The Sound of the Mountain
10 best books like The Sound of the Mountain (Yasunari Kawabata): Some Prefer Nettles, The Confessions of Lady Nijō, The Three-Cornered World, Black Rain, The Waiting Years, Fires on the Plain, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: 4 Short Novels, Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, The Wild Geese
| 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 | Lady Nijō |
| ISBN | 0804709300 |
In about 1307 a remarkable woman in Japan sat down to complete the story of her life. The result was an autobiographical narrative, a tale of thirty-six years (1271-1306) in the life of Lady Nijo, starting when she became the concubine of a retired emperor in Kyoto at the age of fourteen and ending, several...
| 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...
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...
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 | Shōhei Ōoka |
| ISBN | 0804813795 |
"Written with precise skill and beautifully controlled power. The translation by Ivan Morris is outstanding." —The New York Times
**Winner of the 1952 Yomiuri Prize**
This haunting novel explores the complete degradation and isolation of a man by war. Fires on the Plain is set...
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: 4 Short Novels
These four novels display Oe’s passionate and original vision. Oe was ten when American jeeps first drove into the mountain village where he lived, and his literary work reveals the tension and ambiguity forged by the collapse of values of his childhood on the one hand and the confrontation with American...
| Author | Donald Keene |
| ISBN | 0802150586 |
The sweep of Japanese literature in all its great variety was made available to Western readers for the first time in this anthology. Every genre and style, from the celebrated No plays to the poetry and novels of the seventeenth century, find a place in this book. An introduction by Donald Keene places...
| Author | Xun Lu |
| ISBN | 0824813170 |
This collection of short stories by Lu Xun, commonly considered one of the greatest writers in 20th-century China and often referred to as the father of modern Chinese literature, includes the celebrated short story, "A Madman's Diary". This short story is considered to be one of the first and most...
| 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...
The Orchard: The Bostan Of Saadi Of Shiraz, Saadi
Bustan ("Būstān") is a book of poetry by the Persian poet Saadi, completed in 1257. Saadi's first work, and its title means "the orchard". The book contains the fruits of Saadi's long experience and his judgements upon life, and is illustrated...
| 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";...
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...
The Counterfeiter and Other Stories
| Author | Yasushi Inoue |
| ISBN | 0804832528 |
3.5 stars. This little book of short stories is elegant and sweet. The stories aren't very captivating in themselves, but they way they are written is what keeps you captivated. The focus is introspective, mostly on thoughts, feelings, symbols, and themes. The beauty of the writing is shown in the intelligent...
