English books from Japan
Recommended English books written by authors from Japan (107)
Travel the world without leaving your chair.
If you speak English here are some English books from Japan for the next part of the "Read Around The World Challenge".
41.
Men Without Women : Stories by Haruki Murakami EN
Description:
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Including the story "Drive My Car”—now an Academy Award–nominated film—this collection from the internationally acclaimed author "examines what happens to characters without important women in their lives; it'll move you and confuse you and sometimes leave you with more questions than answers" (Barack Obama). Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are lovesick doctors, students, ex-boyfriends, actors, bartenders, and even Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, brought together to ... continue
42.
My Annihilation by Fuminori Nakamura EN
Description:
What transforms a person into a killer? Can it be something as small as a suggestion? Turn this page, and you may forfeit your entire life. With My Annihilation, Fuminori Nakamura, master of literary noir, has constructed a puzzle box of a narrative in the form of a confessional diary that implicates its reader in a heinous crime. Delving relentlessly into the darkest corners of human consciousness, My Annihilation interrogates the unspeakable thoughts all humans share that can be monstrous when brought to life, revealing with disturbing honesty the psychological motives of a killer.
43.
Description:
A powerful story of passion and friendship, the nature of love and the taboos surrounding it. N.P. is the last collection of stories by a celebrated Japanese writer, written in English while she was living in Boston.
44.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro EN
Description:
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • From the acclaimed, bestselling author of The Remains of the Day comes “a Gothic tour de force" (The New York Times) with an extraordinary twist—a moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic. As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time... continue
45.
Night on the Galactic Railroad & Other Stories from Ihatov by Kenji Miyazawa EN
Description:
Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) is one of Japan's most beloved writers and poets, known particularly for his sensitive and symbolist children's fiction. This volume collects stories which focus on Miyazawa's love of space and his use of the galaxy as a metaphor for the concepts of purity, self-sacrifice and faith which were near and dear to his heart. "The Nighthawk Star" follows an lowly bird as he struggles to transform himself into something greater, a constellation in the night sky; "Signal & Signal-less" depicts a pair of star-crossed train signals who dream of eloping to the moon; and "Night ... continue
46.
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai EN
Description:
Now in a retro gift cloth edition, No Longer Human ponders profound alienation: Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.
47.
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami EN
Description:
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
48.
People from My Neighborhood : Stories by Hiromi Kawakami EN
Description:
Nominated for the 2021 Shirley Jackson Award From the author of the internationally bestselling Strange Weather in Tokyo, a collection of interlinking stories that masterfully blend the mundane and the mythical—"fairy tales in the best Brothers Grimm tradition: naïf, magical, and frequently veering into the macabre" (Financial Times). A bossy child who lives under a white cloth near a tree; a schoolgirl who keeps doll's brains in a desk drawer; an old man with two shadows, one docile and one rebellious; a diplomat no one has ever seen who goes fishing at an artificial lake no one has ever hear... continue
49.
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
50.
Rental Person Who Does Nothing : A Memoir by Shoji Morimoto EN
Description:
Profiled in The Times, The Independent and by BBC Reels I’m starting a service . . . available for any situation in which all you want is a person to be there. Maybe there’s a restaurant you want to go to, but you feel awkward going on your own. Maybe a game you want to play, but you’re one person short. Or perhaps you’d like someone to keep a space in the park for your cherry blossom viewing party . . . Shoji Morimoto was constantly being told by his boss that he contributed nothing to the company he worked for and that it made no difference whether he showed up or not. He began to wonder whe... continue