japanese literature

in english

search japanese books translated into english:

Genre: Fiction

  • Kabuki dancer

    A fictionalized biography of Okuni, the 17th Century Japanese temple dancer who invented the Kabuki theatre. The novel chronicles her love life and the public’s reaction to her innovations, such as cross-dressing, reaction which tended to vary with the political climate of the day.

  • Promenade of the gods

    It begins with a woman’s search to find her husband, who disappears after watching a TV show. She enlists the aid of her husband’s best friend, and together they discover that the famous female personality of the TV show disappeared after the same evening’s broadcast as well. The duo’s search leads to a battle within…

  • Rashomon and other stories

    This collection gave birth to a new paradigm when Akira Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon”, made famous Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s disturbing tale of seven people recounting the same incident from shockingly different perspectives.

  • A treasury of modern Asian stories

  • Moju : the blind beast

  • Enma : the immortal

  • We, the children of cats : stories and novellas

    By turns teasing and terrifying, laconic and luminous, the stories in this anthology are drawn from sources as diverse as Borges, Nabokov, Garcia-Marquez, and traditional Japanese folklore, and yet they ultimately reside in a slyly subversive literary world that is all their own. Blending an uncompromising ethical vision with exuberant, free-wheeling imagery and bracing formal…

  • Almost transparent blue

  • Pinball, 1973

  • The housekeeper and the professor

    He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem. Ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to…