The Tale of the Heike
10 best books like The Tale of the Heike (Anonymous): The Pillow Book, The Confessions of Lady Nijō, The Three-Cornered World, The Diary of Lady Murasaki, Tales of Moonlight and Rain, Fires on the Plain, The Kojiki: Records of Ancient Matters, The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan, River of Stars: Selected Poems, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan
| 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 | 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...
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 | 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 | Akiko Yosano |
| ISBN | 1570621462 |
Yosano Akiko (1878-942) is one of the most famous Japanese writers of the twentieth century. She is the author of more than seventy-five books, including twenty volumes of original poetry and the definitive translation into modern Japanese of the Tale of the Genji. Although probably best known for...
| Author | Ono no Komachi |
| ISBN | 0679729585 |
Japanese poetry is said to be originated in human heart and mind and grows in to the myriad leaves of words. The collection of poems The Ink Dark Moon is from the Heian era of Japanese literature, the era is considered as Golden Age in the history of Japanese literature. The language in that era was very inflected...
| 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...
The Hyakunin Isshu is a poetry anthology beloved by generations of Japanese since it was compiled in the 13th century. Many Japanese know the poems by heart as a result of playing the popular card game version of the anthology. Collecting one poem each from one hundred poets living from the 7th century...
| 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 | Kenneth Rexroth |
| ISBN | 0811201813 |
The poems are drawn chiefly from the traditional Manyoshu, Kokinshu and Hyakunin Isshu collections, but there are also examplaes of haiku and other later forms. The sound of the Japanese texts i reproduced in Romaji script and the names of the poets in the calligraphy of Ukai Uchiyama. The translator's...
| 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 | 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 | Ōtomo no Yakamochi |
| ISBN | 0486439593 |
Dating from the 8th century and earlier, the Manyoshu is the oldest Japanese poetry anthology; it is also widely considered to be the best. The 1,000 poems (out of a total of more than 4,500) in this famous selection were chosen by a distinguished scholarly committee based on their poetic excellence,...
Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō
| Author | Yoshida Kenkō |
| ISBN | 0231112556 |
Written sometime between 1330 and 1332, the Essays in Idleness, with their timeless relevance and charm, hardly mirror the turbulent times in which they were born. Despite the struggle between the Emperor Go-Daigo and the usurping Hojo family that rocked Japan during these years, the Buddhist priest...
Yamamoto Kansuke hidup pada zaman Sengoku Jidai; di mana perang saudara dan perebutan wilayah melingkupi wilayah Jepang. Kansuke dipandang sebelah mata karena kakinya yang pincang dan matanya yang buta sebelah. Hingga pada suatu ketika ia bertemu dengan jenderal Itagaki, yang memberinya kesempatan...
