The Three-Cornered World
10 best books like The Three-Cornered World (Natsume Sōseki): Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale, Tales of Moonlight and Rain, Black Rain, Masks, Fires on the Plain, Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Seven Japanese Tales, The Tale of the Heike, The Lake, The Wild Geese
| 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...
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...
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...
| Author | Fumiko Enchi |
| ISBN | 0394722183 |
Masks takes its name from the Noh masks of Japanese dramas, and much is made of spirit possession. This is a curiously elegant and scandalous tale of sexual deception and revenge. Ibuki loves widow Yasuko who is young, charming and sparkling with intelligence as well as beauty. His friend, Mikame, desires...
| 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...
| 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 | Jun'ichirō Tanizaki |
| ISBN | 0679761071 |
I purchased this book in a bookstore off Piccadilly Circus waiting to meet someone. After hours of conversation, we separated, taking our respective tunnels to catch our trains. Every time I see this book, I remember that goodbye. Funny, the things that serve as fluttering markers to our memories.
I'm...
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 | Yasunari Kawabata |
| ISBN | 4770030010 |
This story of a stalker is a unique work by the first Japanese Nobel Prize winner for Literature.
The Lake is the history of an obsession. It traces a man's sad pursuit of an unattainable perfection, a beauty out of reach, admired from a distance, unconsummated. Homeless, a fugitive from an ambiguous...
| 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 | 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";...
Self Portraits: Tales from the Life of Japan's Great Decadent Romantic
| Author | Osamu Dazai |
| ISBN | 0870117793 |
Dazai's frail sunken chest and haunted handsome gaze says it all - dissolution, sickness, deep feeling, and beauty are authentic pathways through an inauthentic and decaying world.
Going into this I thought him a self-absorbed hedonist unconcerned with the heartbreak and death he left...
| Author | Ryūnosuke Akutagawa |
A patient in a mental hospital tells anyone who will listen his story of chasing a Kappa in the woods, when he fell down a hole and landed in Kappaland, a parallel world to the one above. And, by the way, friends he made in Kappaland come back to visit him nightly.
What’s a Kappa? It’s a scaly,...
