japanese literature

in english

search japanese books translated into english:

Book Subject Tag: Women authors

  • Black Box: The Memoir That Sparked Japan’s #Metoo Movement

    Black Box is a riveting, sobering memoir that chronicles one woman’s struggle for justice, calling for changes to an industry–and in society at large–to ensure that future victims of sexual assault can come forward without being silenced and humiliated. In 2015, an aspiring young journalist named Shiori Ito charged prominent reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi with rape. After…

  • Parade

    On a summer afternoon, Tsukiko and her former high school teacher have prepared and eaten somen noodles together. ‘Tell me a story from long ago, ‘ Sensei says. ‘I wasn’t alive long ago,’ Tsukiko says, ‘but should I tell you a story from when I was little?’ ‘Please do,’ Sensei replies, and so Tsukiko tells…

  • The Ten Loves of Nishino

    Hiromi Kawakami tells the story of an enigmatic man through the voices of ten remarkable women who have known him. Each woman has succumbed, even if only for an hour, to the seductive, imprudent, and furtively feline man who drifted so naturally into their lives. Still clinging to the vivid memory of his warm breath…

  • The Nakano Thrift Shop

    The objects for sale at the Nakano Thrift Shop appear as commonplace as the staff and customers who handle them. But like those staff and customers, they hold many secrets. If examined carefully, they show the signs of innumerable extravagances, of immeasurable pleasure and pain, and of the deep mysteries of the human heart. Hitomi,…

  • Strange Weather in Tokyo

    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 develops from a perfunctory acknowledgment of each…

  • 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…

  • Let those who appear

    Over twenty-five years ago New Directions, at the urging of Kenneth Rexroth, published Seasons of Sacred Lust, a selection of poems by a young Japanese writer, Kazuko Shiraishi. Since then the book has gone through several printings and toured around the world, accompanying Ms. Shiraishi to almost any country one can think of, places where she…

  • The poetry and poetics of ancient Japan

    It was the noblewomen of the 10th and 11th centuries who freed Japanese literature from the domination of formal Chinese writing to create a poetry shaped by spoken Japanese. Many centuries later it was again women, this time courtesans and prostitutes, who through popular song liberated a poetry more and more restricted by increasingly rarified…

  • Japanese women poets : an anthology

    This anthology encompasses all the major Japanese women poets, over one hundred, arranged chronologically and all the major verse forms: choka, tanka, haikai (haiku), kanshi (verse written in Chinese), and free verse.

  • I am alive : the tanka poems of Goto Miyoko, 1898-1978