Seven Japanese Tales
10 best books like Seven Japanese Tales (Jun'ichirō Tanizaki): Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale, Masks, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, Japanese Gothic Tales, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan, Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy, Five Women Who Loved Love: Amorous Tales from 17th-Century Japan, Modern Japanese Literature: From 1868 to the Present Day, The Paper Door and Other Stories, The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto
| 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 | Fumiko Enchi |
| ISBN | 0394722183 |
Masks takes its name from the Noh masks of Japanese dramas, and much is made of spirit possession. This is a curiously elegant and scandalous tale of sexual deception and revenge. Ibuki loves widow Yasuko who is young, charming and sparkling with intelligence as well as beauty. His friend, Mikame, desires...
| Author | Yasunari Kawabata |
| ISBN | 0374530491 |
Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, the novelist Yasunari Kawabata felt the essence of his art was to be found not in his longer works but in a series of short stories--which he called "Palm-of-the-Hand Stories"--written over the span of his career. In them we find loneliness, love, and...
| Author | Kyōka Izumi |
| ISBN | 0824817893 |
Resisting the various forms of realism popular during the Meiji enlightenment, Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939) was among the most popular writers who continued to work in the old-fashioned genres of fantasy, mystery, and romance. Gothic Tales makes available for the first time a collection of stories by...
| 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...
Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy
| Author | Osamu Dazai |
| ISBN | 4770026102 |
Blue Bamboo is a collection of seven short stories by one of Japan's preeminent postwar writers and prose stylists, Osamu Dazai. Not the typical romantic fantasies so often seen in Japanese writing, filled with water sprites and vengeful ghosts, these stories are a mixture of fantastic allegory,...
| Author | Saikaku Ihara |
| ISBN | 0804801843 |
"Five charming novellas...which have astonishing freshness, color, and warmth." The New Yorker
First published in 1686, this collection of five novellas was an immediate bestseller in the bawdy world that was Genroku Japan, and the book's popularity has increased with age, making it today...
| 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 | Kenji Nakagami |
| ISBN | 1880656396 |
The fiction of Kenji Nakagami has no peer in contemporary Japan. Born into the burakumin -- an outcast class shunned in feudal Japan and still suffering discrimination today -- Nakagami depicts the lives of his people in powerful, sensual prose and stark, sometimes horrifying detail. The Cape is his...
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 | Ivan Morris |
| ISBN | 0804833362 |
This collection shows the qualities that make Japanese literature among the world's finest.
Including "Under Reconstruction," considered to be the first modern Japanese short story, this book presents the short stories of Japan as among the world's most satisfying.
Edited by...
| Author | Ryūnosuke Akutagawa |
| ISBN | 0977857603 |
She was the prettiest girl in my high school. I say “prettiest” and not “most beautiful” intentionally, for being so small and delicate, so willowy, “beautiful” was not appropriate. Beautiful implies a rounded womanliness entirely absent from her miniature perfection. She was the...
Acts of Worship: Seven Stories
| Author | Yukio Mishima |
| ISBN | 4770028938 |
When Mishima committed ritual suicide in November 1970, he was only forty-five. He had written over thirty novels, eighteen plays, and twenty volumes of short stories. During his lifetime, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times and had seen almost all of his major novels appear in English....
The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories
| Author | Theodore W. Goossen |
| ISBN | 0192803727 |
This collection of short stories, including many new translations, is the first to span the whole of Japan's modern era from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with the first writings to assimilate and rework Western literary traditions, through the flourishing of the...
| Author | Ōgai Mori |
| ISBN | 0804810486 |
Though banned three weeks after its publication in 1909, Vita Sexualis is far more than a prurient erotic novel. The narrator, a professor of philosophy, wrestles with issues of sexual desire, sex education, and the proper place of sensuality. He tells the story of his own journey into sexual awareness,...
| Author | Natsume Sōseki |
| ISBN | 0939512823 |
And Then, ranked as one of Soseki Natsume's most insightful and stirring novels, tells the story of Daisuke, a young Japanese man struggling with his personal purpose and identity, as well as the changing social landscape of Meiji-era Japan. As Japan enters the 20th century, ancient customs give way...
