japanese literature

in english

search japanese books translated into english:

Book Subject Tag: Short stories

  • The Isle of South Kamui and other stories

    A young Tokyoite doctor accepts a post on a remote island south of Okinawa. When a highly contagious fatal disease breaks out, he has to choose between saving himself or saving others. A hormone-ridden teenage youth left alone with his young stepmother following his fathers death is consumed with jealousy as her affections turn to…

  • Things Remembered and Things Forgotten

    The ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are – by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and…

  • Life Ceremony

    In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the…

  • The Trial of Pak Tal and other stories

    The so-called Zainichi Korean diaspora in Japan is a large and diverse community with a long and painful history that began with the Japanese colonization of Korea (1910-1945). One of the most prolific and influential Zainichi Korean writers in Japan, Kim Tal-su (1920-1997) left behind a wide body of work depicting the many social and…

  • Toddler Hunting and Other Stories

    Winner of Japan’s top literary prizes (the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri), Taeko Kono writes with a strange beauty: her tales are pinpricked with disquieting scenes, her characters all teetering on self-dissolution, especially in the context of their intimate relationships. In the title story, the protagonist loathes young girls but compulsively buys…

  • The woman with the flying head and other stories

    A collection of fantasy stories by Yumiko Kurahashi.

  • Realm of the dead

    A collection of short stories, where the lands of both the living and the dead are equally dark and mysterious worlds where logic and reality are subject to constant change and where ideas about identity and self are continually questioned.

  • Love and other stories of Yokomitsu Riichi

    Short stories.

  • Lemon

  • The word book

    Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in this collection shows an entirely different facet when viewed from a different angle. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction-the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these things to one another-Mieko…