The River Ki
10 best books like The River Ki (Sawako Ariyoshi): Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale, The Waiting Years, Harp of Burma, 36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan, In The Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life of Higuchi Ichiyo, With Nine of Her Best Stories, First Snow on Fuji, The Wild Geese, On Parole, Five Women Who Loved Love: Amorous Tales from 17th-Century Japan, Crackling Mountain and Other Stories
| 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 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...
36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan
| Author | Cathy N. Davidson |
| ISBN | 0822339137 |
In 1980 Cathy N. Davidson traveled to Japan to teach English at a leading all-women’s university. It was the first of many journeys and the beginning of a deep and abiding fascination. In this extraordinary book, Davidson depicts a series of intimate moments and small epiphanies that together make...
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 | Yasunari Kawabata |
| ISBN | 1582431051 |
The stories of Yasunari Kawabata evoke an unmistakably Japanese atmosphere in their delicacy, understatement, and lyrical description. Like his later works, First Snow on Fuji is concerned with forms of presence and absence, with being, with memory and loss of memory, with not-knowing. Kawabata...
| 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | Yasushi Inoue |
| ISBN | 8845921158 |
Un piccolo hotel incastonato in una scogliera scoscesa, la spiaggia di ciottoli, il mare indaco: per Sugi, che dopo infiniti fallimenti deve affrontare anche il disonore, è l’approdo cercato – lo scenario ideale per morire. Si è concesso un unico, singolare lusso: tre giorni, il tempo necessario...
| 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 | 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...
Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa
| Author | Yukichi Fukuzawa |
| ISBN | 0231083734 |
Here is the autobiography of a remarkable man. Yukichi Fukuzawa's life covered the 66 years between 1835 and 1901, a period which comprised greater and more extraordinary changes than any other in the history of Japan. In his country's swift transformation from an isolated feudal state to a full-fledged...
The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi & Arrowroot
| Author | Jun'ichirō Tanizaki |
| ISBN | 0375719318 |
From a Japanese master of romantic and sexual obsession come two novels that treat traditional themes with sly wit and startling psychological sophistication. In The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, Junichir Tanizaki reimagines the exploits of a legendary samurai as a sadomasochistic dance...
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...
| 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...
| Author | Hikaru Okuizumi |
| ISBN | 0156011832 |
The Stones Cry Out is the story of an amateur geologist and bookseller who is collapsing under the burden of his own history. Tsuyoshi Manase learned his first geology lesson from a dying soldier in a cave at the end of World War II. The soldier, a corporal, is skeletal, his eyes swarming with maggots, but...
For years Kazu has run her fashionable restaurant with a combination of charm and shrewdness. But when the she falls in love with one of her clients, an aristocratic retired politician, she renounces her business in order to become his wife. But it is not so easy to renounce her independent spirit, and...
