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I've read and enjoyed some Murakami (Norwegian Wood and Hard-boiled Wonderland), but can anyone recommend some (or one) other Japanese authors to check out? Thi

I've read and enjoyed some Murakami (Norwegian Wood and Hard-boiled Wonderland), but can anyone recommend some (or one) other Japanese authors to check out? This is especially intriguing to me: > ... Japanese stories focus on the individual adrift in seas of excessive convenience and information, obsessed with personal not political identities, and questions of the soul. Or maybe some other Murakami. I can say I enjoyed Norwegian Wood quite a bit more then Hard-boiled Wonderland.

bjornsteffanson 8y ago
Of other Murakami works, I really enjoyed "After Dark" and his collection of short stories, "The Elephant Vanishes".
convolvatron 8y ago
I would give Oe's Silent Cry a read. I think he mostly stopped writing(?) after his Nobel. and if you're interested in a japanese Gogol-like author, Kobo Abe is generally alot of fun Another huge standard in Japanese translated into english in Yukio Mishima. sea of fertility tetralogy is worth reading. like most readers I have kind of mixed and weird impression of the author himself. Kauzo Ishiguro is really accessible to the western reader, maybe too much so if you're looking for the alien aspect, but I do like his work alot
- greeneggs 8y ago
  (Kazuo Ishiguro is British.)
  - convolvatron 8y ago
    sorry, you're absolutely right. I thought he went back after studying in Britain, but he was raised there.
UsernameProxy 8y ago
The first Murakami I read was Kafka on the Shore, and it's still my favourite. As far as other authors, Revenge, by Yoko Ogawa is in my all-time top ten.
- wibble10 8y ago
  Kafka is probably the only one I would recommend not reading first. If you were to summarise the plot it in a few sentences it would put a lot of people off, in murakami land though he can write a story about a guy killing his father and sleeping with his mother and while you’re in the book world it seems totally normal......
poisonarena 8y ago
I liked "Women in the Dunes" by Kōbō Abe, also you can watch the 1960s movie on youtube
Analemma_ 8y ago
If you're not specifically talking about contemporary authors, the short stories of Ryunosuke Akutagawa are a must. Penguin Books has a collection that includes his best ones, including probably my favorite short story of all, "Hell Screen": https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/35522/rashomon-and-seventeen-other-stories/ https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/35522/rashomon-and-seventeen...
bpowell 8y ago
I really liked The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami.
wibble10 8y ago
Give banana yashimoto’s kitchen a go. Besides her and murakmi I am rather derelict on the Japanese authors read front tho... Hopeful for some pointers here too. I would highly recommend wind up bird cronicle and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage though. The latter was pretty heavily panned by the critics but the description of sudden complete alienation without reason struck a chord with me, as well as the narrative description of how such vibrant young people ended up with such mostly mundane lives so many years on.. maybe you will feel the same. Murakami books are sort of like being in a dream where somehow you completely understand this person acting as if you were them, even when the culture and motivations are so different and then it just sort of ends. I find myself thinking about his characters long after finishing books, which is really something few authors can provide at least to me...
fizzychicken 8y ago
In The Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami
jpatokal 8y ago
Three Japanese authors that are wildly different from Murakami: * Yukio Mishima. Prose is incredibly dense to the point of being baroque (there are pages of footnotes even in the Japanese originals), but there's nobody else quite like him: heavy focus on themes of sex, death and mysticism. "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" is his most famous work but the "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy is also good. What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima * Osamu Dazai. The F. Scott Fitzgerald of Japan in time, themes and popularity, wrote a series of heavily autobiographical novels about his struggles with money, health, family and basically everything. Fairly grim but compelling reading. The year before last I was expelled from my family and, reduced to poverty overnight, was left to wander the streets, begging help for various quarters, barely managing to stay alive from one day to the next, and just when I'd begun to think I might be able to support myself with my writing, I came down with a serious illness. Thanks to the compassion of others, I was able to rent a small house in Funabashi, Chiba, next to the muddy sea, and spent the summer there alone, convalescing. Though battling an illness that each and every night left my robe literally drenched with sweat, I had no choice but to press ahead with my work. The cold half pint of milk I drank each morning was the only thing that gave me a certain peculiar sense of the joy in life; my mental anguish and exhaustion were such that the oleanders blooming in one corner of the garden appeared to me merely flicking tongues of flame... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Dazai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Dazai * Murakami Ryu. Not to be confused with his namesake, Ryu's writing is very opposite of whimsical and "Almost Transparent Blue" is shockingly brutal. This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%AB_Murakami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%AB_Murakami
- ctchocula 8y ago
habosa 8y ago
"A Personal Matter" by Kenzaburo Oe is really incredible.
pierre 8y ago
Aki Shimazaki. A lot of short / easy to read novels that somehow relate to each others
__Joker 8y ago
I would recommend short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%ABnosuke_Akutagawa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%ABnosuke_Akutagawa
lmm 8y ago
Loups=Garous is the most genuinely scary piece of science-fiction I've read, and very much along the lines of what you quoted.

bjornsteffanson 8y ago

Of other Murakami works, I really enjoyed "After Dark" and his collection of short stories, "The Elephant Vanishes".

convolvatron 8y ago

I would give Oe's Silent Cry a read. I think he mostly stopped writing(?) after his Nobel. and if you're interested in a japanese Gogol-like author, Kobo Abe is generally alot of fun Another huge standard in Japanese translated into english in Yukio Mishima. sea of fertility tetralogy is worth reading. like most readers I have kind of mixed and weird impression of the author himself. Kauzo Ishiguro is really accessible to the western reader, maybe too much so if you're looking for the alien aspect, but I do like his work alot

greeneggs 8y ago
(Kazuo Ishiguro is British.)
- convolvatron 8y ago
  sorry, you're absolutely right. I thought he went back after studying in Britain, but he was raised there.

UsernameProxy 8y ago

The first Murakami I read was Kafka on the Shore, and it's still my favourite. As far as other authors, Revenge, by Yoko Ogawa is in my all-time top ten.

wibble10 8y ago
Kafka is probably the only one I would recommend not reading first. If you were to summarise the plot it in a few sentences it would put a lot of people off, in murakami land though he can write a story about a guy killing his father and sleeping with his mother and while you’re in the book world it seems totally normal......

poisonarena 8y ago

I liked "Women in the Dunes" by Kōbō Abe, also you can watch the 1960s movie on youtube

Analemma_ 8y ago

If you're not specifically talking about contemporary authors, the short stories of Ryunosuke Akutagawa are a must. Penguin Books has a collection that includes his best ones, including probably my favorite short story of all, "Hell Screen": https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/35522/rashomon-and-seventeen-other-stories/ https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/35522/rashomon-and-seventeen...

bpowell 8y ago

I really liked The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami.

wibble10 8y ago

Give banana yashimoto’s kitchen a go. Besides her and murakmi I am rather derelict on the Japanese authors read front tho... Hopeful for some pointers here too. I would highly recommend wind up bird cronicle and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage though. The latter was pretty heavily panned by the critics but the description of sudden complete alienation without reason struck a chord with me, as well as the narrative description of how such vibrant young people ended up with such mostly mundane lives so many years on.. maybe you will feel the same. Murakami books are sort of like being in a dream where somehow you completely understand this person acting as if you were them, even when the culture and motivations are so different and then it just sort of ends. I find myself thinking about his characters long after finishing books, which is really something few authors can provide at least to me...

fizzychicken 8y ago

In The Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami

jpatokal 8y ago

Three Japanese authors that are wildly different from Murakami: * Yukio Mishima. Prose is incredibly dense to the point of being baroque (there are pages of footnotes even in the Japanese originals), but there's nobody else quite like him: heavy focus on themes of sex, death and mysticism. "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" is his most famous work but the "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy is also good. What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima * Osamu Dazai. The F. Scott Fitzgerald of Japan in time, themes and popularity, wrote a series of heavily autobiographical novels about his struggles with money, health, family and basically everything. Fairly grim but compelling reading. The year before last I was expelled from my family and, reduced to poverty overnight, was left to wander the streets, begging help for various quarters, barely managing to stay alive from one day to the next, and just when I'd begun to think I might be able to support myself with my writing, I came down with a serious illness. Thanks to the compassion of others, I was able to rent a small house in Funabashi, Chiba, next to the muddy sea, and spent the summer there alone, convalescing. Though battling an illness that each and every night left my robe literally drenched with sweat, I had no choice but to press ahead with my work. The cold half pint of milk I drank each morning was the only thing that gave me a certain peculiar sense of the joy in life; my mental anguish and exhaustion were such that the oleanders blooming in one corner of the garden appeared to me merely flicking tongues of flame... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Dazai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Dazai * Murakami Ryu. Not to be confused with his namesake, Ryu's writing is very opposite of whimsical and "Almost Transparent Blue" is shockingly brutal. This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%AB_Murakami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%AB_Murakami

ctchocula 8y ago

habosa 8y ago

"A Personal Matter" by Kenzaburo Oe is really incredible.

pierre 8y ago

Aki Shimazaki. A lot of short / easy to read novels that somehow relate to each others

__Joker 8y ago

I would recommend short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%ABnosuke_Akutagawa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%ABnosuke_Akutagawa

lmm 8y ago

Loups=Garous is the most genuinely scary piece of science-fiction I've read, and very much along the lines of what you quoted.