The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter
10 best books like The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Anonymous): The Confessions of Lady Nijō, The Diary of Lady Murasaki, Tales of Moonlight and Rain, Fires on the Plain, The Kojiki: Records of Ancient Matters, Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan, The Twilight Years, Crossfire, In The Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life of Higuchi Ichiyo, With Nine of Her Best Stories
| 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...
The Diary of Lady Murasaki
'When I go out to sit on the veranda and gaze,
I sem to be always conjuring up visions of the past'
The Diary recorded by Lady Murasaki (c. 973 c. 1020), author of The Tale of Genji, is an intimate picture of her life as tutor and companion to the young Empress Shoshi. Told in a series of vignettes,...
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...
| 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...
The Kojiki: Records of Ancient Matters
| Author | Ō no Yasumaro |
| ISBN | 0804836752 |
Translation is a tough work, and the challenge is compounded when the original is written in archaic language because the meaning of words change over time.
I've been wondering why the Japanese gods Izanagi and Izanami have been accused of incest. It's because of the word 妹. In modern Japanese,...
| 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 | 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...
| Author | Sawako Ariyoshi |
| ISBN | 0870118528 |
Tokyo, the seventies, years of affluence and social change in Japan. Through the eyes of the working mother Akiko we are confronted with the old age-problems of dementia and senility. Ariyoshi's way of writing is very descriptive and dry, and there's a lot of factual information on dementia and social...
| Author | Miyuki Miyabe |
| ISBN | 4770029934 |
A harrowing tale of murder and retribution.
Young, pretty Junko Aoki has an extraordinary ability-she can start fires through sheer force of will. When she begins using her gift of pyrokinesis to take the law into her own hands and punish violent criminals, her executions attract the attention...
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 | Kamo no Chōmei |
| ISBN | 1880656221 |
The single great work of literary witness in medieval Japan, Hojoki is a short social chronicle prompted by a series of calamities that overtook old Kyoto in the late 12th century. By building a rude home in the forest and eliminating desire, poet and Buddhist priest Chomei believed he would be spared...
| 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 | 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 | Heliodorus of Emesa |
| ISBN | 0812216725 |
"Upon a rock sat a maiden of such inexpressible beauty as to be supposed divine. . . . Her head inclined forward without moving, for she was looking fixedly at a young man who lay at her feet. The man was disfigured with wounds, but seemed to rouse himself a little as from a deep sleep, almost of death itself....
| 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 | 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 | Thomas Deloney |
| ISBN | 0854170928 |
Publisher: London: Printed by Eliz Allde for R. Bird, Edinburgh, Printed by J. Ballantyne and co. Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com...
| Author | Karl Philipp Moritz |
| ISBN | 0140446095 |
Well received in its own day and all but forgotten in the last century, Anton Reiser (1785) has regained in our times the popular attention it richly merits. Subtitled a "psychological novel" by its author, who also called it a biography, the work is actually a highly authentic autobiography. The work...
| 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 | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
| ISBN | 0520063155 |
So this is a love story supposedly, with innumerable sup-plots. Every time a new character shows up we get yet another tangent. Whats odd is that not only do the actual characters get bored with some of the sub-stories but the author apologises to the reader at least ten times about how repetitive it can...
| 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,...
Escrita a partir de 1460 i publicada per primera vegada el 1490, Tirant lo Blanc de Joanot Martorell és una novel·la cavalleresca que narra les aventures d'armes i d'amor del seu protagonista, Tirant, al servei d'un bell ideal: alliberar l'Imperi Grec, Constantinoble, del setge dels turcs. Qualificada...
| Author | Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo |
| ISBN | 1146644310 |
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part...
| Author | Natsume Sōseki |
| ISBN | 1552123952 |
The First Night
'The sun rises. And the sun sets. And the sun rises and sets... When the red sun rises in the east and sets in the west, then I will... Will you wait for me?'
The Second Night
'I cannot reach the state of nothingness.' Whenever I felt I was about to reach it, the pain seemed to...
