Japan has the prestigious honour of being the birthplace of the world’s first novel, and of three authors who have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. From classical Edo poets to modern authors and manga creators, Japan’s literary depth and breadth is astonishing. You could read nothing but Japanese literature your entire life and experience the entire scale of human emotion and experience.
Here are 75 of the very best Japanese authors that you can read in translation, from the woman who penned the first ever novel to writers who, while only recently rising to fame, are already shifting the Japanese literary landscape. For each we have provided a couple of great recommendations of novels you should read, all of which are available on Amazon, representing the best of Japanese literature, new and old.
1. Junichiro Tanizaki
One of pre- and post-war Japan’s most adored authors, Tanizaki sits comfortably in the literary pantheon alongside Natsume Soseki, Yasunari Kawabata, Kenzaburo Oe, and Yukio Mishima. He began writing long before the Second World War erupted and produced his most famous work – The Makioka Sisters – during the early 1940s.
The Makioka Sisters is reminiscent of many British novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, dealing with a wealthy upper-middle-class family and the politics of arranged marriage. The dynamic family mechanics of this novel would feel at home in the pages of Jane Austen or the Brontes, though Tanizaki’s inspirations were closer to home, basing the novel’s events and characters on those in his own life.
A pre-war Tanizaki novel to recently receive a lot of new attention is A Cat, A Man, And Two Women, one of countless contemporary Japanese novels to prominently feature a cat as part of its narrative. Though he wasn’t necessarily the pioneer of this theme, the book is one of the most compelling in this inherently Japanese sub-genre.
The Makioka Sisters – Available at Amazon
2. Osamu Dazai
One of the most captivating literary figures of 20th century Japan, Osamu Dazai was a prominent writer within the Japanese I-novel genre of autofiction. His life was troubled by alcoholism and poor health, and he was impacted personally by the effects of the Second World War when his Tokyo home burned down.
Dazai abandoned his family for a woman with whom he committed suicide before reaching the age of 40, and his works reflect rather brutally on his self-destructive inclinations. The most glaring example is Dazai’s magnum opus: No Longer Human.
No Longer Human is a first-person-narrated, heavily autobiographical novel written at the very end of Dazai’s life, and many consider it to be his last will and testament. It recounts a childhood marred by struggle and a lack of human connection, leading to an adulthood of alcoholism and misguided life choices.
No Longer Human – Available at Amazon
3. Fumiko Enchi
One of the great women writers of 20th century Japan, Fumiko Enchi was showered with literary prizes during her lifetime, and books such as The Waiting Years and Masks remain popular to this day. While she did write a handful of plays in the 1920s, and translated The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, it’s for these novels upon which her legacy hinges.
The Waiting Years remains Enchi’s most celebrated novel. A concise tale set in 19th-century Tokyo, it explores the unenviable responsibility heaped upon the wife of a government official. The task at hand? Selecting a geisha to be her own husband’s mistress. As seen through a modern, feminist lens, Enchi’s novels were powerful explorations of womanhood, for which she remains a vital literary figure today.
The Waiting Years – Available at Amazon
4. Yoko Ogawa
Ogawa is not only one of the most influential and famous Japanese authors writing today; she’s also one of the most diverse. Her books broach a variety of genres – from dystopian fiction to family drama to eerie gothic horror – and in each case, she confidently asserts herself as a master of the style. This adaptability played a significant role in Ogawa winning the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most coveted literary award, as well as the Shirley Jackson Award.
Ogawa’s most successful work in English is The Housekeeper and the Professor. Told from the perspective of a housekeeper hired to take care of an aging mathematics professor, it explores themes of human connection and love without veering into romantic cliches. The unlikely relationship is framed around the professor’s love of mathematics, which he imparts upon the housekeeper as he loses touch with reality.
Her most recent work in English, The Memory Police, tells the story of an island where things and ideas disappear at random. But some people don’t forget, and they thus incur the wrath of the Memory Police. The result is a frightening Orwellian masterpiece that captures the modern zeitgeist.
The Housekeeper and the Professor - Available at Amazon
5. Haruki Murakami
If there’s one famous Japanese author, classic or contemporary, who needs no introduction, it’s Haruki Murakami; one of the rare authors in translation who is as much a household name in the West as he is in Japan. With his brand of off-kilter and surrealist stories and his reliable themes of cats, lost women, jazz music, and parallel worlds, his tales have a powerful allure and inherent readability for bibliophiles the world over.
His bestselling novel is also his most grounded and least surreal, if also his most depressing. Norwegian Wood tells the story of a university student who falls in love with two women: one, the girlfriend of a friend who took his own life; the other, an eccentric and intransigent young women who walks her own path. This is all centered around the narrative drive of a lingering memory and how it can be triggered by something as seemingly insignificant as a song.
Murakami’s most accomplished novel is, perhaps, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in which a helpless and quasi-useless man living in a quiet Tokyo neighborhood loses his cat and then his wife. In order to find her, he must climb down into the bottom of an empty well and find a way into a parallel world. In other words, it’s trademark Murakami.
Norwegian Wood - Available at Amazon
6. Hiromi Kawakami
One of Japan’s most successful contemporary authors, Hiromi Kawakami, exhibits a clear and fundamental understanding of the relationships between ordinary people – a recurring theme in her books. These relationships may be romantic, platonic, professional, or familial. Love and friendship are her tools. And with them, she has crafted some of the most enduring stories of her time.
Kawakami’s most celebrated novel in translation is Strange Weather in Tokyo, which brings together a Tokyo salarywoman and her former teacher in a gripping romance. The book cleverly uses this romance to weave together the dichotomy of post-war and pre-war Japan as the two struggle to exist alongside one another.
The most recent Kawakami novel to appear in English is The Ten Loves of Nishino, a novel structured in a truly original and experimental style. Ten stories from ten women’s perspectives paint a vibrant image of the titular Nishino. Though we never see the world through his eyes, we are reintroduced to him over and again by the ten loves of his life – some have described it as Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity in reverse.
Strange Weather in Tokyo - Available at Amazon
7. Yukio Mishima
Knowing where to begin with Mishima is a trial in itself. A larger-than-life character, Mishima was a radical political activist who fervently believed in returning Japan to its militaristic past. He believed this so fiercely that he attempted a coup against the government, which failed spectacularly and led to him committing seppuku.
In his lifetime, Mishima penned dozens of stories, almost all of which were very transparent metaphors for his own views on post-war Japan, and at their most extreme, manifestoes for change and reverting to the former sociopolitical status quo. Mishima also came close to being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature several times, and when news of his suicide broke, his dear friend and certified Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata immediately followed suit and committed suicide himself.
The book which best summarizes Mishima’s views and his political mission is The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With The Sea. This short novel describes a young man who watches his mother fall madly for a sailor. The boy is inspired by his rugged, self-sufficient masculinity but his respect slowly turns to hate as the sailor abandons the sea in favor of love and a peaceful life. The book is deliberately unsubtle and plainly spells out Mishima’s radical mindset.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With The Sea - Available at Amazon
8. Sei Shonagon
A contemporary and literary rival of Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji, Sei Shonagon was a Heian-period court lady known for writing The Pillow Book. While her true name remains unknown – as with many of the Heian female literati – her writing has remained influential for a thousand years.
The Pillow Book is representative of a Japanese literary genre known as zuihitsu, reflecting collections of ideas, musings, observations, and poems inspired by the writer’s experiences and surroundings. The Pillow Book stays true to this form, unveiling secrets of the clandestine court life of the era and granting historians a peek behind the curtain of the ancient Japanese aristocracy.
The Pillow Book – Available at Amazon
9. Shusaku Endo
Shusaku Endo remains a fascinating figure within Japanese literature, partly for his Roman Catholic faith, and also because his most famous novel, Silence (later adapted for the silver screen by Martin Scorsese), plays around with the theme of tested faith and the silence of a supposedly omnipotent God.
From the 1950s to the 1990s, Endo penned an impressive list of works, including The Samurai, The Sea and Poison and Silence, with the last of these remaining the most seminal. And like many of his most famous contemporaries, he was in the running for a Nobel Prize in Literature, but ultimately fell just short.
10. Keigo Higashino
One of Japan’s most admired whodunnit writers, Keigo Higashino, served for four years as president of the Mystery Writers of Japan. While some of his novels, such as Naoko and Journey Under the Midnight Sun, are standalone, many fit into one of two series named after their respective protagonists: Detectives Galileo and Kaga.
In translation, Higashino’s Detective Kaga series is the best-known, which was kickstarted by Malice. In the novel, protagonist Kaga, a teacher-turned-detective, embarks on a locked-room mystery – a common theme in Japanese crime fiction – which ultimately hinges on the detective visiting the skeletons hidden within his closet.
11. Inio Asano
An outstanding writer in the world of Japanese manga, Inio Asano is one of those rare creators who elevates his genre to entirely new heights. Asano’s work as a mangaka has been celebrated for its intense philosophical depth and the tributes it pays to classic literature.
Asano is best known for the hefty single-volume manga A Girl on the Shore and the series Goodnight Punpun, both of which deal with adolescence and self-discovery through charcter’s relationships with those around them. Anxiety, doubt, and similarly trying themes, pervade Asano’s work, making him a stand-out, experimental artist who offers an exciting entry point for Japanese comic book neophytes.
Goodnight Punpun – Available at Amazon
12. Mieko Kawakami
Arguably Japan’s most exciting contemporary novelist, at least in translation, Mieko Kawakami has made waves with her powerful explorations of the struggles of womanhood. A highly charged and revolutionary feminist writer – who has been slammed by the older and more patriarchal strands of the literary elite – Kawakami has become synonymous with new-age concepts of Japanese femininity.
While she made her debut in translation with Ms Ice Sandwich (translated by Louise Heal Kawai), it’s the double-album Breasts and Eggs (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd) which cements Kawakami as an astonishing literary force. centers around a handful of women coming to term with their bodies as they deal with teenage periods, the allure of boob jobs and artificial insemination.
Breasts and Eggs – Available at Amazon
13. Yoko Tawada
Yoko Tawada is a fiercely original and unique author, now based in Germany. She has written books in both Japanese and German to great success and has the uncanny ability to write abstract novels that are at once strangely distant yet entirely relatable.
Tawada’s breakout success in translation was Memoirs of a Polar Bear. This tale follows three different bears: one who escapes Soviet Russia, a circus bear who is daughter to the first, and a baby bear born in Berlin Zoo.
In 2018, Tawada wrote a dystopian Japanese novel of intense clarity in the form of The Last Children of Tokyo, also called The Emissary. In this near-future world, children are born frail and grey-haired as natural resources have been depleted and cities are emptying as pollution levels become unbearable.
Memoirs of a Polar Bear - Available at Amazon
14. Yasunari Kawabata
There are few Japanese authors more respected and revered than Yasunari Kawabata. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kawabata bridged the gap between classical Japanese authors and contemporary writers. He had the heart and mind of a poet and wrote with a romanticism and delicacy rarely seen since.
One of Kawabata’s most famous works is Snow Country. A novella though it may be, it’s a rich and beautiful story following the romance of a man who flees Tokyo and heads into the Japanese wilderness to meet with a geisha who has stolen his heart.
Another of Kawabata’s most popular stories is Thousand Cranes, a family drama focused on a young man, named Kikuji, who has been invited to have tea with his late father’s former mistress. The novel descends into familial chaos while the protagonist battles with the idea that his future marriage is being arranged against his will.
Snow Country - Available at Amazon
15. Sayaka Murata
Sayaka Murata has spent much of her adult life writing fiction, all while working part-time at a Tokyo convenience store. Her breakout hit novel of 2018, Convenience Store Woman, which evidently drew from her own experiences, brought her such enormous global success that it skyrocketed her into the upper echelons of the Japanese literary pantheon.
Convenience Store Woman tells the story of a woman in her late thirties who has spent her entire adult life working as a cog in the convenience store machine. The novel is a scathing indictment of corporate Tokyo and the unwavering ladder of society young Japanese people are expected to climb. It poses a deep question to its readers in an unapologetic light: What is normal, anyway?
Convenience Store Woman - Available at Amazon
16. Junji Ito
Ito is a very special kind of writer and illustrator. His horror stories, written and drawn with abstract and unsettling venom, chill readers to their core. His ability to weave a tale of frightening dread, and to depict each tale visually with gruesome skill, is unparalleled in the genre.
A perfect place to begin is with Ito’s short story collection Shiver, in which a handful of protagonists are subject to the worst terrors of their imaginations. In one, the nation is overcome by the arrival of floating heads that resemble real citizens and begin to chase after their counterparts before slinging a noose around their necks and floating away with their bodies. In another, a model with striking and unsettling looks is hired by a film crew, only for the latter to go missing, one by one.
In 2018, Ito also adapted Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a graphic novel that is unquestionably one of the most faithful and successful adaptations to date, on or off the screen.
If you’re interested, check out Junji Ito: 10 Best Stories from Japan’s Master of Horror!
17. Seishi Yokomizo
Arguably Japan’s most legendary crime and mystery writer, Seishi Yokomizo was heavily inspired by the European writers who came to define the mystery genre (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie). Yokomizo’s own masterpieces of mystery writing have gone on to forge a legacy of their own in Japan and abroad.
Like Christie’s Poirot and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Yokomizo had his own legendary detective protagonist in Kosuke Kindaichi: a young, eccentric mastermind detective who set the tone and atmosphere of the novels in which he appears. Kindaichi was first introduced in The Honjin Murders, a classic locked room mystery that plays, delightfully, on its own tropes.
The Honjin Murders – Available at Amazon
18. Soji Shimada
A modern mystery writer who began writing in the 1980s, Soji Shimada has made a name for himself through his characters Detective Kiyoshi Mitarai and Detective Takeshi Yoshiki, each of whom lead their own long-running series of books.
The Detective Kiyoshi Mitarai series is slowly making its way into the English language, beginning with The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (translated by Ross and Shika Mackenzie) and Murder in the Crooked House (translated by Louise Heal Kawai).
Compared by his fans to Agatha Christie, Shimada has published dozens of other mystery novels since he left his job as a dump truck driver.
Murder in the Crooked House – Available at Amazon
19. Masako Togawa
A phenomenally multi-talented artist, Masako Togawa saw success as a writer, a singer and musician, an actor, a teacher, and even as a nightclub owner. Perhaps best-known as a mystery writer, Togawa also played a self-referential character in a ‘60s TV show called Playgirl, in which she adapted the role of a mystery writer.
Togawa’s first novel The Master Key (translated by Simon Grove) is set in an apartment block for women only, and concerns a broad cast of eclectic, unique characters. It is emblematic of Togawa’s feminist approach to writing, as well as her unique approach to mystery writing.
The Master Key – Available at Amazon
20. Natsuo Kirino
Natsuo Kirino is one of Japan’s most powerful and respected feminist authors. Her books are often savage, cleverly subversive takedowns of the patriarchal norms of Japanese society and have played a pivotal role in the rise of feminist voices in modern Japan.
Out epitomizes Kirino’s style, a door-stop of a novel about a small group of female factory workers. When one of these women grows tired of her life and hits breaking point, she murders her low-life husband and seeks the help of her colleague in hiding the body to ensure her freedom.
A novel which approaches its feminist themes in a more poetic and fairy-tale manner is The Goddess Chronicle. In this mystical novel, two sisters who live on an island are forced to follow two different destinies: one becoming the blessed Oracle and the other being cast out to complete the prophecy.
21. Kenzaburo Oe
Oe is another of Japan’s treasured Nobel Prize winners. His books about the changing landscape of Japanese society and intense, troubled family dramas will long outlive the late author, who died in 2023. This is evident in how well his books have aged; there’s an immediacy and tone to Oe’s books that has kept them feeling fresh since his mid-20th-century heyday.
His novel The Silent Cry is a post-war masterpiece following two brothers from a quiet Japanese village who go their separate ways – one to Tokyo and the other to the US – only to be reunited under troubling circumstances as their ancestral home comes under threat from the unstoppable forces of global capitalism.
Death By Water is a similar novel, but more evidently autobiographical, pitting its protagonist against the shadow of his darkest memories. The protagonist writer is suffering from writer’s block and becomes increasingly desperate to understand the father he lost and never really knew.
The Silent Cry - Available at Amazon
22. Naoki Matayoshi
A fairly new novelist in Japan, Naoki Matayoshi built a successful career as a comedian before eventually turning to film, TV, and novel writing. His first novel Spark (translated by Alison Watts) was inspired by his own experience as a comedian, and has even been adapted into an acclaimed Netflix series.
Spark centres around the traditional Japanese form of comedy known as manzai (classic double-act comedy), focusing on the turbulent friendship of its primary duo. It has sold millions of copies in Japan, becoming something of a cultural phenomenon in Japan.
23. Yuko Tsushima
Yuko Tsushima was one of the undisputed greats of 20th century Japanese literature. Winner of multiple awards, Tsushima garnered universal praise from across the world during her lifetime. She left us with some transformative works, including Territory of Light and Child of Fortune (both translated by Geraldine Harcourt).
A unique aspect to Tsushima’s life is that her father was Osamu Dazai (mentioned above), who took his own life when she was only a year old. During her own life as a writer, Tsushima penned several masterpieces. In the West, her most famous work is Territory of Light: the story of a year in the life of a woman who leaves her husband, takes her child, and learns to understand herself as she begins a new life in a new home.
Territory of Light – Available at Amazon
24. Hiro Arikawa
While she predominantly works as a writer of light novels, Hiro Arikawa made a big name for herself a few years ago for her novel The Travelling Cat Chronicles, an absolutely delightful story of friendship, love, and loss.
Arikawa has won awards for her other light novels, several of which have been adapted into TV dramas and films, but The Travelling Cat Chronicles shines as one of the most memorable works of modern Japanese literature, following the relationship between an amenable man and his cat as they embark on a road trip.
The Travelling Cat Chronicles – Available at Amazon
25. Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Renowned in his native Osaka as an award-winning playwright, Toshikazu Kawaguchi took one of his plays and turned it into an international sensation of a novel. Before The Coffee Gets Cold (translated by Geoffrey Trousselot) instantly put Kawaguchi on the map as one of modern Japan’s most exciting writers.
While he has been working in theatre as a writer, director, and producer for years, his first novel immediately skyrocketed his fame and a follow-up to his international bestseller soon followed, titled Tales from the Cafe. With a very theatrical tone, Kawaguchi instills something uniquely thespian into his prose which has had a quietly revelatory effect on contemporary Japanese literature.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Available at Amazon
26. Banana Yoshimoto
Self-named after the fruiting tree, Banana Yoshimoto is, for sure, one of the best contemporary Japanese writers. Her stories have consistently proven to be far ahead of their time, exploring topics and ideas that probe into the soon-to-be-realized collective consciousness.
Her novel Kitchen is an intensely lifelike tale of young love, set against the juxtapositional backdrop of death. One of her protagonists is an orphan, while the other has lost his mother and has a father who has since transitioned into a woman – a concept rarely explored in 1980s mainstream literature.
Goodbye Tsugumi is another love story, though it explores the bonds of sisterly love between two cousins: Maria and Tsugumi. Tsugumi has lived with a debilitating, life-threatening illness that’s made her a sardonic, callous young woman. Maria, however, goes on loving Tsugumi throughout everything, and this unconditional love contains the power for Tsugumi to grow.
27. Ryu Murakami
Unfortunately, Ryu Murakami has been cursed with the brand of being “the other Murakami.” Despite writing revolutionary and exceptionally dark, twisted and rugged novels, he has lived in the shadow of the more famous writer of the same name his entire working life. But he is just as much worth reading for his powerful portrayals of the underbelly of Tokyo society.
His most infamous work, Coin Locker Babies, tells the story of two newborns abandoned in a locker at Tokyo Station who survive and grow up as de facto twins. Playing out amongst the hidden, forgotten and abandoned underclass of Tokyo – in a fictional district called Toxitown – with drug addicts, sex workers and swindlers, the novel is both dystopic yet grounded in a perverse reality.
In Audition, perhaps Murakami’s most visceral work, a widowed documentary maker decides to find a new partner by filming auditions. Though one of the women who auditions, a ballerina, hides a darkness that may just scar the reader… indefinitely.
Coin Locker Babies - Available at Amazon
28. Hiroko Oyamada
Oyamada is a brand-new talent in the world of Japanese literature, especially in translation. Nonetheless she is already en route to becoming quite a tour de force. She writes in a surrealist style that blends the off-kilter sense of Haruki Murakami with the satirising and antagonistic themes of Franz Kafka.
Oyamada’s first major work in translation, The Factory, is perhaps the most successful Kafkaesque novel to come out of Japan in years. Three protagonists work at a factory that stretches on like a city. It’s an all-encompassing place that saps the life and will of its workers. This book is a true tribute to Kafka and a scathing indictment of late-stage capitalist work culture.
The Factory - Available at Amazon
29. Natsume Soseki
There may not be a more legendary Japanese writer than Natsume Soseki. Beloved by readers from Hokkaido to Okinawa, Soseki has been enjoyed with love and intensity for a hundred years and is arguably held in even higher regard than the Nobel Prize winners.
Soseki’s most creative work, I Am A Cat, is a clever and poignant satire told with dry wit and pointed jabs at pretentious middle class Japanese society at the turn of the 20th century. The entire story is told from the perspective of a household cat often bewildered by, and scoffing at, the words and actions of its owner.
Kokoro is a very different kind of novel. In this book, a nameless narrator becomes obsessed by a man he refers to as Sensei. This story is set to the backdrop of great change as the Meiji era of Japan comes to an end and modernisation steamrolls ahead.
I Am A Cat - Available at Amazon
30. Miyuki Miyabe
One of modern Japan’s most exciting and unique writers of genre fiction, Miyuki Miyabe plays with the tropes of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror to create stellar works of fiction, while even drawing on Japanese folklore and tradition to inspire her writing.
Having written an enormous amount of books in her native Japanese, Miyabe is a cherished winner of numerous literary awards. In English, works like The Book of Heroes and Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo have helped to define her unique voice as a writer who blends genre tropes and bends the rules of genre writing.
Apparitions – Available at Amazon
31. Kyoko Nakajima
Having worked as a magazine editor and a freelance writer, as well as spending a year living abroad in the US, Kyoko Nakajima eventually carved out a space in Japan’s busy literature scene.
Her novel, The Little House, which was adapted into a film in Japan in 2014, is set in the pre-war Showa period. A Naoki Prize-winning novel, it follows the nostalgic housemaid’s journal, written at the end of her life, waxing poetic about her beloved middle-class suburban employers; the novel’s ending realigns the story’s entire perspective, however, with powerful effect.
The Little House – Available at Amazon
32. Yukiko Motoya
Originally a voice actor, Yukiko Motoya is now known predominantly as a theatre director and playwright, a well as an author of fantastical short stories and novels, many of which have won prestigious awards in Japan.
In English, several of Motoya’s short stories have been collected and translated by Asa Yoneda. Published as The Lonesome Bodybuilder in North America and as Picnic in the Storm in the UK, this collection of surreal tales explores modern Japanese life through the lens of feminism, poking fun at the absurd logic of the everyday.
The Lonesome Bodybuilder – Available at Amazon
33. Riku Onda
Having had many of her works adapted to film and TV in Japan, Riku Onda is a literary force to be reckoned with. Her bibliography in Japanese is impressive, and the works which have reached the West through translation have demonstrated her strength as a global writer.
The most well-known of these is The Aosawa Murders, a novel which subtly explores the psychology of contemporary Japan, expressed through an intense mystery story which begins with the mass-murder of seventeen party guests.
The Aosawa Murders – Available at Amazon
34. Aoko Matsuda
Japan has a rich history of folktales and fables, many inspired by Shinto mythology or based on legends of samurai, geisha, and princes. In Where the Wild Ladies Are, Aoko Matsuda takes many of these stories, well-known in Japan - the kinds that are shared on school playgrounds - and rewrites them from a contemporary and feminist lens. This is a wonderful example of the modernisation and feminisation of Japanese storytelling.
Where the Wild Ladies Are – Available at Amazon
35. Yu Miri
A Zainichi Korean writer born in Yokohama, Yu Miri now lives in Fukushima, where she opened a bookshop and theater in an attempt to restore the local community after the 2011 nuclear disaster. Her writing points to the hypocrisies at the heart of modern Japanese society, which is perhaps telling given the recent history of her adopted hometown.
Her first work in English, Tokyo Ueno Station, had a colossal impact in 2019. Narrated by the ghost of a working man who died homeless in the park near Ueno Station, a man who gave an entire lifetime, along with his happiness, his family and his blood to building the Japan we know today. Though he was born on the same day as the emperor, he died in anonymity, and the emperor never knew his name.
Tokyo Ueno Station - Available at Amazon
36. Tomihiko Morimi
Popular contemporary Japanese writer Tomihiko Morimi is known more for the film adaptations of his most famous works than for the original books themselves. Nonetheless, he writes with a Ghibli-esque brightness and creativity that is welcome color in a sometimes-stale modern literary world.
Morimi’s novel Penguin Highway, adapted into an animated film of the same name, is a strange and magical tale about a fourth grade genius who seeks to uncover the mystery of all the penguins that have started appearing in his landlocked hometown.
The Night is Short, Walk on Girl, also recently adapted into a feature film, is a very different novel which explores a woman’s choices when she is faced with a college classmate’s confession of love.
Penguin Highway - Available at Amazon
37. Kabi Nagata
Unlike fellow graphic novelist Junji Ito, Kabi Nagata is a more recent success story. She has achieved such success through remarkable courage and honesty.
My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness and its sequel, My Solo Exchange Diary, broke free from the mold of traditional manga, taking the form a graphic autobiography exploring Nagata’s relationship with her own sexuality and mental health. It’s an intimate and powerfully engaging story that’s drawn and colored with nothing but blacks, whites and pinks in a delightfully minimalist, scrapbook style that oozes charm and sweetness.
My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness - Available at Amazon
38. Matsuo Basho
Matsuo Basho was a revolutionary Edo-period poet, famous for his haiku that captured on paper the ever-changing natural world around him. Basho’s Edo doesn’t exist anymore, which is what makes the existence of his masterful prose even more vital reading material in today’s world.
His book of observational haiku, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is a travelogue that captured the mood and tone of changing seasons and the natural landscapes of the Japanese hinterlands with unparalleled beauty, elegance and wisdom.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Available at Amazon
39. Murasaki Shikibu
While in the Western world the novel (arguably) began its life 300 years ago with Robinson Crusoe, the first ever novel written was by a Japanese woman. Murasaki Shikibu was a lady-in-waiting of the imperial court during the 11th-century Heian period. While it was the norm for women at the time to be illiterate, Shikibu’s unique position granted her the privilege of learning reading and writing skills, and she put them to a use in unprecedented ways.
The Tale of Genji is an epic journey following the life of an emperor’s son who is stricken from the line of succession and becomes an officer instead. The book covers in great detail his romantic encounters, while illuminating the political and courtly traditions of the era.
The Tale of Genji - Available at Amazon
40. Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but left Japan at the age of five, moving with his family to the UK – he has since gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (only the third Japanese author to do so). While he may write in English, and often about aristocratic England, Ishiguro’s first two novels were very much centered around Japanese people, culture, history, and politics.
His first novel, A Pale View of Hills, tells the story of a Japanese woman who has lived for many years in the English countryside. Her eldest daughter has recently taken her own life and her younger daughter comes to visit, but there is now a rift between them. This is traced back to the woman’s time living in Japan with her first daughter and the events that unfolded one summer.
Ishiguro’s second novel, and one of his most beloved, was An Artist of the Floating World. Its protagonist, Masuji Ono, was a once-celebrated artist who now spends his days peacefully tending to his garden and spending time with his family. But his peace is shattered as dark feelings of guilt and denial rise up within due to his sordid past. Despite some of its more testing themes, this is an infinitely re-readable novel that’s as multifaceted as it is thought-provoking.
A Pale View of Hills - Available at Amazon
41. Takashi Matsuoka
Growing up as a first generation Japanese-American in Hawaii, Takashi Matsuoka worked in a Zen Buddhist temple before turning his attentions towards writing full-time. Though he writes in English, his novels deal with inherently Japanese themes, with a particular focus on the clashing cultural mores of American immigrants in pre-industrial Japan.
His Cloud of Sparrows series – featuring Cloud of Sparrows and its spiritual successor Autumn Bridge – is centered around the fabled Okumichi clan, whose patriarchs are known for their gifts (or perhaps curses) of foresight, and American missionaries sent to Japan during the Edo period. Fusing historical fiction, spiritual philosophy and more grounded elements of supernaturality, Matsuoka has become an important voice in the Japanese-Western literary canon.
Cloud of Sparrows – Available at Amazon
42. Koizumi Yakumo
Arriving in Japan as an Irish-Greek journalist under the birthname Lafcadio Hearn – by which literature fans now known him – Koizumi Yakumo was a master of the kaidan, or strange story. After becoming enthralled by regional folktales in western Japan during the dying embers of the 1800s, Hearn eventually married into a déclassé samurai family and was later named Koizumi Yakumo after he gained Japanese citizenship.
Kwaidan is his most eerie and enduring collection of folktales, embellished with his trademark flowery prose and informed by his dark imagination. Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan is a more journalistic compilation, containing a series of profound essays on the Japanese landscape and her people – it’s required reading for anyone interested in the collective Japanese psyche or the changing tides of post-Edo Japan.
43. Kobo Abe
Kobo Abe, also known as Kimifusa Abe, grew up in Manchuria before moving to Japan during the Second World War. His love of literature started in his school days when he would collect works by the European greats – Fyodor Dostoyevski, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe – and he would later go on to emulate these childhood heroes.
Utilizing bizarre allegories to explore the travails of the human condition, he saw great success with his suspenseful story of isolation, The Woman in the Dunes, which won the Yomiuri Prize. Another of his most famous works, The Face of Another, follows a Vanailla Sky-esque blueprint, whereby the protagonist loses his face and is forced to create a mask of the highest perfection to reconnect with the world.
The Woman in the Dunes – Available at Amazon
44. Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, after whom Japan’s most famous domestic literature prize was named, was the father of the modern Japanese short story and a master storyteller of the Taisho era. Like many of his contemporaries, however, Akutagawa struggled with mental health and eventually succumbed to a premature self-inflicted death.
His best-known works left to posterity are Rashomon and In a Grove. The former focuses on a servant taking refuge from a storm under the Rashomon Gate in Kyoto, and his quandary over risking starvation or fighting for survival. In a Grove, which turned 100 years old in 2022, is among the greatest short stories ever told, pitting the competing perspectives of several witnesses to a crime against one another – leaving the audience not towards a conclusion, but to draw their own. Film director Akira Kurosawa would later fuse these two stories into the movie Rashomon, which shot him to international stardom and forever cemented the term “Rashomon effect”, denoting conflicting accounts of the same story, into the English lexicon.
Rashomon – Available at Amazon
45. Kenzo Kitakata
A hard-boiled writer, who specializes in the hard-boiled genre, Kenzo Kitakata is firmly in the pantheon of Japan’s mystery writing greats. Featuring yakuza gangsters, Poirot-like detectives and stylistic prose, Kitakata’s works play on genre stereotypes while retaining their own inimitable spirit.
The Cage is arguably his most famous novel in English, which reacquaints cigarette-puffing Detective Takagi with the nefarious forces of the Tokyo criminal underworld set against the backdrop of bubble-era Japan.
The Cage – Available at Amazon
46. Miyamoto Musashi
Though widely known as Japan’s greatest ever samurai, with a record of 61-0 in one-on-one duels between the ages of 12 and 27, Miyamoto Musashi also penned what would become the bible of martial arts philosophy.
The Book of Five Rings, written in a secluded cave (in true ascetic fashion), is an exploratory treatise of swordsmanship, strategy and mind over matter. Still lauded by martial arts enthusiasts over 400 years later, Musashi’s lessons prove that his writings were as formidable as the pointy end of his blood-soaked katana.
The Book of Five Rings – Available at Amazon
47. Kenji Nakagami
Kenji Nakagami is as well known for his literary works as his social status – he was the only post-war Japanese writer to publicly announce himself as a burakumin, an untouchable class of workers from the feudal era defined by their dirty-handed jobs: butchers, slaughterhouse workers, tanners, and executioners.
Stridently “not an intellectual,” in the traditional sense of the word, Nakagami would play on these controversial roots in his novels. The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto is the ideal entry point into his work, presenting troubled tales of the discriminated classes of Japan in gruesome detail. The collection’s titular novella, The Cape, centers on the struggles of a burakumin community living in a small coastal city, and would go on to win the Akutagawa Prize.
The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto – Available at Amazon
48. Masuji Ibuse
A writer specializing in satire and witty allegories, Masuji Ibuse’s stories deal with the hardships experienced by run-of-the-mill people. This has given them a timeless quality, providing as much value to readers today as during his mid-20th-century heyday.
Salamander and Other Stories, brings together some of his finest and pithiest literary portraits. The novel Black Rain also brought him much success, marrying traditional ideals of Japanese stoicism with the horrifying events following the Hiroshima A-bomb atrocity.
Black Rain – Available at Amazon
49. Chikamatsu Monzaemon
Chikamatsu Monzaemon was primarily a playwright, who authored so many successful scripts in his lifetime – mainly for bunraku (Japanese puppet theatre), though they also appeared in other theatrical forms – that he earned the lofty epithet, the “Shakespeare of Japan.”
Bunraku’s answer to Romeo and Juliet, the Chikamatsu Monzaemon classic Love Suicides at Sonezaki is a masterpiece of dramatic storytelling and love-struck tragedy. Unfortunately, however, it’s influence would have dire consequences, inspiring many couples gripped by the fatal passion of love to re-enact the final scenes and take their own lives together. (This caused the government to subsequently outlaw love-suicide plays.) Though Chikamatsu’s plays still appear on stages across Japan, legendary Japanophile Donald Keene translated the top works into a seminal compendium: The Major Plays of Chikamatsu.
Love Suicides at Sonezaki – Available at Amazon
50. D.T. Suzuki
D.T. Suzuki, the pride and joy of the historic city of Kanazawa, was a Japanese-American intellectual who had his irons in many fires: as an author, essayist, scholar, monk, translator, and philosopher. His most popular writings were teachings and reinterpretations of Eastern mysticism and spirituality, helping introduce these once-foreign concepts to the West.
His Zen Buddhism bibliography is impressive alone, with fantastic manuals, primers and treatises on one of Japan’s primary religious thought schools. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism is the book for first-timers, while Zen Buddhism: Collected Writings of D.T. Suzuki provides a deeper analysis of Zen practices, from historical doctrines to attaining satori (enlightenment).
An Introduction to Zen Buddhism – Available at Amazon
51. Kenji Miyazawa
Born at the end of the 19th century and writing in the early days of the 20th, Kenji Miyazawa is still adored as one of Japan’s greatest writers of children’s stories and poetry, whose optimistic beliefs of utopianism shine through in his works.
Written in the early 1900s, Miyazawa’s Night on the Galactic Railroad is galaxy-traversing fantasy that holds as much charm for young readers as it does for nostalgic adults. It speaks to the power of childhood friendships, in the vein of Stand By Me – but with sci-fi flare – and has a sensitive style indicative of its transcendentally skilled author.
Night on the Galactic Railroad – Available at Amazon
52. Motoori Norinaga
A scholar of the Edo period and one of the Four Great Men of Kokugaku (nativist) studies, Motoori Norinaga was renowned for his research and commentary on Japan’s greatest ancient texts. His writings on the Tale of Genji and the Kojiki, chronicling the myths and legends of Japan as far back as the 7th century, are still considered fundamental to literary scholarship.
Motoori’s thoughts on the Kojiki, published in English in the late 20th century as Commentaries on the Kojiki, were seminal in changing Japan’s perception of itself, using philological theory, interpretations of ancient ideologies and the application of then-modern political thought. Commentaries on the Kojiki is certainly an academic piece of work, but a vital addition to the library of any Japanese history buff.
Commentaries on the Kojiki – Available at Amazon
53. Mori Ogai
Growing up amongst the aristocracy following the Meiji Restoration of the mid-19th century, Mori Ogai had a career in medicine, namely, as an army surgeon, before his creative juices forced a slight course correction. It’s for his subsequent literary resumé that bibliophiles know his name today.
His most enduring works focused on deeply personal stories and the nature of truth. The Wild Geese was a tale of unfulfilled love and is emblematic of his elegiac style which subsequently inspired his contemporaries and successors to write in similarly autobiographical terms. Vita Sexualis, an erotic novel published in 1909, ended up being his most controversial work and was banned soon after publication for being considered an affront to public morals.
The Wild Geese – Available at Amazon
54. Ito Sachio
Ito Sachio was one of the great Meiji period tanka poets – a form not unlike extended haiku, with a syllabic genome of 5,7,5,7,7 (31 syllables total). Ito also contributed regularly to national newspapers and prestigious literary magazines, and later became a master of the tea ceremony.
Whilst some of his poetry has been translated into English, A Wildflower’s Grave might be his most approachable masterpiece. This novella is a sentimental, coming-of-age romance following two country teens who’s love goes against the traditions of the day. Adapted for film and television numerous times, A Wildflower’s Grave has retained the power of its central message for over a century.
A Wildflower’s Grave – Available at Amazon
55. Kobayashi Issa
The Edo period Buddhist, Kobayashi Issa, still stands tall as a legend of the haiku genre, often uttered in the same breath as esteemed poets Basho and Buson. TThe Spring of My Life And Selected Haiku is the definitive collection of his works, celebrating the natural world through his concise attention to detail and the absurdity of life with his trademark humor. Over 160 individual poems are included in the compilation making it a worthy edition to any aspiring poet’s bookshelf.
The Spring of My Life And Selected Haiku – Available at Amazon
56. Otomo no Yakamochi
The most ancient inclusion on this list is the venerable writer Otomo no Yakomochi, born into an upper class family in the early 8th century. A worthy poet in his own right, who wrote in melancholic prose about the self and society, he is best known for compiling the Manyoshu, Japan’s greatest compilation of ancient poetry, an endeavor which some scholars believe took him decades to complete.
Much of his poetry is concise and philosophical, as was the style of the times, and is available in English. His magnum opus, the Man’yoshu (meaning “Ten Thousand Leaves Collection”), has also been translated, giving many non-Japanese-language readers wonderful insight into the origins of the Japanese literary tradition.
Manyoshu – Available at Amazon
57. Natsuko Imamura
Another of Japan’s reverential contemporary female writers, Natsuko Imamura was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize thrice before the age of 40, eventually winning it in 2019. The story which nabbed her Japan’s most prestigious literature accolade was The Woman in the Purple Skirt, charting the briefly converging lives of two women in modern Japan. It prods societal mores with provocative intensity and deadpan humor, through its narrator, the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who becomes obsessed with her subject, the Woman in the Purple Skirt.
The Woman in the Purple Skirt – Available at Amazon
58. Ono no Komachi
Waka poetry, exemplified by five-line stanzas grouped in a rigid format, is one of the most celebrated forms of the craft; and few were better at it than Ono no Komachi. One of the great female writers of the Heian period, considered among Japan’s 36 Poetry Immortals, Komachi was also renowned for her startling beauty – a theme reflected in her poems – and the intensity of emotion she managed to convey with words. Her poems can be found in the Kokin Wakashu: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry, which has been fully translated into English.
Kokin Wakashu – Available at Amazon
59. Koshun Takami
Koshun Takami is one of the least prodigious writers on this list, but his name was etched into the history books upon the publication of Battle Royale, a dystopian, fight-to-the-death thriller which was as controversial as it was successful.
Subsequently made into a film and a manga series, the latter of which Koshun helped adapt, Battle Royale features a class of high-school kids consigned to an island off the coast of the Republic of Greater East Asia, a fascist dictatorship which came to prominence following an alternative history version of the Second World War. The contestants battle for survival in a blood sport of wits and mind games, a basic premise that has since inspired numerous copycat stories in books, film, television, videogames and more.
Battle Royale – Available at Amazon
60. Keiichiro Hirano
Winning the Akutagawa Prize at the tender age of 23, Keiichiro Hirano was destined for literary stardom. Also former law graduate, his novels are deeply immersive and often focus on themes of identity and memory. His first novel to be translated into English, A Man, epitomizes his style, centered around a man who follows another man’s trail of lies in the search for identity. Transparent Labyrinth is more erotic, but speaks to Hirano’s deep sensitivity and his understanding of the human mind.
61. Fuminori Nakamura
Fuminori Nakamura rose to prominence when he won the 2010 Kenzaburo Oe Prize for The Thief, a short but poignant novel about a pickpocket in Tokyo who discovers his moral compass and tries to redirect his life onto the straight and narrow as his shady past comes back to haunt him.
He now has nine books published in English, most recently The Rope Artist in 2023, cementing his place as a force in the international literary scene. That said, he’s viewed as literary writer in Japanese and a noir or crime writer in translation, and this genre misalignment is often cited for why Nakamura remains in the shadows of his better-known contemporaries, such as Sayaka Murata and Mieko Kawakami.
The Thief – Available at Amazon
62. Mizuki Tsujimura
Mystery writer and diehard fan of the popular cartoon Doraemon, Mizuki Tsujimura’s books have a broad appeal to both adults and younger readers. The best example of this is Lonely Castle in the Mirror, a mystical adventure and exploration of teenage angst set in a castle accessed by mirror portals, for which she won the 2018 Japan Booksellers Awards. Fusing childlike energy with a fundamental understanding of the human condition in her works, she has placed herself in the canon of contemporary Japanese literature.
Lonely Castle in the Mirror – Available at Amazon
63. Genzaburo Yoshino
Genzaburo Yoshino’s literary status is founded, primarily, upon the sheer gumption of How Do You Live? A subversive novel, written to extoll virtues of individualization and self-actualization while Japan was under tyrannical imperial rule in the 1930s, it has rerisen to prominence following the release of Hayao Miyazaki’s final film, The Boy and the Heron, which it clearly inspired. Though Yoshino became the director of a collection of educational books for young people, his work dealt with more mature themes: philosophy, idealism, moral complexity, and being on the right side of history.
How Do You Live? – Available at Amazon
64. Seicho Matsumoto
Seicho Matsumoto is often credited with popularizing detective fiction in Japan. But there was more to his writing than complex plots and hardboiled investigators probing horrifying crime scenes.
Matsumoto’s novels were equally concerned with postwar nihilism and human psychology, delving into the corrupt aspects of law enforcement as much their image as protectors of the peace. He was prodigious, too, publishing more than 450 works in the final 40 years of his life and serving as president of the Mystery Writers of Japan from 1963 to 1971. Of his numerous novels, Pro Bono, a plucky tale of vengeance, and Points and Lines, the cerebral uncovering of a nationwide crime network, are among his most successful novels in English.
Pro Bono – Available at Amazon
65. Edogawa Ranpo
The pseudonymous Edogawa Ranpo – real name Taro Hirai – is synonymous with Japanese thriller fiction. Influenced by Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Ruiko Kuroiwa, Ranpo is known for his Private Detective Kogoro Akechi series and Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, nine morbid and suspense-filled stories that ignited the darkest recesses of the imagination. Ranpo’s works continue to instill terror in readers, but not because of the ghoulish creatures populating his tales, rather it’s human depravity that takes center stage.
Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Available at Amazon
66. Shunro Oshikawa
Shunro Oshikawa is one of the founding fathers of Japanese steampunk and science fiction. His novel Undersea Warship: A Fantastic Tale of Island Adventure, which owes its inspiration to Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, is a retro-futuristic story about a maritime battle between Japan and Russia involving an armored submarine. It influenced a new generation of sci-fi writers throughout the rest of the 20th century and ultimately spilled into other pop culture mediums, through movies like Atragon (1963) and its 1995 anime adaptation Super Atragon.
Undersea Warship: A Fantastic Tale of Island Adventure – Available at Amazon
67. Mari Akasaka
Mari Akasaka is the prototypical feminist Japanese author who has shot to stardom for her fiction’s no-nonsense approach to the travails of womanhood. Vibrator (1999), which was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, is the most enduring of her novels. It follows a young, bulimic and self-destructive woman who sets off an impulsive road trip with a truck driver she meets in a convenience store. Vibrator’s themes of mental health and desire, as well as its stream-of-consciousness prose, exemplify the writing chops of this sometimes underappreciated author.
68. Durian Sukegawa
Durian Sukegawa has dipped his pen into a variety of literary avenues, from books and essays to film and television. The tender Sweet Bean Paste is the novel most know him for, an unlikely story of friendship that takes place in a dorayaki shop. It has a decidedly soothing cadence, and this approach to writing is partly why Sukegawa has achieved much success in his homeland. Fans of Hiromi Kawakami or Hiro Arakawa will doubtless find succor in his works.
Sweet Bean Paste – Available at Amazon
69. Sakyo Komatsu
Another giant of Japanese science fiction, Sakyo Komatsu, continued the tradition of his literary predecessors in the latter half of the 20th century. He novels forayed into space operas, geopolitical conflicts of the future and proto-climate crises. Japan Sinks, his most famous work in translation, explores the social implications of a nation on the brink of disaster using human-driven drama and rigorous scientific research. Whereas Sayonara Jupiter turns its attention to the planets of our solar system as alternative homes when humanity has finally stressed earth’s natural resources. His work often deals with demographic catastrophes, which is particularly relevant in a world where many countries are facing either population explosions, or in the case of Japan and other post-industrial nations, worrying decline.
Japan Sinks – Available at Amazon
70. Eiji Yoshikawa
Eiji Yoshikawa found fame as a revisionist of Eastern classics, and was particularly intrigued by the Tales of Heike and Genji and the Chinese epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms. He also focused on the works of Miyamoto Musashi, Japan’s greatest ever samurai, known as the deadliest swordsman the country has ever produced.
The Heike Story: A Modern Translation of the Classic Tale of Love and War is a beefy tome but required reading for anyone interested in the legendary battles between the Heike and Genji clans. While Taiko: An Epic Novel of War and Glory in Feudal Japan is the definitive retelling of the Sengoku Warring States era (1467-1615), when three power-hungry warlords successively changed the sociopolitical fabric of Japan.
The Heike Story – Available at Amazon
71. Risa Wataya
Risa Wataya has grown to prominence through impactful novellas that prove you don’t need the endurance of Haruki Murakami to leave your readers reeling. I Want to Kick You in the Back, winner of Akutagawa Prize for rising literary talent, is a prime example of Wataya’s style. It follows Hatsu, a high school outcast who becomes infatuated with one of her classmates. But this infatuation is not one of love, necessarily; rather it manifests itself as a stubborn yet coherent thought: Hatsu wants to kick him in the back. The book, as befits its main premise, is comical but also expresses Wataya’s ability create meaningful and relatable characters.
Her first novel, Install, written when she was only 17, depicts a teenage girl who encounters the seedy world of internet chatrooms. It won the Bungei literary prize and proved that Wataya had the chops to capture the collective struggles of Japan’s coming-of-age youth.
I Want to Kick You in the Back – Available at Amazon
72. Hideo Furukawa
Contemporary novelist Hideo Furukawa has been showered with accolades throughout his career. Furukawa is a fantastic storyteller, but its his experimental nature that makes him stand out from the crowd – so much so, that no two books are alike. Slow Boat is a story of lucklessness, longing and the power of escaping in order to find oneself. Tokyo Soundtrack is a coming-of-age novel set in a dystopic version of Tokyo wracked by chaos, heat and tyranny. While Belka, Why Don’t You Bark? is a surrealist novel about war and strife, and dogs as man’s best friend.
Slow Boat – Available at Amazon
73. Toshiyuki Horie
Toshiyuki Horie, a professor of creative writing at Waseda University, is known within academic circles for his translation of French authors, including Michel Foucault, Hervé Guibert and Michel Rio. His interest in France, along with his time spent living there, greatly influenced his own fiction. His inspirations are particularly apparent in his Akutagawa Prize-winning The Bear and the Paving Stone, three stories about the power of memory set against the backdrop of the French countryside. Fusing dreams and reveries, the tales emphasize the idea that one’s past, whether one likes it or not, is inescapable.
The Bear and the Paving Stone – Available at Amazon
74. Noriko Ogiwara
Early in her life Noriko Ogiwara decided she wanted to become a fantasy writer. It appears she was destined for it. Her first, and arguably most famous, novel, Dragon Sword and Wind Child plays neatly with fantasy tropes. Good vs Evil? Check. Light vs Darkness? Check. Epoch-defining conflicts? Check. This doesn’t mean it’s a cookie-cutter story; in fact, it’s the moral complexity and extraordinary worldbuilding that enchanted the minds of so many readers.
What makes Ogiwara’s work so vital in translation is how the fantasy worlds are fashioned from those in Oriental history, rather than the European fairytales and Western mythologies that influenced writers like J.R. Tolkien, Andrzej Sapkowski and Terry Pratchett.
Dragon Sword and Wind Child – Available at Amazon
75. Osamu Tezuka
It’s perhaps unfair to have a list of authors that includes mangaka without mentioning Osamu Tezuka, the man who is often credited as the grandfather of this literary form. Beginning with is his work in the early postwar period, such as New Treasure Island (1947), Tezuka used pioneering, cinematic techniques, detailed character development and genre-blending stories to elevate the profile of manga beyond a medium primarily for children. Simply put, Tezuka understood that manga didn’t have to be pulp, it could be art. His bibliography is extensive, but notable entries that exemplify his artistic prowess include Astro Boy, Princess Knight, Black Jack, and Phoenix.
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September 15, 2023 | Art, Lifestyle
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