Miss Oyu (お遊さま) is a 1951 film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi and based on Junichiro Tanizaki's 1932 novella entitled The Reed Cutter (蘆刈)....

Drawing from his experience as a journalist in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Ethiopia, Swain looks back on his love affair with...

Kafū Nagai’s short story “Something Strange Across the River” (1937) brings us to the streets of early 1900s Asakusa (then the center of...

It’s impossible to trust any text that’s incomplete, and Kawabata’s novel The Dandelion (also Dandelions, Tanpopo) was published...

Souls on the Road (Rojō no Reikon), directed by Minoru Murata and released in 1921, is one of Japan’s best remembered silent films and...

Japanologist, translator, documentary filmmaker John Nathan gives us a memoir packed with delightful stories from his years in Japan and,...

"The Dancing Girl of Izu", particularly its last three pages, is excellent for its delicate poignancy. After that comes a series of...

Robert Whiting’s Tokyo Junkie covers the author’s ties to Japan’s megacity over a period of more than half a century, including his...

Mishima's second novel in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy is set in the early 1930s and follows Isao Iinuma, son of Shigeyuki Iinuma, who...

This meandering, dense, rather insane book is chockablock with ideas, which gelled at times and at others never fully took shape for me,...

Shusaku Endo’s The Samurai (1980) is a fictional account of a 17th-century diplomatic mission from Japan to “Nueva España,” or...

Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask (仮面の告白, Kamen no Kokuhaku) was first published in 1949, following the 1948 release of his first...

“The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.” The famous first line of Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country...

Onibaba (鬼婆, 1964) is a Japanese horror film directed by Kaneto Shindo. Set during the aftermath of a fourteenth century civil war near...

"The Human Chair" (人間椅子, 1925) by Edogawa Rampo isn't so much a scary tale as it is a deviant's disturbing fantasy come to life. An ugly...

This 1986 novel by Shusaku Endo is a departure from a lot of his previous work, mainly historical fiction. Protagonist Suguro, a...

After reading and enjoying Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase and Norwegian Wood, I was disappointed in his 2002 novel, Kafka on the...

The Burmese Harp (1956) (ビルマの竪琴) is a Japanese anti-war film directed by Kon Ichikawa and based on a novel for children (same name) by...

This multigenerational family saga by Min Jin Lee is very good and quite a feat considering the breadth and complexities of the...

Kiku's Prayer first appeared as a newspaper serial in the Asahi Shimbun between November 1980 and July 1981. An English translation was...