japanese literature

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Genre: Fiction

  • Botchan

    The setting is Japan’s deep south, where the author himself spent some time teaching English in a boys’ school. Into this conservative world, with its social proprieties and established pecking order, breezes Botchan, down from the big city, with scant respect for either his elders or his noisy young charges; and the result is a…

  • The briefcase

    Tsukiko, thirty-eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, “Sensei” in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him “Sensei” (“Teacher”). He is thirty years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship-traced by Kawakami’s gentle hints at the changing…

  • Otogizoshi : the fairy tale book of Dazai Osamu

  • The sound of the mountain.

  • The temple of the golden pavilion.

    The son of a poor rural priest becomes an acolyte at the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mizoguchi had built up an image of ideal beauty in his mind based on this Golden Pavilion; this ideal image causes him to feel disappointed in any supposed form of beauty, even the actual physical Golden Pavilion. He…

  • Diary of a mad old man

    Diary of a Mad Old Man records, with alternating humor and sadness, seventy-seven-year-old Utsugi’s discovery that even his stroke-ravaged body still contains a raging libido, especially in the unwitting presence of his chic, mysterious daughter-in-law.

  • Secret rendezvous

  • 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.…

  • Vita sexualis

    Though banned three weeks after its publication in 1909, Vita Sexualis is far more than a prurient erotic novel. The narrator, a professor of philosophy, wrestles with issues of sexual desire, sex education, and the proper place of sensuality. He tells the story of his own journey into sexual awareness, spanning fifteen years, from his…

  • Unmapped territories : new women’s fiction from Japan

    Translation of seven stories by contemporary Japanese women.