japanese literature

in english

search japanese books translated into english:

Translator: Rubin, Jay

  • After the quake : stories

    A collection of stories inspired by the January 1995 Kobe earthquake and the poison gas subway attacks two months later takes place between the two disasters and follows the experiences of people who found their normal lives undone by surreal events.

  • Norwegian wood

    This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event. Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted…

  • The elephant vanishes

  • The wind-up bird chronicle

    While searching for his missing wife, Japanese lawyer Toru Okada has strange experiences and meets strange characters. A woman wants phone sex, a man describes wartime torture, he finds himself at the bottom of a well. Part detective story, part philosophical meditation.

  • Blind willow, sleeping woman 25 stories

  • Sanshiro

    One of Soseki’s most beloved works of fiction, the novel depicts the 23-year-old Sanshiro leaving the sleepy countryside for the first time in his life to experience the constantly moving ‘real world’ of Tokyo, its women and university. In the subtle tension between our appreciation of Soseki’s lively humour and our awareness of Sanshiro’s doomed…

  • The Miner

  • Rashomon and seventeen other stories

    Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan’s foremost stylists, a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour.

  • After dark

    Two sisters, Eri, a fashion model sleeping her way to oblivion, and Mari, a young student, form the center of a novel that documents a series of encounters, with a jazz trombonist, the manager of a “love hotel” and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute brutalized by a businessman client, in Tokyo during the…

  • 1Q84

    An ode to George Orwell’s “1984” told in alternating male and female voices relates the stories of Aomame, an assassin for a secret organization who discovers that she has been transported to an alternate reality, and Tengo, a mathematics lecturer and novice writer.