japanese literature

in english

search japanese books translated into english:

Translator: Gessel, Van C.

  • Stained glass elegies : stories

  • Five by Endo : stories

    Here gathered in this small volume are five of the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo’s short stories exemplifying his style and his interests, presenting, as it were, Endo in a nutshell. “Unzen,” the opening story, touches on the subject of Silence, Endo’s most famous novel – that is the torture and martyrdom of Christians in seventeenth-century…

  • When I whistle.

  • The samurai : a novel.

    In the 17th Century, a Japanese trade delegation travels to Mexico accompanied by Father Velasco, a Franciscan missionary acting as interpreter. On the way he converts them, using the argument that this will assure the success of their mission. It doesn’t and on their return to Japan they are persecuted for their new faith.

  • Scandal

  • Deep river

    In India, four Japanese tourists converge on the River Ganges in search of absolution. The novel probes their consciences, from Isobe, grieving the death of the wife he ignored in life, to Kugachi, haunted by wartime memories of a man who saved his life by eating human flesh, then drank himself to death to forget.…

  • The final martyrs

    Eleven stories by a cosmopolitan Japanese writer. The title story is on the persecution of Christians in Japan; Japanese in Warsaw is on pimping for tourists; Adieu, set in France, is on old age; and Shadows is a young man’s cry from the heart when his role model, a Spanish priest, abandons the church for…

  • Kiku’s prayer : a novel

    Endo Shusaku was a renowned twentieth-century Japanese author who wrote from the unusual perspective of being both Japanese and Catholic. His work is often compared to that of Graham Greene, who himself considered Endo one of the century’s finest writers. A historical novel set in the turbulent period between the fall of the shogunate and…