5 Things You Should Know About Japanese Literature

by Will Heath | ART

In recent years, Japanese literature has become a genre of its own among western readers. When discussing their favourite styles of writing, they might list romance, science fiction, historical novels, or Japanese literature. Japanese literature itself, naturally, includes many genres of its own, and yet we so often bundle them under the tantalising umbrella. So what is it in the modern literature of Japan that makes it irresistible to international readers?

Japan, like the UK and France, is a nation particularly known for its long and broad history of rich literature: prose, poetry, and theater. From what is widely considered to be the world’s first novel - Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, written a thousand years ago - to modern breakout political and feminist writers like Mieko Kawakami and Sayaka Murata, Japanese literature has thrived and been celebrated for centuries.

Fireflies - The Tale of Genji by Maeda Masao, 1950s

Modern Japanese literature is particularly vast in its scope, style, and themes. More and more is being translated into English and there are new independent publishing houses dedicated to bringing new and obscure Japanese literature to Western audiences. But what is making Japanese literature the hit publishing trend of this century? What themes are tackled by Japanese writers? What do these writers have in common? Is there a unique style of writing in Japanese literature? What makes them different from other nations’ writers?

1. The Unique Narratives of Japanese Literature

The immediate draw of Japanese literature in the west is the same as that of Japanese art and cinema. That being the fact that European and Asian artists - be they writers, poets, painters, animators, or musicians - observe the world differently from one another and capture those observations differently in their art.

For example, many European love stories - from Shakespeare to Danish fairy tales - end with a wedding. In Japanese literature, a love story may not have such a clearly defined beginning or end, but might instead be a snippet of someone’s life or relationship. This is inspired by opposing views on narratives, time, and endings. This different approach to telling a love story or a family drama feels new and fresh to Western audiences.

2. Themes in Japanese Literature

Beyond narrative structure, there are also the themes of Japanese literature. In translation many of the biggest and best names in Japanese literature are women, and these women are breaking boundaries and smashing literary traditions by tackling themes like societal structures and patriarchy, loss and isolation, and non-romantic love.

One popular thematic trend of modern Japanese literature is the Kafkaesque genre. While this style began with Bohemian writer Franz Kafka, it has been almost entirely co-opted by Japanese authors (and also some modern Korean authors too). Haruki Murakami, Sayaka Murata, Hiroko Oyamada, and Yoko Ogawa have all tackled the Kafkaesque genre head-on, inspired by the infamous salaryman culture of Tokyo and the rigid societal and familial structures of contemporary Japanese life.

19Q4 by Haruki Murakami, Available at Amazon

In Japan, much of the best modern literature is punk: a form of art that betrays anger at sexist, patriarchal, capitalist systems that have been taken for granted for far too long. Haruki Murakami is renowned for writing male protagonists going through some kind of displacement or existential crisis, expressed through urban fantasy and surrealist narratives. Meanwhile, Sayaka Murata has become increasingly bold in her aggressive attack on traditions, systems, and hierarchies.

3. Who Are The Most Popular Japanese Writers?

Contemporary Japanese literature arguably began with Natsume Soseki, who was writing around the turn of the 20th century. To this day, he is still considered Japan’s most beloved writer. Natsume’s writing, from I Am A Cat to Kokoro, explored heavy themes like the rapid industrialisation and gentrification of Japan and the self versus the group (in terms of art, success, and emotion).

After World War II came a quick succession of Japanese authors, many of whom won the Nobel Prize for Literature or were favourites to win during their lifetimes. These writers include Junichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, Kenzaburo Oe, and Yukio Mishima. These men all tackled heavy geopolitical themes in their writing, with Kawabata romanticising Japanese art, traditions, and landscapes, and Mishima romanticising fascistic ideals of Japanese cultural superiority.

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto - Available at Amazon

The final decades of the 20th century was dominated by writers who are still current, popular, and celebrated today. Men writers like Haruki Murakami and Ryu Murakami dominated the landscape, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a new wave of political and philosophical feminist writers like Natsuo Kirino, Yoko Ogawa, and Banana Yoshimoto.

In the 21st century, there has been an explosion of new talent across all genres and from writers of all walks of life. Many of modern Japan’s strongest writers are women writing from a sharply political perspective, such as Aoko Matsuda’s modern feminist retellings of Japanese fairy tales, or Yu Miri’s anti-capitalist attack on 20th century commercialisation. Political writing is the name of the game for many of the most recent and current Japanese authors.

You can also check out our list of the 20 Best Japanese Authors of All Time to find out more.

4. Modern Japanese Literature You Should Read

Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Convenience Store Woman was an enormous breakout success when it hit English markets. The novel, loosely based on Murata’s own lived experiences and her own philosophy, tells the story of a convenience store worker who has remained in her job for eighteen years. It’s a quietly angry book that asks readers to reconsider their approach to personal progress, the difference between security and happiness, and the modern machine we all operate within.

Murata’s second novel, Earthlings, released in English in September 2020, takes those same philosophies and twists them even further. It’s a harsh, unsettling, and disturbing novel about a young woman who believes that she exists outside of society. She creates fantasies in order to survive brutal experiences which are both put upon her and doled out by her.

Convenience Store Woman – Available at Amazon

Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda

Translated by Polly Barton

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 Ares – Available at Amazon

The Lonesome Bodybuilder/Picnic in the Storm by Yukiko Motoya

Translated by Asa Yondeda

Depending on where you live, this book may be titled The Lonesome Bodybuilder or Picnic in the Storm. Either way, what you get is a surreal short story collection that neatly encapsulates many of the themes and politics of modern Japanese literature. These stories share the same surrealist qualities of books by Haruki Murakami. They also express the same feminist themes of books by Natsuo Kirino, Yoko Ogawa, and Sayaka Murata.

The Lonesome Bodybuilder – Available at Amazon

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

One of 2020’s biggest Japanese novels in translation is actually two books in one: a novella and its sequel, published together as one angry feminist masterpiece. Breasts and Eggs beautifully demonstrates the alluring Japanese storytelling narrative discussed earlier: snippets of a life, heavy on themes and political messages. Telling the story of three women and their relationships with their bodies, as well as modern society’s relationship with the female body, Breasts and Eggs is a deeply philosophical and explorative discussion on the life of a woman in modern Japan.

Breasts and Eggs – Available at Amazon

5. Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

Translated by Morgan Giles

One of the angriest and most inspiring political novels of recent years, Tokyo Ueno Station is a short novel about the damage done by the long arm of capitalism and gentrification. The book’s protagonist is a ghost who haunts Ueno Park: a man who was born on the same day as the emperor, worked like an ant to build the cityscape of modern Tokyo, and died homeless and forgotten. It’s a book about class and societal structures; the lives of ordinary people who sacrifice so much.

Tokyo Ueno Station – Available at Amazon

There are many more, some of which you will find here amon the 25 Best Japanese Books of All Time!

4. Japanese Literature in English

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki - Available at Amazon

There is a rather infamous story of the translator of Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, Edward Seidensticker, wrangling with the book’s title. The original Japanese title Sasameyuki (“Softly Falling Snow”) is a play on the name and personality of one of the sisters, Yukiko, but that clever nod is lost in translation. Challenges like this one are complex and delicate, and they are a daily occurrence for translators of Japanese literature, from poetry to manga.

Emily Balistrieri, translator of the Overlord light novel series and the novel Kiki’s Delivery Service, remarked in an interview for SCBWI that one of the common challenges of translating Japanese to English is archaic forms, “which some use to create atmosphere in the same way you might find Shakespearian flourishes in English.” Another challenge involves sentences that come with qualifiers before the subject: “They can contain info that, at least to an English reader, seems totally off-topic in the paragraph or just feels super wordy compared to what is actually being said”.

In a follow-up conversation I had with Balistrieri, she gave examples of the unique creative challenges which translators must overcome, such as how to convey linguistic quirks in light novel characters: “In Overlord, there is one character who talks in katakana and kanji instead of hiragana and kanji. We made him talk in all caps.” And with regards to linguistic approaches to gender: “Since it's so easy to omit the subject or not gender it [in Japanese], you can have characters with ambiguous genders or situations where a character is a different gender from how they are presented”.

These challenges are ongoing, and they demonstrate the mental, linguistic, and artistic gymnastics at play when translating from Japanese to English. This alone demonstrates the invaluable role that translators play in bringing a work to an English audience.

If you’re a fan of Japanese literature, you can experience the locations featured in some of your favorite novels. Check out these 15 Japanese Novel Settings You Can Actually Visit!

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