Vox Day is a novelist, a game designer, a bestselling political philosopher, and the lead editor of the Castalia Library. He spent a semester studying economics in Tokyo at the height of the Heisei Boom and is the author of a number of comics, including Alt★Hero, Hypergamouse, and Midnight’s War.
Japanese literature is like no other. What the wedding is to the English novel, the suicide is to the Japanese novel. Furthermore, the absence of Christian sexual mores, the cultural inclination toward passivity and fatalism, and the lack of an individualist hero tradition will tend to strike the average Western reader as strange and, in some cases, even bordering on the perverse.
But the technical skill of Japanese novelists, combined with their very different takes on the human condition, makes Japanese literature one of the most interesting and rewarding literatures available for reading on the planet. Below are my favorite books by ten different Japanese authors translated into English, since I don’t read kanji, and a list of my ten favorite Japanese novels would amount to little more than an incomplete bibliography of Haruki Murakami.
10. The Nakano Thrift Shop, Hiromi Kawakami
The best of the Japanese shop girl genre. The question of why so many Japanese writers, most of them women, feature young women working in retail as their protagonists, is probably best left for the sociologists to ponder. But Kawakami somehow manages to hold the reader’s interest in a story about the ups and downs of a Tokyo secondhand store and the people who work there despite the fact that very little happens in terms of action, plot, or romance.
9. Runaway Horses, Yukio Mishima
The most notorious and flamboyant of Japan’s 20th Century authors, Mishima committed suicide after staging a farcical solo military coup in much the same manner that he once described in suspiciously loving detail in his 1961 short story, “Patriotism”. But he was a gifted and inventive writer, and Runaway Horses is a fascinating tale addressing the chaotic period in which the young conservative nationalists rebelled violently against the opening of Japanese society by their more pragmatic elders. It is the second of his tetralogy known as The Sea of Fertility, but it can be read as a solo novel. Honorable mention to The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
Inspired by the great Japanese classic, Genji Monogatari, which the author personally translated into modern Japanese, Masks is a three-part novel in which each part is connected to the masks utilized in Japanese Noh theatre and derived from a significant scene in Genji. It is dark, deeply artistic, and compelling throughout.
A fictionalized account of the 1984 Glico Morinaga case in which the president of a large industrial concern was kidnapped and which still remains unsolved 40 years later. It is clever, and its twists-and-turns are so contorted that the reader will do well to simply keep up; one need not fear being able to anticipate what is going to happen next.
6. The Makioka Sisters, Junchiro Tanizaki
The Japanese Brideshead Revisited tells the story of the decline of a wealthy Osaka family as the world descends into World War II. As with most literary tales of decline, there is a bittersweet edge to the tragedy. It is generally considered to be a classic and one of Japan’s greatest novels of the modern era.
5. Before the Dawn, Toson Shimazaki
This is Shogun, if it was real, set in the time of Admiral Perry and the Black Ships, and written from the perspective of a minor government bureaucrat responsible for overseeing a section of one of the two main roads to Edo, as Tokyo was then called. A thinly-disguised fictionalization of the author’s actual family history, the novel is a remarkable chronicle of a time of rapid change from medieval to modern Japan as well as a generational story of an interesting family that inadvertently found itself close to the most significant events of the time.
4. Under the Midnight Sun, Keigo Higashino
Japan has had a thriving crime, mystery, and police procedural genre for decades, and Keigo Higashino is the best of the many novelists who write within it. His novels can be very dark, but his detectives are sufficiently intellectual and detached to prevent them from weighing excessively on the reader’s soul. All of his books are good, this one is a little more complex and absorbing than the others.
3. Honeybees and Distant Thunder, Riku Onda
This is one of the best novels about music to have been written in any language. A story about a national music competition and its effects upon the competitors, all of whom are unique talents with very different backgrounds and perspectives. Although she’s much more well-known for The Aosawa Murders, a fictionalized reimagining of a historical tragedy known as the Teigin Incident, this novel shows her elevating her talents to the highest level.
2. A Wild Sheep’s Chase, Haruki Murakami
While this is the third of the Rat trilogy, it absolutely works as a stand-alone novel and is a little more accessible than the epic 1Q84 and its strange supernatural elements are less bizarre than the otherworld of Killing Commendatore. The twists and turns of the multiple mysteries that are intertwined always keeps the reader guessing, and the characteristic passivity of Murakami’s protagonist is balanced by the oddness of the situations in which he finds himself. 1Q84 is Murakami’s best novel, but this one is still my favorite of his reliably excellent ouevre.
1. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu
The first Japanese novel is one of the most important pieces of literature on the planet. It’s about as close as we can get to a deep dive into a truly alien culture; the floating world of Heian court culture, its romances, and its politics, is about as far from modern global monoculture as it is possible to be. While the novel is incoherent by our standards and lacks anything that can really be described as a plot, the characters are unforgettable and the world-building surpasses anything not written by Tolkien, with the additional advantage of having been more or less real. I would go so far as to say that unless one has read this landmark work, written sometime between 1005 and 1021 AD, one cannot consider oneself to be fully literate.
What do you think of Vox Day’s 10 favorite Japanese Novels? Leave a comment and let us know.
I had no idea A Wild Sheep's Chase was the third novel of a trilogy. Clearly, I have more reading in front of me,
There’s just something about Japanese novels ❤️