Cultural books from Japan
Recommended cultural books (12)
Travel the world without leaving your chair.
If you are into cultural here are some cultural books from Japan for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge.
1.
A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe EN
Description:
First pub. 1964. Author's most dramatic work, won him the prestigious Shincho Literary Prize. In the novel the narrator tells how he responds to the birth and problems posed by his handicapped child. Recipient of the 1994 Nobel prize.
2.
Description:
Publisher description: The setting is Japan's deep south, where the author himself spent some time teaching English in a boys' school. Into this conservative world, with its social proprieties and established pecking order, breezes Botchan, down from the big city, with scant respect for either his elders or his noisy young charges; and the result is a chain of collisions large and small.
3.
I Am a Cat by Sōseki Natsume EN
Description:
Though the total book is held together by the continuing theme of a nameless cat's observations on upper middle-class Japanese society of the Meiji era, its essence is in the humor and the sardonic truth of these various observations.
4.
Description:
The great Japanese author’s most famous novel, in its first new English translation in half a century No collection of Japanese literature is complete without Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, his most famous novel and the last he completed before his death. Published here in the first new translation in more than fifty years, Kokoro—meaning "heart"—is the story of a subtle and poignant friendship between two unnamed characters, a young man and an enigmatic elder whom he calls "Sensei." Haunted by tragic secrets that have cast a long shadow over his life, Sensei slowly opens up to his young disciple, c... continue
6.
Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa EN
Description:
Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan's foremost stylists - a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour. "Rashomon" and "In a Bamboo Grove" inspired Kurosawa's magnificent film and depict a past in which morality is turned upside down, while tales such as "The Nose", "O-Gin" and "Loyalty" paint a rich and imaginative picture of a medieval Japan peopled by Shoguns and priests, vagrants and peasants. And in later works such as "Death Register", "The Life of a Stupid Man" and "Spinning Gears", Akutagawa drew from his own... continue
7.
Restaurant of Love Regained, The by Ito Ogawa EN
Description:
Returning home from work, Rinko is shocked to find that her flat is totally empty. Gone are her TV set, fridge and furniture, gone are all her kitchen tools, including the old Meiji mortar she has inherited from her grandmother and the Le Creuset casserole she has bought with her first salary. Gone, above all, is her Indian boyfriend, the maitre d' of the restaurant next door to the one she works in. She has no choice but to go back to her native village and her mother, on which she turned her back ten years ago as a fifteen-year-old girl. There she decides to open a very special restaurant, o... continue
9.
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa EN
Description:
Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family. He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem—ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper—with a ten-year-old son—who is hired to care for the Professor. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold mem... continue
10.
The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai EN
Description:
The Kamogawa Food Detectives is the first book in the bestselling, mouth-watering Japanese series, for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold. What’s the one dish you’d do anything to taste just one more time? Down a quiet backstreet in Kyoto exists a very special restaurant. Run by Koishi Kamogawa and her father Nagare, the Kamogawa Diner serves up deliciously extravagant meals. But that's not the main reason customers stop by . . . The father-daughter duo are 'food detectives'. Through ingenious investigations, they are able to recreate dishes from a person’s treasured memories – dishes that ma... continue