Almost every scholar of Asian American literature has acknowledged the brilliance of Milton Murayama’s first novel, All I Asking for Is My Body, and its notable contribution to local Hawaiian and Asian American literature. When All I Asking for Is… Read More ›
Although it is not one of Sakutarō’s more harrowing compositions and does not contain the nightmarish imagery of so much of his poetry, Spring Night nevertheless creates a hauntingly melancholic mood by employing visual imagery to evoke the mystery of… Read More ›
While Tanikawa is not the first Japanese poet to use the sonnet form, he has made unique contributions to the sonnet genre through his 62 Sonnets (62 no sonetto), in which the poet seems to have used the form of… Read More ›
During the 1960s, Tamura Ryūichi published two poems as separate, exceptionally slim volumes. One was Research into Fear (or A Study of Fear, 1963); the other was Decaying Matter (or A Perishable Substance, 1966). One of Tamura’s translators commented: “In… Read More ›
Miyazawa wrote his Proem poem The Hard Keyura Jewels… (1922) as a supplement to his first collection, Spring and Asura (1924). While the first two lines or so of the manuscript seem to be missing, the poem clearly expresses the… Read More ›
Composed as a prose poem and narrated from an omniscient point of view, this piece by Sakutarō gives an account of the sad life of an octopus neglected for a long time in “a certain aquarium” (281). The poet delicately… Read More ›
Kōtarō Takamura’s 1914 book Dōtei (Journey) may be the single most important poetry collection to the development of 20th-century Japanese poetry. In Dōtei, Kōtarō Takamura showed himself to be the first Japanese poet to break effectively with traditional poetic convention…. Read More ›
Chieko Shō is Takamura Kōtarō’s best-known book. The collection consists of 31 poems and three essays. Chieko Shō is a unified collection and a poetry sequence in the true sense, chronicling Takamura’s life together with his wife, Chieko. The sequence… Read More ›
Based on Ballard’s childhood experiences in a Japanese concentration camp outside Shanghai, this autobiographical novel became a successful film adaptation for director Steven Spielberg in 1985. The story unfolds in three parts, opening in Shanghai on the eve of the… Read More ›
Winner of the Whitbread Award in 1986, Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel follows the first-person narrative of Masuji Ono, a Tokyo painter, after World War II. Masuji has retired and spends his time in meditative seclusion, in contrast to the prominence… Read More ›
Silence is the best known of this Japanese writer’s prolific production of novels exploring the apparent disparity between existential experience and theological doctrine. The novel by Shūsaku Endō (1923–96) reflects some of the author’s own struggles with Catholicism, which he… Read More ›
A psychological tale of calculated murder unfolds in this short but evocative novel by Yukio Mishima (1925–70) about a boy, his widowed mother, and her new relationship with a sailor whose career serves as a testament to his distaste for… Read More ›
Masks by the Japanese writer Fumiko Enchi (1905–86) tells the story of two rivals who pursue a young widow and of the inscrutable relationship between the widow and her mother-in-law, a woman of many secrets who holds her own malevolent… Read More ›
Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) is one of the great classics of Japanese literature. A translation of the title produces a wide range of meanings: “heart,” “soul,” “spirit,” “feelings,” and “the heart of things.” Kokoro is divided into three parts:… Read More ›
Kitchen, the debut novel by Banana Yoshimoto (1964– ), was a phenomenal success, catapulting the young author into instant celebrity status in her native Japan. The novel quickly won three literary prizes: Kaien magazine’s New Writer’s Prize, the Umitsubame first… Read More ›
A satire on human foibles from the standpoint of a cat, I Am a Cat is one of the most original novels of the Wagahai wa Neko de aru, one of the best loved works by the Japanese writer Natsume… Read More ›
In House of the Sleeping Beauties, by the Japanese Nobel Prize–winning author Kawabata Yasunari (1899– 1972), the protagonist, 67-year-old Eguchi, visits an inn where old men pay to spend a chaste night with beautiful young women who have been drugged…. Read More ›
The third novel by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) returns to themes earlier explored in his semiautobiographical first novel, Confessions of a Mask. The title, a euphemism for homosexuality roughly equivalent to “forbidden love,” frankly announces the novel’s subject matter… Read More ›
The Doctor’s Wife by Sawako Ariyoshi (1931–86) gives a fictional account of the life of Hanaoka Seishū, who lived from 1760 to 1835 and performed the first known operation under anesthesia in 1805, 37 years before the use of ether… Read More ›
The Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965) began his career as a writer of sensational, rather diabolical tales influenced in part by Western writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde. Celebrated for his masterful plotting and psychological… Read More ›
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