With all the translated modern Japanese fiction I've been reading lately, I feel sort of obliged to make a multi-title post.
Overall, it's difficult for someone like me, who doesn't read Japanese, to get a good idea of what the country's literary output is like. I rely solely on what's been translated already. Some of these books are clearly translated for their mass market potential - not outstanding works of literature, but likely to sell in the paperback sections. Others are indeed award-winning novels that are getting their due outside of Japan.
In any event, I'd like to cover some of the titles I've been reading so far, offering my humble and amateur opinion of what you might find in your bookstore. I've listed these in order of most favorite to least favorite.
Haruki Murakami - Hugely popular, and with good reason. I'm not going to go through every title this guy has churned out, but there are some key works that are worth getting to first.
Norwegian Wood is a pretty heartbreaking love story, and it's what put him on the map in Japan.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a noir thriller that plumbs the unconscious, did the same in the United States. Personally, though, I think he makes a better short story writer than a novelist.
The Elephant Vanishes, as well as
after the quake and
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman are three short story collections filled with the strange, the chilling, the elegant and the hilarious.
Here's a sample.Yoko Ogawa - Probably even better than Murakami, she has won every major literary award in Japan, but is bizarrely virtually unknown in the English-speaking world (inexplicably, she does quite well in French). She's had a scattered short story published here and there, but her collection of novellas,
The Diving Pool, is a great introduction to her minimal and very disturbing style. She can invoke primal fear through subtle manipulations of language, and seems to have a penchant for the small cruelties of everyday people. Beautiful stuff. She has a newly-translated novel out,
Hotel Iris, which also looks very promising.
Banana Yoshimoto - People seem to either love her or hate her. I love her. I've only read
Amrita and
Hardboiled/Hard Luck, but both are written in a relaxed, unpretentious language, following the lives of young people in Japan, with just a touch of the surreal now and then.
Ryu Murakami - No relation to Haruki. He's probably best known for
Coin Locker Babies, a futuristic dystopian piece. Not so well known is his book
69, an extended memoir about his late teens in Japan, 1969, at a time when student riots and university strikes gave a generation of post-war Japanese the sense that they were going to accomplish a revolution in their country. It's a funny and touching story, and he writes unashamedly about himself.
Jun'ichiro Tanizaki - Considered one of the fathers of 20th century Japanese literature. His short stories read a little bit dated, but still hold up to the test of time.
A Man, A Cat and Three Women is a great collection of his stories. He seems to be drawn to characters who are pitiable, but have no one but themselves to blame for the messes they get themselves into. Fun fact: Yukari-sensei from Azumanga Daioh gets her name from this author.
Hideaki Sena - This is the guy who wrote
Parasite Eve while he was still a grad student. Yes, it's a thriller. It's a thriller with SCIENCE! This story is about a man who loses his wife in a car accident, so he extracts part of her liver to make a cell culture that he can keep as a pet, only the mitochondria in his wife's cells are in fact sentient and homocidal. Surprising and highly entertaining.
Randy Taguchi - This author is more famous for her internet presence than anything else, but
Outlet - a story about a woman whose brother dies under mysterious circumstances - is a solid exploration of those favorite themes of Japanese literature, sex and death. It engages the reader from the first page and keeps you turning pages. The ending was also pretty funny.
Tetsuo Miura - Author of the novel
Shame in the Blood. Written in 1964, this heartbreaking story about a young family struggling to keep their heads above the waters of life is really six different inter-related stories. It's touching, and well-written if a little old fashioned sounding today (e.g., when a woman is raped, she apologizes to her husband for infidelity), but be warned, it's pretty god damned sad.
Mari Akasaka - This was another female author that I wanted to like, as it seems too few woman authors get translated (or maybe there are just fewer female Japanese authors), but her book
Vibrator, an exploration into the dark side of sexuality, reads more like a rough draft than a novel. At barely over 100 pages, it's more a novella anyway. I really hope she either a) gets a better translator or b) improves her writing, because she's very daring, fearless even.
Taichi Yamada -
Strangers, a book about a middle-aged man who meets a couple who look exactly like his long-dead parents, is sparse and chilling, but tends to be a little long in the expositions. Maybe that's just a Japanese thing, but I prefer stories that show rather than tell. This novel does it, for the most part. Just be prepared for the occasional narrator speech.
Koji Suzuki - Author of the
Ring series, he writes competent thrillers, even if he does seem to tangent into areas he can't fully cover, biting off more than he can chew. The novel
Ring itself contains a whole other side to the Sadako character that the movie doesn't even hint at, too.
Hitomi Kanehara - I really wanted to like her first translated novel,
Snakes and Earrings, as it gives us a look inside Japan's counter-culture youth, but it seemed to be trying way too hard to be shocking. And then it reached some pointless "Huh?" ending. But Ryu Murakami likes her, so maybe I need to give that book another shot.
Natsuo Kirino - In fairness, I'm not a big fan of thriller novels, so
Out already had the deck stacked against it. It does, however, portray Brazilian-Japanese - descendants of Japanese immigrants to Brazil who've returned to Japan, and often looked down upon as not being "real" Japanese - in a positive light, which was pretty bold. However, it rests on the lazy "fat people are slovenly and selfish" trope as it drags itself towards a wholly predictable ending.
Yasutaka Tsutsui - You know the kind of writer who decides they're going to write satire, and so they write some utterly outrageous story that beats you with a giant 2x4 upon which is written "Message of the Story", over and over again, while using plenty of exclamation points and not using characters so much as caricatures? That's this guy.
Salmonella Men on Planet Porno gets props for the title but little else.
