The Doctor's Wife
10 best books like The Doctor's Wife (Sawako Ariyoshi): Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale, In Search of a Distant Voice, Some Prefer Nettles, The Three-Cornered World, The Waiting Years, Harp of Burma, Woman on the Other Shore, Thirst for Love, On Parole, The World of the Short Story: A Twentieth Century Collection
| 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...
In Search of a Distant Voice
| Author | Taichi Yamada |
| ISBN | 0571229727 |
[Originally appeared on New Reads and Old Standbys in June 2009:]
Nobody does crushing loneliness and uncertainty like the Japanese, and of those novelists one of the very best is Yamada Taichi. It’s a real shame his body of work has gone largely untranslated, and an even bigger shame that...
| Author | Jun'ichirō Tanizaki |
| ISBN | 0679752692 |
The marriage of Kaname and Misako is disintegrating: whilst seeking passion and fulfilment in the arms of others, they contemplate the humiliation of divorce. Misako's father believes their relationship has been damaged by the influence of a new and alien culture, and so attempts to heal the breach...
| Author | Natsume Sōseki |
| ISBN | 0720611563 |
"An artist abandons city life to wander into the mountains to meditate, but when he decides to stay at a near-deserted inn he soon finds himself drawn to the daughter of the innkeeper. This strange and beautiful woman is rumoured to have abandoned her husband and fallen in love with a priest at a nearby...
The beautiful, immature girl whom she took home to her husband was a maid only in name. Tomo's real mission had been to find him a mistress. Nor did her secret humiliation end there. The web that his insatiable lust spun about him soon trapped another young woman, and another ... and the relationships between...
| Author | Michio Takeyama |
| ISBN | 0804802327 |
Harp of Burma is Japan's haunting answer to Germany's famous requiem for the First World War, All Quiet on the Western Front.
Winner of the prestigious Mainichi Shuppan Bunkasho prize and the subject of an acclaimed film by Ichikawa Kon, Harp of Burma portrays a company of Japanese troops who...
| Author | Mitsuyo Kakuta |
| ISBN | 4770030436 |
This compelling novel, widely acclaimed for its perceptive portrayal of the everyday lives and struggles of Japanese women, struck a deep chord with readers throughout Japan. In 2005 it won the prestigious Naoki Prize, awarded semiannually for the best work of popular fiction by an established writer.
Sayoko,...
| 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 | Akira Yoshimura |
| ISBN | 0156011476 |
After spending sixteen years in prison for a crime of the heart, Shiro Kikutani is released into a world he no longer recognizes. He must readjust to the bright and vigorous stimulus of Tokyo while fending off his own dark memories. In a spare yet powerful style, Akira Yoshimura paints the psychology...
| 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 | Colette |
| ISBN | 0374176825 |
Colette et le lion
La curiosité m'a mis ce petit roman dans les mains, et je l'ai dévoré d'une traite, avec le plus grand plaisir. Il est question de Minne, une jeune fille de bonne famille, qui, quoiqu'elle paraisse la plus rangée du monde, ne laisse pas d'être fascinée par le monde...
| 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 | 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";...
Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan
| Author | Gary P. Leupp |
| ISBN | 0520209001 |
Tokugawa Japan ranks with ancient Athens as a society that not only tolerated, but celebrated, male homosexual behavior. Few scholars have seriously studied the subject, and until now none have satisfactorily explained the origins of the tradition or elucidated how its conventions reflected class...
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...
| 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 | Yūko Tsushima |
| ISBN | 4770015240 |
By conventional Japanese standards, Koko Mizuno is an abysmal
failure as woman, wife, and mother--and she couldn't care less. She has succeeded in remaining true to herself in a stubborn struggle against powerful conformist pressures. Yet her resistance is largely passive.Self-absorbed,...
| Author | Yōko Tawada |
| ISBN | 0811217396 |
A precocious Vietnamese high school student — known as the pupil with “the iron blouse”—in Ho Chi Minh City is invited to an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. But, in East Berlin, as she is preparing to present her paper in Russian on “Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism,”...
