Some Prefer Nettles
10 best books like Some Prefer Nettles (Jun'ichirō Tanizaki): Black Rain, The Temple of Dawn, Masks, The Twilight Years, The Lake, The Wild Geese, Five Women Who Loved Love: Amorous Tales from 17th-Century Japan, Modern Japanese Literature: From 1868 to the Present Day, Crackling Mountain and Other Stories, A Dark Night's Passing
What Are We Now?
Only in Japan could the dropping of the atomic bomb be written about in the same even tone as the stocking of fish in the local lake. The details of death, injury, radiation sickness and physical destruction are given equal billing with the care and feeding of farmed carp, their...
| Author | Yukio Mishima |
| ISBN | 0099282798 |
Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of Dawn is the third novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Here, Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood friend.
Travelling in Thailand in the early 1940s, Shigekuni Honda,...
| 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 | Sawako Ariyoshi |
| ISBN | 0870118528 |
Tokyo, the seventies, years of affluence and social change in Japan. Through the eyes of the working mother Akiko we are confronted with the old age-problems of dementia and senility. Ariyoshi's way of writing is very descriptive and dry, and there's a lot of factual information on dementia and social...
| Author | Yasunari Kawabata |
| ISBN | 4770030010 |
This story of a stalker is a unique work by the first Japanese Nobel Prize winner for Literature.
The Lake is the history of an obsession. It traces a man's sad pursuit of an unattainable perfection, a beauty out of reach, admired from a distance, unconsummated. Homeless, a fugitive from an ambiguous...
| 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 | 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 | 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 | Naoya Shiga |
| ISBN | 0870113623 |
Shiga Naoya "dismissed Mishima's fiction as all 'fantasy' with little 'sense of reality.' (Shiga was another writer Mishima admired who did not reciprocate his sentiments.)"
(Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima)
There's certainly a sense of reality to "A Dark Night's Passing";...
| 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...
| 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...
