The Paper Door and Other Stories
10 best books like The Paper Door and Other Stories (Naoya Shiga): Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale, The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanshichi: Detective Stories of Old Edo, Tales of Moonlight and Rain, Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories, In The Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life of Higuchi Ichiyo, With Nine of Her Best Stories, The River Ki, Japanese Gothic Tales, Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy, 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...
The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanshichi: Detective Stories of Old Edo
| Author | Kidō Okamoto |
| ISBN | 0824831004 |
That year, quite a shocking incident occurred. . . . So reminisces old Hanshichi in a story from one of Japan's most beloved works of popular literature, Hanshichi torimonocho. Told through the eyes of a street-smart detective, Okamoto Kido's best-known work inaugurated the historical detective...
Tales of Moonlight and Rain
| Author | Ueda Akinari |
| ISBN | 0231139128 |
First published in 1776, the nine gothic tales in this collection are Japan's finest and most celebrated examples of the literature of the occult. They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the period's fascination with the strange and the grotesque. They were...
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...
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 | 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...
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 | 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 | Mieko Kanai |
| ISBN | 1564785661 |
Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in this collection shows an entirely different facet when viewed from a different angle. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction—the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these things...
| 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 | Jun'ichirō Tanizaki |
| ISBN | 4770029721 |
The decadent tales in this dazzling collection span forty-five years in the extraordinary career of Japan's master storyteller, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965).
Tanizaki's major novels-Naomi, The Makioka Sisters, A Cat, a Man, and Two Women, and The Key, for example-have already appeared...
| 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...
| 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...
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...
Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan
| Author | Lafcadio Hearn |
| ISBN | 1604247487 |
"Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" is a compilation of 27 sketches on Japanese culture, of which 10 appeared initially in publications such as the Atlantic Monthly intended for the general American public. The pieces are tremendously charming and cover a wide range of topics including Shinto, Buddhism...
