The one thing the world is not short of is books about Japan. Virtually every foreign writer and journalist who has passed through the country has felt compelled to commit to paper their thoughts and experiences. Many of these accounts are hopelessly out of date (or just plain hopeless), but we've picked out a personal selection of the best that provide a deeper understanding of what is too easily assumed to be the world's most enigmatic country. As throughout this guide, for Japanese names we have given the family name first. This may not always be the order in which it is printed on the English translation.
Drawing on over a thousand years of literature and navel-gazing, the Japanese also love writing about their own country and culture. The vast bulk of translated works widely available in the Britain and the US are novels, spanning from the courtly elegance of
Genji Monogatari
(
The Tale of Genji
) to the contemporary fiction of Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo and the Generation-Y author Yoshimoto Banana. Such books are often released by Kodansha, one of the world's biggest publishers, and Charles E. Tuttle, a long-established imprint for specialist books on Japan. Both these publishers have an excellent range of reference and coffee-table books on all aspects of Japanese culture, from architecture and gardens to food and martial arts, which are best bought at major bookstores in Japan, such as Kinokuniya and Maruzen. Look out also for the series of pocket-size booklets by JTB on many different aspects of Japanese culture. Books published by Kodansha, Tuttle and JTB are usually cheaper in Japan, but other books won't be, so buy them before your journey.
A Geisha scorned
The phenomenal success of Arthur Golden's
Memoirs of a Geisha
has caused publishers to raid their back catalogues for related titles - Liza's Dalby's
Geisha
(Vintage) is one true-life memoir that has come back for a second round of...
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History
Pat Barr
The Coming of the Barbarians
(Penguin). Entertaining and very readable tales of how Japan opened up to the West at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration.
Ian Buruma
The Wages of Guilt
(Random...
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Business, economics and politics
Peter Hadfield
Sixty Seconds That Will Change The World
(Sidgwick & Jackson). The main theme - the terrible threat hanging over Tokyo and the world by a coming earthquake - allows Hadfield to reveal much about Japanese attitudes,...
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Arts, culture and society
Ruth Benedict
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
(Tuttle). Classic study of the hierarchical order of Japanese society, first published in 1946. It's still relevant now for its intriguing insight into the psychology of a nation that had...
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Travel writing
Dave Barry
Dave Barry Does Japan
(Random House). Hilarious spoof travel book by top American satirist.
Isabella Bird
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan
(Virago). After a brief stop in Meiji-era Tokyo, intrepid...
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Guides and reference books
Jude Band
Tokyo Night City
(Tuttle). Hip, streetwise guide to the capital's hot nightspots, although it's somewhat superseded by her more recent contributions to the
TokyoQ
Web site, penned under the
nom de plume
...
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Classic literature
Kawabata Yasunari
Snow Country, The Izu Dancer
, etc (Tuttle). Japan's first Nobel Prize winner for fiction writes intense tales of passion usually about a sophisticated urban man falling for a simple country girl.
Matsuo...
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Contemporary fiction
Alfred Birnbaum ed.
Monkey Brain Sushi
(Kodansha). Eleven often quirky short stories by contemporary Japanese authors. A good introduction to modern prose writers.
Van C. Gessel & Tomone Matsumoto (eds.)
...
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Japan in foreign fiction
Alan Brown
Audrey Hepburn's Neck
(Sceptre). Beneath this rib-tickling, acutely observed tale of a young guy from the sticks adrift in big-city Tokyo, Brown weaves several important themes, including the continuing impact of World War II...
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Murakami Haruki
Murakami Haruki
is one of the most entertaining Japanese writers around and is hailed as a postwar successor to the great novelists Mishima, Kawabata and Tanizaki. His books, which are wildly popular in Japan, are about conspiracies, suicidal women,...
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