The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in titles translated from Japanese into English. While many of these novels and short stories collections are by rising authors, publishers also present readers with classic works by authors already well-known outside of Japan. These include Osamu Dazai, long celebrated for his No Longer Human, first…
Kotaro Isaka’s Three Assassins follows hot on the heels of the release of Bullet Train, the Hollywood movie starring Brad Pitt, based on the English-language edition of the author’s previous thriller of the same name. The novel alternates between the voices of Suzuki, a former middle school math teacher turned scammer; The Whale, a towering…
Several times a year, the narrator of Hiromi Ito’s The Thorn Puller boards a Transpacific flight to care for her elderly Japanese parents. She ferries her mother to and from the doctor. She keeps her father company. She buys him a dog. She reflects on her childhood.
A round-up of reviews of works in translation from Japanese, including fiction, story collections, poetry and non-fiction.
Yoko Tawada is a compelling, prolific, and award-winning writer working in Japanese, German, and English. Three Streets is her most recent collection published in English, here not so much short stories as they are strolls through three streets in Berlin. Throughout her works, her narrators are often strangers in a strange land, living in between…
Seishu Hase’s The Boy and the Dog opens with Kazumasa Nakagasi. He finds an emaciated dog outside a convenience store. The dog is wearing a tag engraved with his name, Tamon, short for Tamonten. Tamonten is one of four guardian deities of Buddha’s realm. The dog Tamon becomes a guardian for the people he encounters…
Active in the 13th century, poet Matsuo Basho has been a cornerstone of literature globally since the late 19th century when the word haiku was used to cover traditional “haikai” and “hokku” (more about which further down). Largely due to 19th-century Realism, Western onlookers and practitioners have made much of direct personal experience in haiku;…
Osamu Dazai is one of Japan’s most celebrated modern writers. He was born in 1909, at the end of Japan’s era of rapid modernization known as the Meiji Period. He began writing as a high school student, moved by the suicide of the great Japanese short story writer, Ryonosuke Akutagawa in 1927.
The narrator of Hiroko Oyamada’s Weasels in the Attic wants to start a family with his wife. They’ve been together for three years, but they haven’t had any luck. Meanwhile, it has been getting more and more difficult to see other people their age with kids of their own.
The prolific career of acclaimed mystery and detective fiction author Seicho Matsumoto spanned the latter half of the 20th century. His 1958 novel, Tokyo Express, provides a glimpse into daily life during the postwar period in Japan. Previously published in English a generation ago under the title Points and Lines, the novel has been freshly…
Thirty-four year old Shibata works at a company that makes empty paper cores, the kinds of cardboard tubes used in packaging for plastic wrap of tea canisters. (Reinforcing the impersonality of a culture dominated by work, the narrator never reveals her first name.) It’s a professional job, but her male co-workers have unthinkingly loaded her…
In a famous 1990 essay, one of the most respected living writers in Japan lamented that, “Serious literature and a literary readership have gone into a chronic decline, while a new tendency has emerged over the last several years … a largely economic one … reflected in the fact that the novels of certain young…
Sayaka Murata’s English-language debut novel, Convenience Store Woman, caused a sensation when it appeared in a 2018 translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori. The story of an offbeat, thirty-something sales clerk at a “Smile Mart” helped spur a boom in English-language translations of Japanese literature, especially literature by women.
Erika Kobayashi’s recently-translated Trinity, Trinity, Trinity is the latest in a long, rich, and complicated history of atomic literature from Japan.
There is a word in Japanese—komorebi—that refers to the way sun shines through the trees, casting a sea of soft, dark shadows scattered with gleams of light, a phenomenon reflected in the title of Riku Onda’s most recently-translated psychological thriller Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight.