Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

First American Publication This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event. Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but... (more)

In the Miso Soup

by Ryu Murakami

From postmodern Renaissance man Ryu Murakami, master of the psychothriller and director of Tokyo Decadence , comes this hair-raising roller-coaster ride through the nefarious neon-lit world of Tokyo’s sex industry. In the Miso Soup tells of Frank, an overweight American tourist who has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo’s sleazy nightlife. But Frank’s behavior is so strange that Kenji ... (more)

Kitchen

by Banana Yoshimoto

With the publication of Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, the literary world realized that Yoshimoto was a young writer of enduring talent whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. Kitchen is an enchantingly original book that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in... (more)

Lizard

by Banana Yoshimoto

I shall refer to her as Lizard here, but not because of the small lizard tattoo that I discovered on her inner thigh. The woman has round, black eyes that gaze at you with utter detachment, like the eyes of a reptile. Every bend and curve of her small body is cool to the touch, so cool that I want to scoop her up in my two hands. This may bring to mind the image of a man holding a bunny or a chick, but that's... (more)

Sputnik Sweetheart (Vintage International)

Sputnik Sweetheart (Vintage International)

by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami, the internationally bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , plunges us into an urbane Japan of jazz bars, coffee shops, Jack Kerouac, and the Beatles to tell this story of a tangled triangle of uniquely unrequited loves. A college student, identified only as “K,” falls in love with his classmate, Sumire. But devotion to an untidy writerly life precludes her from... (more)

Kafka on the Shore

by Haruki Murakami

With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come. This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to... (more)

Goodbye Tsugumi

by Banana Yoshimoto

Banana Yoshimoto's novels of young life in Japan have made her an international sensation. Goodbye Tsugumi is an offbeat story of a deep and complicated friendship between two female cousins that ranks among her best work. Maria is the only daughter of an unmarried woman. She has grown up at the seaside alongside her cousin Tsugumi, a lifelong invalid, charismatic, spoiled, and occasionally cruel. Now Maria's... (more)

The Elephant Vanishes: Stories (Vintage International)

The Elephant Vanishes: Stories (Vintage International)

by Haruki Murakami

These are beautifully written stories, often funny, always moving."--Chicago Tribune With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a... (more)

Dance Dance Dance (Vintage International)

Dance Dance Dance (Vintage International)

by Haruki Murakami

This wildly propulsive novel by the acclaimed author of A Wild Sheep Chase focuses on a man searching for a former lover who vanished mysteriously from a seedy hotel. But each new clue to Kiki's whereabouts leads him deeper into a labryrinth of physical violence and metaphysical dread. "A world-class writer."--Washington Post Book World

Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami, Stephen Snyder

A surreal coming-of-age tale that establishes Ryu Murakami as one of the most inventive young writers in the world today. Abandoned at birth in adjacent train station lockers, two troubled boys spend their youth in an orphanage and with foster parents on a semi-deserted island before finally setting off for the city to find and destroy the women who first rejected them. Both are drawn to an area of freaks and... (more)

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea (Vintage International)

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea (Vintage International)

by John Nathan, Yukio Mishima

A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disallusionment as an act of... (more)

South of the Border, West of the Sun: A Novel (Vintage International)

South of the Border, West of the Sun: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Haruki Murakami

In South of the Border, West of the Sun , the simple arc of a man's life--with its attendant rhythms of success and disappointment--becomes the exquisite literary terrain of Haruki Murakami's most haunting work. Born in 1951 in an affluent Tokyo suburb, Hajime-- beginning in Japanese--has arrived at middle age wanting for almost nothing. The postwar years have brought him a fine marriage, two daughters, and an... (more)

The Waiting Years

by Fumiko Enchi

The beautiful, immature girl whom she took home to her husband was a maid only in name. Tomo's real mission had been to find him a mistress. Nor did her secret humiliation end there. The web that his insatiable lust spun about him soon trapped another young woman, and another ... and the relationships between the women thus caught were to form, over the years, a subtle, shifting pattern in which they all played a... (more)

Asleep

by Banana Yoshimoto

The New York Daily News has called Asleep "enchanting, surreal ... Yoshimoto brings readers to another powerful, atmospheric place." Demonstrating again the artful simplicity and depth of her vision, Banana Yoshimoto reestablishes her place as a writer of international stature in a book that may be her most delightful since Kitchen. In Asleep, Yoshimoto spins the stories of three young women bewitched into a... (more)

Quicksand (Vintage International)

by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

Sonoko Kakiuchi is a cultured Osaka lady, unfortunately widowed young. But her story is unsettlingly at odds with her image. It is a tale of infatuation and deceit, of eliberate evil. Its theme is humiliation, its victim Sonoko's mild-mannered husband. At is centre - seductive, manipulating, enslaving - is one of Tanizaki's most extraordinary characters, the beautiful and corrupt art student, Mitsuko.

Piercing

by Ryu Murakami

A pulsating psycho-thriller from Ryu Murakami, author of In the Miso Soup A renaissance man for the postmodern age, Ryu Murakami—a musician, filmmaker ( Tokyo Decadence ), TV personality, and award-winning author—has gained a cult following in the West. His first novel, Almost Transparent Blue , won Japan’s most coveted literary prize and sold over a million copies, and his most recent psychosexual... (more)

Inspector Imanishi Investigates (Soho Crime)

Inspector Imanishi Investigates (Soho Crime)

by Seicho Matsumoto, Beth Cary

In a police procedural by Japan's foremost master of mystery, Inspector Imanishi Eitaro, a typically Japanese detective fond of gardening and haiku, must follow a killer's trail across the social strata of Japan.

Asleep

by Banana Yoshimoto

Yoshimoto has a magical ability to animate the lives of her young characters, and here she spins the stories of three women, all bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning a lost lover, finds herself sleepwalking at night. Another, who has embarked on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, finds herself suddenly unable to stay awake. A third finds her sleep haunted by another woman whom she was... (more)

NP

by Banana Yoshimoto

"Bananamania" has returned in an enchanting new novel of uncanny sulbtlety, style, magic, and mystery that Frank Ramirez of the South Bend Tribune declares is "every bit as good as Yoskimoto's first book ... perhaps better." A celebrated Japanese writer has committed suicide, leaving behind a collection of stories written in English, N.P. But the book may never be published in his native Japan: each... (more)

Amrita

by Banana Yoshimoto

After losing her beautiful younger sister, a celebrated actress, to suicide, Sakumi falls down a flight of stairs and loses her memory to a head injury. Struggling to remember whom she loves and what she lost, she embarks on a unique emotional journey, accompanied at times by her dead sister's lover, at others by her clairvoyant kid brother. This is the story of Sakumi's remarkable expedition through grief,... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: modern japanese lit

by Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin

by Ryu Murakami

by Banana Yoshimoto

by Banana Yoshimoto

by Haruki Murakami

by Haruki Murakami

by Banana Yoshimoto

by Haruki Murakami

by Haruki Murakami

by Ryu Murakami, Stephen Snyder

by John Nathan, Yukio Mishima

by Haruki Murakami

by Fumiko Enchi

by Banana Yoshimoto

by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

by Ryu Murakami

by Seicho Matsumoto, Beth Cary

by Banana Yoshimoto

by Banana Yoshimoto

by Banana Yoshimoto