISBN | 0486432041 |
Because women in ancient Japan enjoyed high status, they were well-educated and reasonably independent. They also produced much of the country's best literature. Three of these amazing ladies wrote these diaries, among them the highly skilled writer Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 973-1025 a.d.). A lady-in-waiting...
