Contemporary Japanese Literature

Shima Shinya’s four-volume sci-fi manga Glitch opens in a mundane setting in contemporary Japan: a high school student named Minato Lee has moved to a small rural town with her mother and young...

https://japaneselit.net/2024/09/02/glitch/

Tomoko is only twelve years old when she loses her father to cancer. To learn to support herself, Tomoko’s mother attends a dressmaking school in Tokyo, where she lives in a student dorm. From ...

https://japaneselit.net/2024/08/26/minas-matchbox/

Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City is a fascinating study of urban space augmented by a wealth of photographs and illustrations. Jorge Almazán convincingly argues that, instead of be...

https://japaneselit.net/2024/08/19/emergent-tokyo/

Being Dead Otherwise is an anthropological account of the shifting cultures of death and dying in contemporary Japan. Despite its seemingly grim topic, this is one of the most hopeful academic bo...

https://japaneselit.net/2024/08/12/being-dead-otherwise/

Takehiro Fukunaga’s 1954 novel Flowers of Grass is considered to be a classic of postwar Japanese fiction, and it’s the sort of book that I imagine many people envision when they think of “...

https://japaneselit.net/2024/08/05/flowers-of-grass/

Shinya Tanaka’s prizewinning novella Cannibals is a harrowing story of how poverty enables a cycle of abuse and assault. The writing and translation are beautiful, but the book is often difficu...

https://japaneselit.net/2024/07/29/cannibals/

Seichō Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express is a slim mystery novel from 1958 whose crime is largely dependent on train schedules. Although two apparent victims of suicide appear to have traveled togethe...

https://japaneselit.net/2024/07/22/tokyo-express/

Takeshi Murase’s linked short story collection The God of Nishi-Yuigahama Station is about four people who lost members of their family in a tragic train derailment. For a year after the accide...

https://japaneselit.net/2024/07/15/the-god-of-nishi-yuigahama-station/

Shōji Morimoto’s Rental Person Who Does Nothing is probably the most chill autobio essay collection I’ve read, and it’s also one of the more interesting. Morimoto, who makes himself availa...

https://japaneselit.net/2024/07/08/rental-person-who-does-nothing/

Atsuhiro Yoshida’s 2018 linked short story collection おやすみ、東京 chronicles the adventures of a cast of slightly odd characters with subtle connections to one another. Each of the st...

https://japaneselit.net/2024/07/04/%E3%81%8A%E3%82%84%E3%81%99%E3%81%BF%E3%80%81%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%AC/