japanese literature in english

All Books

Death in midsummer, and other stories.



House of the sleeping beauties : and other stories



Snow country


With the brushstroke suggestiveness and astonishing grasp of motive that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata tells a story of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan, the snowiest region on earth. It is there, at an isolated mountain hotspring, that the wealthy sophisticate …


The decay of the angel


During the last years of his life, Honda adopts an orphaned boy and teaches him about Japanese society and tradition.


The gossamer years : the diary of a noblewoman of Heian Japan


Kagero Nikki, translated here as The Gossamer Years, belongs to the same period as the celebrated Tale of Genji. This frank autobiography diary reveals two tempestuous decades of the author’s unhappy marriage and her growing indignation at rival wives and mistresses. To impetuous to be satisfied as a subsidiary wife, …


The Izu dancer and other stories

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The Counterfeiter, Obasute, and The full moon by Yasushi Inoue


The master of go.


Symbolic novel reporting a match of the Japanese game of go.


The tale of Genji


In the eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in the Heian court of Japan, wrote the world’s first novel. But The Tale of Genji is no mere artifact. It is, rather, a lively and astonishingly nuanced portrait of a refined society where every dalliance is an act of political consequence, …


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