Mina-san Konichiwa, Hi everyone, In this video I will tell about top 10 Japanese
novels you should read.
If you are interested in Japanese literature and don't know where to start then this ten
novels will give you plenty to read.
They are some of the best of Japanese literature.
Also if you don't want to read and just want to know what the big Japanese novels are about,
then you will learn that here.
But first let me answer the pressing question, why Japanese literature in the first place?
I love Japanese literature for three very important reasons.
First, most Japanese novels tend to be short.
In Japan space and time are extremely important.
Land being so scarce in this mountainous country that everything is made smaller, like electronics.
Even dogs are smaller and so are….people.
So Japanese novelists tend to write shorter and more minimalistic novels.
Second, Japanese people like show more than tell.
In Japan you need to show you’re a hard worker, show courage in the battle to earn
respect of your fellow samurai.
Even manga culture is more show than tell.
Also the Chinese-based writing system of Kanji is based on pictures.
So Japanese novels show more than tell, you can draw your own conclusion.
Japanese novels are very sparse with their details.
And the final reason I love Japanese novels is that the minimalism also extends to the
characters.
Most Japanese novels are novels of loneliness.
Living in such crowded cities like Tokyo and Osaka make you lonely.
Connection is harder in a crowded room than in a room with just a few people.
So Japanese novels tend to be more about lonely people.
This appeals to me a lot.
You might know the reason why if you care to read between the lines.
I have discussed The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki a lot in several of my videos so
I have not included it in this list.
The order these novels are presented is in order of their publication date, from first
to last.
1906 Quote:
“Even the works of Shakespeare might be more thoroughly appreciated if they were re-examined
from unorthodox positions.
Someone, once in a while, should take a good long look at Hamlet through his legs.”
I Am A Cat by Natsume Soseki.
Soseki (1867-1916) is like a founding father of modern Japanese literature and inside Japan
he’s considered the most important Japanese novelist and a favourite of Murakami.
His life and writing career coincided with Japan’s rapid modernisation and he captured
that dynamic transitional period beautifully.
I Am a Cat is his most famous novel.
His other novels are Botchan and Kokoro.
It’s about a cat who observes those humans it encounters and captures the old Japan clashing
with new Japan beautifully.
A cat as a protagonist allowed Soseki more freedom to satirise middle-class Japanese
people.
Murakami’s novels are littered with cats and other animals so as far as literary animals
go, this is the first and the biggest cat in Japanese literature.
Almost a tiger.
But if you want something more entertaining, Soseki’s other novel Botchan is a better
choice which I discussed in my other video on Japnese literature.
1915 Quote: “I could wish for nothing more than
to die for a childish dream in which I truly believed.”
Rashomon and Other Stories by Rynosuke Akutagawa.
This is not a novel but a collection of short stories by one of the most original Japanese
authors.
Rynosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is a pioneer of unreliable narrator.
He is the most celebrated short story writers in Japan.
He committed suicide at the age of 35.
The story In The Bamboo Grove not only questions human’s ability to tell the truth but also
truth itself.
Are we really able to see truth?
Is there such thing as objective truth?
This book has also some the most revealing bits about Akutagawa’s own life titled the
life of a stupid man.
In Japan Akutagawa is as important as Soseki.
So I highly recommend you read his short stories.
1948 “the more I feared people the more I was
liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them—a process which eventually compelled
me to run away from everybody.”
Ningen Shikkaku or No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai.
Dazai was born in 1909 committed suicide in 1948 at the age of 39.
The novel is about what it means to be a real as human being.
What’s our genuine selves.
Is it the traditional roles you belong to or assigned to or you can shape your own self.
Nowadays the issue of gender, class and race are very prominent in the media.
Group identity vs individual identity.
It’s somewhat similar to Kafka’s dark world of individuals as cog in a machine or
Martin Heidegger’s philosophy about alienation in modern world.
Japan’s rapid modernisation from 1870s to 1930s came at a cost to individual Japanese
people as they were mobilised to help the military state.
Dazai is considered a critique of modernisation of Japan and the strain of it on individuality
among Japanese people.
The social pressure to conform and hide your true self to prevent social isolation and
ostracization by others.
It’s a brilliantly honest novel about individual identity, like a flower growing on concrete,
so fragile in the face of social pressure.
1956 “The high, thin nose was a little lonely,
a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little
circle of leeches.”
Yuki-guni or Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata.
Kawabata (1899-1972) was the first Japanese to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964.
His style is very unique among Japanese novelists.
He’s got a more Japanese style similar to the Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki, often
leaving things unexplained and for the reader to understand them from the context.
This makes him more difficult for western audience.
Snow Country is his most well-known novel about a man who visits a spa town and gets
enamoured with a few women.
Shimamura is like a modern day Prince Genji unable to settle with one woman.
One of the most beautiful scene is when Shimamura is on the train and catches the reflection
of a young girl superimposed on the plains outside through the train window in the evening
light.
He’s too embarrassed to stare at her directly but watches her reflection on the window pane.
The novel basically boils down to a battle between one man and four women.
It has the beautiful writing of Kawabata that earned a Nobel Prize.
If I have to choose, I’d say Kawabata is my favourite Japanese writer.
Snow Country is like an untouched Japan’s past that Kawabata recaptures in this novel.
1956 “For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity
with one hand and life with the other.”
The Temple of Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima.
Mishima (1925-1970) is perhaps the most controversial Japanese writer and his suicide during an
attempted Coup in 1970 was bizarre as well as sensational.
His more popular novels are Confessions of a Mask, and The Sea of Fertility.
Despite his right-wing political views, Mishima was a brilliant novelist and one of the most
disturbing as well as exhilarating Japanese writers.
The Temple of Golden Pavilion is based on a true story.
In 1950 a priest burned down the most iconic temple in Kyoto, the Golden Temple Kinkakuji.
In this novel, Mishima attempts to answer why, but also trying to answer questions such
as what’s beauty, jealousy and destruction.
This exposes the most fundamental of human existential questions.
How can we hold on to something we have attained.
In this case, it’s beauty at its perfection.
At some point we have to let it go, but what if you don't want to.
The Golden Temple despite its beauty goes somewhat against the Japanese concept of rustic
beauty as in wabi sabi.
It’s too shiny and flashy in your face.
The novel tries to articulate that there is a love thin between love, madness and destruction.
1962 “Sand, which didn't even have a form of
its own.
Yet, not a single thing could stand against this shapeless, destructive power.
The very fact that it had no form was doubtless the highest manifestation of its strength,
was it not?”
The woman in the dunes by Kobo Abe: Kobo Abe (1924-1993) is often called Franz Kafka of
Japan.
His most well-known novel The Woman in Dunes is about an insect collector who missing his
bus gets stuck at a village.
Imagine you are stuck in a sand and your routine is to clean the sand every day.
You do the same thing over and over.
Imagine you finish work and wake the next morning and you have to do it all over again.
It’s a metaphors for our lives.
He tries to escape but as times passes, he realises it doesn't matter where he is, he
is never going to be free.
It’s a brilliant novel, and you can see hints of it in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro,
in that we are destined to be useful for others, but we can never escape our life of suffering.
1964 “In this age of ours it's hard to say with
certainty that having lived was better than not having been born in the first place.”
A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe.
Oe (1935) was the second Japanese to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994.
A Personal Matter is not an easy novel to read.
It can be very upsetting and heart-breaking at times.
It’s about an intellectual with grand future dreams but this dream is shattered with the
birth of his brain-damaged child.
Part of it is a true story of Oe’s own personal life, hence the title of A Personal Matter.
His own son was born with a cognitive disability.
A Personal Matter is mainly about one thing.
One thing only.
How our personal life hinders or helps our outlook on the world.
A small tragedy in our life is hundred-fold more important that serious tragedies in the
world.
We’re small creature with small lives, but occasionally we have big, gigantic dreams.
This novel is brutally honest about the dynamic between our personal lives and societal change.
2003 The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko
Ogawa.
It’s a beautiful tale of a math professor whose memory only lasts 80 minutes after an
accident and his housekeeper is a woman with a 10-year old son.
She has to introduce herself every morning as if they have never met before.
The three of them make a make-shift yet beautiful family.
The writing is so wonderful.
It’s a novel that makes numbers as beautiful as art.
Here is an example talking about prime numbers: “When you get to much bigger numbers – a
million or ten million – you’re venturing into a wasteland where primes are terribly
apart … like a desert.
The sun shines down mercilessly, your throat is parched, your eyes glaze over.
Then you think you see one, a prime number at last, and you go running towards it – only
to find that it is just a mirage, nothing but wind.
Still, you refuse to give up, staggering on step by step, determined to continue the search…
until you see it at last, the oasis of another prime number, a place of rest and cool, clear
water...”
While reading, I was so engrossed that I tried to do the maths in the story.
I’m sure you will do too.
The Housekeeper and the Professor is a novel of falling in love with maths, baseball, mother
and son, and a man without a son and son without a father.
It’s a beautiful story.
2005 “When you come out of the storm, you won’t
be the same person who walked in.
That’s what this storm’s all about.”
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.
I love Murakami for his storytelling.
When I grab one of his books, I can just relax like watching my favourite TV show.
He tells me everything and I don't have to think much.
After reading a heavy book, I often go to one of his novels and everything feels so
much more easier.
I made a whole video talking about Murakami’s novels and style of writing.
I will link it down below if you like to watch.
Kafka On The Shore has all the elements that make Murakami unique and bizarre.
Kafka, just like the real Franz Kafka hates his own father and escapes from him.
There are many bizarre events in the novel, like cats talking to humans or fish raining
from the sky, the novel focuses on Kafka and one more character who due to his childhood
experiences during the second world war lives a very unusual life.
It’s a great novel.
2016 “You eliminate the parts of your life that
others find strange--maybe that's what everyone means when they say they want to 'cure" me.”
Kombini-no-hito or Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.
Murata was born in 1970 and worked at a convenience store for 18 years but rose to fame with this
debut novel about her experience of working there.
The main character is Keiko, a 36-year-old woman who has only worked one job, a temporary
worker at a convenience store.
Not married, no boyfriend, no career and not even a hobby.
Her entire life is defined by work at the convenience store.
When she meets another misfit, a man who cannot even manage the job at the convenience store,
her life is about to take a dramatic turn.
Keiko quits her job, but her experience at the convenience store has changed her forever
that no force big enough to bring her back.
A brilliant novel, very short and on the surface it doesn't seem like a literary masterpiece,
the language and story simple, but it touches you deep inside.
“I am one of those cogs, going round and round.
I have become a functioning part of the world, rotating in the time of day called morning.”
It is a beautiful novel and I highly recommend it.
Well, these are my top ten Japanese novels.
I hope you enjoyed the video.
Let me know if I have missed some great novels.
Now, if you want to win a book of your choice from my Japanese shelf just leave a comment
down below.
Any comment is fine.
I will select one person randomly and later will ask you to choose the book you would
like to receive and send the book to you anywhere in the world.
I mean anywhere in the world.
Arigato gozaimasu.
Thank you for watching.