japanese literature

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Genre: Fiction

  • Grotesque

    In the wake of the brutal murders of two Tokyo prostitutes, Yuriko and Kazue, Yuriko’s older sister describes the three women’s education at a prestigious girls’ high school, where a strict societal conventions determine the courses of their lives.

  • Nowaki

  • Schoolgirl

    The novella that first propelled Dazai into the literary elite of post-war Japan. Essentially the start of Dazai’s career, Schoolgirl gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language. Now it illuminates the prevalent social structures of a lost time, as well as the struggle of the individual against them–a theme that occupied Dazai’s…

  • The Scarlet gang of Asakusa

    A new translation of the only work not currently available in English by a Nobel-Prize winning author and the best known Japanese writer outside of Japan.

  • Confessions of a mask

  • Sun & steel.

    This is the personal testament of Japan’s greatest novelist, written shorty before his public suicide in 1970. Through Mishima’s finely wrought and emphatic prose, the mind and motivation behind his agonized search for personal identity is revealed.

  • The woman in the dunes

    In this famous postwar Japanese novel, the first of Abe’s to be translated into English, Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist in pursuit of a rare specimen of beetle, wanders into a strange seaside village, whose residents all live in sandpits. He is taken prisoner, and, along with a widow cast out by the community, he…

  • 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…

  • The Columbia anthology of modern Japanese literature / Vol. 2, From 1945 to the present

    Portrays changes that have transformed Japanese culture since the end of Pacific War. Beginning with the Allied Occupation in 1945 and concluding with early twenty-first century, this title reflects Japan’s transition from poverty to prosperity, its struggle with conflicting ideologies and political beliefs, and more.

  • Laughing wolf