Japanese Authors

After the Quake (published in Japan in 2000 and in English in 2002) by Japanese author Haruki Murakami is a collection of six short stories set in Japan in the aftermath of the Great Hanshin Earthquake and before the Tokyo subway sarin attack. They’re all very Murakami, with his bright, breezy style, humor mixed with sentiment, and mostly young characters finding themselves in surprising and bizarre situations. In “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” my favorite of the six, a massive f

A Wild Sheep Chase (羊をめぐる冒険) is a 1982 novel by Haruki Murakami. It’s something of a mystery with elements of magical realism mixed in (the first book I’ve ever bought with 3D glasses taped inside the front cover). It’s told by a lackadaisical, beer-drinking, unambitious narrator whose name we’re never given, perhaps to make him an everyman of sorts, even described as definitively mediocre by another character in the story. He’s coerced into searching for a particular sheep,

Death in Midsummer and Other Stories is a 1953 collection by Yukio Mishima that was translated into English in the 1960s. I’ve read a few Mishima novels and still can’t quite decide whether I like his work. Some of it I do. But some of his novels and short stories I didn't get much out of. I feel the same about this collection, in which the nine stories and one play are so dissimilar they sometimes seem to have been written by different people. Most of them, including Mishim

Junichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965) is considered among the greats of modern Japanese literature. The Story of Tomoda and Matsunaga (first published in Japanese in 1926, later in Italian, and then in English in 2018 in The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories ) is a novella that explores the divide between Eastern (specifically Japanese) and Western (specifically European) culture through the figure of a doppelgänger—a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde character who shifts between a prov

I sort of read this book by accident. I’ve heard about Shusaku Endo for years but never read his work, and I recently watched Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film, Silence , based on Endo’s 1966 novel of the same name. Then after reading a review in a friend’s blog about Endo’s 1986 novel, Scandal , I headed over to the Kinokuniya near Shinjuku Station’s east exit to see if they carried this title or any of his others. Half a dozen or so Endo novels were on the shelf but not Scandal ,