The Tale of Genji
10 best books like The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu): The Pillow Book, The Sound of the Mountain, Some Prefer Nettles, The Confessions of Lady Nijō, The Three-Cornered World, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Yuasa), Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, The Dreamer Wakes, The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan, The Tale of the Heike
| Author | Sei Shōnagon |
| ISBN | 0231073372 |
"The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon" is a fascinating, detailed account of Japanese court life in the eleventh century. Written by a lady of the court at the height of Heian culture, this book enthralls with its lively gossip, witty observations, and subtle impressions.
Lady Shonagon was an erstwhile...
| Author | Yasunari Kawabata |
| ISBN | 0679762647 |
An alternate cover of this ISBN can be found here.
Ogata Shingo is growing old, and his memory is failing him. At night he hears only the sound of death in the distant rumble from the mountain. The relationships which have previously defined his life - with his son, his wife, and his attractive...
| 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...
| Author | Matsuo Bashō |
| ISBN | 0140441859 |
In later life Basho turned to Zen Buddhism, and the travel sketched in this volume relfect his attempts to cast off earthly attachments and reach out to spiritual fulfillment. The sketches are written in the "haibun" style--a linking of verse and prose. The title piece, in particular, reveals Basho...
| 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...
"The Story of the Stone" (c. 1760), also known as "The Dream of the Red Chamber", is one of the greatest novels of Chinese literature. The fifth part of Cao Xueqin's magnificent saga, "The Dreamer Awakes", was carefully edited and completed by Gao E some decades later. It continues the story of the changing...
| Author | Michitsuna no Haha |
| ISBN | 0804811237 |
Kagero Nikki, translated here as The Gossamer Years, belongs to the same period as the celebrated Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikuibu.
This remarkably frank autobiographical diary and personal confession attempts to describe a difficult relationship as it reveals two tempestuous decades...
If you like reading about brave and honorable warriors in a strange faraway land, you might like this -- just as you'd like some fantasies, even though these stories are based on historical facts.
This is the Japanese version of Homer. We don't really know the original author, but we know the...
| Author | Ivan Morris |
| ISBN | 1568360290 |
The World of the Shining Prince, Ivan Morris's widely acclaimed portrait of the ceremonious, inbred, melancholy world of ancient Japan, has been a standard in cultural studies for nearly thirty years. Using as a frame of reference The Tale of Genji and other major literary works from Japan's Heian...
| 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 | Lady Sarashina |
| ISBN | 0140442820 |
In the mainstream of Japan's literary tradition, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams not only reveals much that is most appealing in Japanese literature but also stands on its own as a remarkable and haunting portrait of a woman.
Born in A.D. 1008 at the height of the Heian period, Lady Sarashina (as she...
| 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 | Chikamatsu Monzaemon |
| ISBN | 0231111010 |
Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) wrote some 130 plays, chiefly for the puppet theater, many of which are still performed today by puppet operators and Kabuki actors. Chikamatsu is thought to have written the first major tragedies about the common man. This edition of four of his most important plays...
| Author | Takeda Izumo |
| ISBN | 0231035314 |
Chushingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers), also known as the story of the Forty-Six (or Forty-Seven) Ronin, is the most famous and perenially popular of all Japanese dramas. Written around 1748 as a puppet play, it is now better know in Kabuki performances. In the twentieth century, cinema 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 | Royall Tyler |
| ISBN | 0140445390 |
Japanese no theatre or the drama of perfected art' flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries largely through the genius of the dramatist Zeami. An intricate fusion of music, dance, mask, costume and language, the dramas address many subjects, but the idea of form is more central than meaning...
| Author | Ō no Yasumaro |
| ISBN | 0804836744 |
Wow. This was almost unreadable. Part of me feels obligated to give it a higher star rating just because the preservation of the earliest known Japanese history is worthy regardless of whether it's enjoyable to read. But I just couldn't. Perhaps this is an expression pf my Western bias, but I was expecting...
