Japanese literature

A lot of Tanizaki has been recently translated.

Anybody know where I can get this book with this specific cover?

don't read japanese novels

>The Complete Haiku
Does Haiku have any sense once they are translated?

Get the original 1965 Knopf edition.

no form of poetry does

That was my point.
It's a waste of time to read it.

The book provides context for everything and has notes all over the place.

lmao

Bazinga

bump

Not OP, but does anyone have any good book recommendations to get acquainted in the Shinto religion?

Look at OP's picture.

A year in the life of a shinto shrine is a good intro.

Read Lovely Complex and experience the pinnacle of Japanese literary culture.

Been binge reading Yukio Mishima lately, quite interesting. Nothing like any other Japanese writer I've read.

Lafcadio Hearn: Kwaidan, etc./

no one does Japanese lit like the micks.

>goes to Japan
>still reads books in English
How about stop being a pleb and learn Japanese?

Essays in idleness and Hojoki.
Two works in one, by medieval buddhist monks in Japan..
Can you tell me how the Pillow Book is? I was thinking about getting it.

how about stop being a pretentious pleb and learn Classical Chinese?

Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows.
Ryokan.
Akutagawa.

Etc etc.

>Essays in idlenes
Read this a couple of years ago, good stuff.

>I'm simply looking for either something that will help me understand Japanese culture/history better
Kokoro, I Am a Cat Silence, The Sailor Who Fell Into The Sea and Into the Miso Soup defiantly help you with that.

Kokoro is a 1919 work that laments the loss of the optimism from the Meiji Restitution

I Am A Cat, written by the same guy, parodies middle class life during the Restitution.

>I heard the post-world war literature gets pretty bleak and nihilistic
Errr it gets pretty bad but honestly they have some really great stuff.

Sailor written in the (50's?) is a allagory regarding the conflict between Old Japan's warrior culture and New Japan's westernisation, with a great deal of alienation and lamentation thrown into the mix.

Into The Miso Soup is the most violent, fucked up book I've ever read but the first 3 quarters of it are some of the fiercest self commentary I've ever seen a writer make regarding the character of Japan, the impact of its busy, commercialised lifestyle and the hypocrisy of the media.

I also really like No Longer Human (which is also fucked up) but it doesn't teach you much about Japan.

I forgot about Silence. Its a modern work that tries to make sense of Japan's relationship with Christianity. Also has some neat insight into Japanese foreign relations in the 1600's as well as the start of their 300 year isolation.

Rampo Edogawa, Junji Ito, Koji Suzuki all are good horror writerss I found though most go the short story route.

Koushun Takami wrote Battle Royale and I think it's really a fun, enjoyable book.

Ryu Murakami is as good as the hype goes to be honest.

I read No Longer Human and its understandable why 50% think it's good and 50% say it's the autistic ramblings of a whiny loser.

The Sound of Waves is a great complement to The Sailor, and a must-read if you want to learn something about life in a rural, post-war Japanese town.

Dazai-wise, The Setting Sun is essential if you want to learn a thing or two about Japan.

I would also add The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle simply because it deals with the role of male outcasts in the modern, westernized Japan, and the emptiness in their lives.

Haven't read it yet, sorry.

reading classical japanese texts or buddhist texts wont teach you anything about the current japanese mindset. maybe read some akutgawa or shiga for context.

read Tanizaki, Soseki, Oe, and mainly Kawabata.

Go back to /jp/ and /a/ weeb

I liked it, I liked the book alot better than the film.

...

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto is rarely discussed but it is a great book.

I also enjoyed the 2 Mitsuyo Kakuta books I read. It was decent.

Zen gets all the press, but Jodo Shinshu is the much more popular school.

Read up on it. It's really underrated IMO.

Good conversation piece.

bump

> the much more popular school.

is it really ?

Any specific books you would recommend?

Julian Pas, Visions of Sukhavati.

Japanese and japanopjile PL-mongers dislike this book, as it focuses on the Chinese schools, and not the J-heresy. (essentially a kind of PL calvinism, justification by faith alone)

kys

this

anyone have essays about japan or something related to???

N-P is really great too.

Ive been reading furinkazan and lots of soseki.

I would definitely recommend Kokoro. Read it recently and it's a pretty sad story

Shiga is a must, anything you can get is going to be very good. I love The Paper Door and Other Stories, for one.

Kafu Nagai doesn't get mentioned often for some reason whereas the likes of Kawabata, Soseki, Mishima, Dazai etc. are always mentioned. He should be mentioned along with them.

Also The Wild Geese by Mori Ogai.

Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is a masterpiece.

If you're interested in a WW2 novel about desperation and survival, try Fires on the Plain by Shohei Ooka.

I just read The Isle of Dreams by Keizo Hino, and this is a good spot to recommend it to others as well. You should like it especially if you're into contemplating the mysterious. It's not a very long novel but I read it slowly and found it worthwhile to stay on some passages for a longer time. It's a mysterious contemplation about living and unliving matter, growth and decay, artifice and reality, the modern Tokyo (written in 1985), identity, etc. The blurb on the book's cover calls it a satire, which I found a very odd characterization as I don't see anything satirical about the content. It's an interesting little book I suspect very few here have even heard of. Sadly the only book of this author translated into English. I guess I have to learn Japanese to widen my reading field in Japanese letters.

Esben Andreasen's Popular Buddhism in Japan is good

Shipwrecks, if you want to be bloody depressed.

Forgot to mention Kenzaburo Oe. Must read.

I didn't find it that depressing. It was quite a kick in the stomach though. The other Yoshimura novel I've read was One Man's Justice which was none too bad from what I remember. I just noticed I've had On Parole on my shopping list for 12 years now...

I'll bump for fresh recommendations of lesser known authors.

>Japanese prose.

japanese author power rank:
\
the top 5 are:

soseki
tanizaki
kawabata
oe
akutagawa

and then the second tier-
abe
dazai
endo
mishima
inoue

then you got a bunch of people whose legacies aren't totally clear yet or are just aren't as important as the above few-
ibuse
ogai
r. murakami
kirino
yoshimoto
enchi
miyamoto

etc. etc.

Both the book and the movie are 10/10 imo.
Okay, I'll take the bait. In what way did Scorsese 'completely miss the point'.

>The movie is 10/10
>not liking trite hollywood trash is bait to you.

Shinoda already did it better in the 70s

What's with the influx of koreans lately?

>Tale of Genji

The fuck are you reading? That better be an analysis of the tale of genji you pleb. Between the Tyler translation and the Washburn translation, I am starting to love the washburn translation more. He is a lot more liberal but without adding anything or missing too many details, it's just more fun to read. Tyler's feel more like the original and has more of the originals aesthetics. Also I am getting to the point in my Japanese where I can read the modern Japanese version of TOG.

What is your favourite chapter? I love 14, it's when I fell in love with Murasaki. The scene that made me laugh the most is when genji had the letter sent to the young wife's stepdaughter but had his page tie it to a tall reed to make fun of her height.

Though I preferred the translation of "I would like to know where could I have learned to be ungenerous." When genji asks Murasaki if she would treat his daughter by the Lady of Akashi generously. Not sure if that was in they Tyler translation or not.

The Tale of Genji is by far the best and most beautiful book I have ever read and it pains me to see someone read an abridged version. Does is have the talk about women in chapter two with To no Chujo? Or mentions how genji sleeps with Utsusemi's bother when she rejects him because he was much warmer than her coldness towards him yet shared a likeness in face? Or how he sneaks into Utsusemi's stepdaughter's bed and has sex with her as to not lose face and to not offend her? "she would take it badly" gets me everytime.

Heian Period literature is god tier
Meiji Period is good
Showa lesbian literature is great
Post war westernized Japanese literature is pretty garbage

What's with the nauseating obsession of bourgeois Westerners with Japanese culture?

Why did you come to a thread about Japanese culture if you knew it would be nauseating to you? Do you hate yourself?

sushi tastes good etc

Not that guy but sushi tastes terrible. Unagi don with a side of miso soup for me. That guys is probably some butthurt Chinese that is angry because no one cares about his rat/dog eating culture.

>Unagi don with a side of miso soup for me

Jesus christ you people are disgusting.

I suppose it depends on the type of roll and quality of fish

What is wrong with eel on rice and miso? You prefer dogs and cats? I hear they are all the rage in venezuela right now.

Then why is that China a shithole no one wants to live in? Maybe China was once great but the beauty and soul of middle kingdom was destroyed a long time ago by Communism. Modern China has as much to do with the aesthetics of the Tang Dynasty as modern dirty Greeks has to do with the greatness of the old greek city states. Sorry that your culture was destroyed but hating the Japanese won't bring it back.

>ctrl+f
>No Yoshiki Tanaka

>Then why is that China a shithole no one wants to live in?

[citation required]

>No TRASH

What did the ending change from the book? I read some people complaining that it triggered their atheist beliefs that supposedly Jesus speaks to the protagonist. Thought that was a very superficial way of reading the scene.

you have got to be kidding?

1.3 billion people dying to get out of that shithole.

GTFO of here, shill. Better yet, go spend some time in the motherland.

this is a good thread

>1.3 billion people dying to get out of that shithole

[citation required]

animu

Stop being a desu pandering weaboo, senpai.

I decided to learn japanese today.

Why today?

Unagi don is oishii. Do you like basashi?

Anime is better than most western media at the moment.

The Kojiki.

Start at the source, and realise that they've been weird since day 1. Everything else that follows makea more sense thay way.

The secret desire for conformity and homogeneity.

How rich is Japanese (quality) literature? To what Western language would it compare in termd of quality and quantity? I'm really drawn to the language and feel like learning, but it would be kind of a waste to do it for only a few dozens great books.

How much time are you willing to put into this?

Japanese has without a doubt the hardest written language in the world.

To read Japanese, you need to learn two phonetic alphabets, Hiragana and Katakana, who both have about 45 characters each.

But that's the easy part. The hard part is learning at least, 2000 Kanji(Chinese characters) as well as their Chinese and Japanese pronunciation.

You could learn two European languages in the same amount of time you would need to master the Japanese language.

Not trying discourage you. But Japanese is very hard to learn.

Kana makes the language significantly easier than Chinese to learn. Also, Kanji are simplified versions of Chinese characters. You need approximately 2000 to have a decent reading ability of Japanese and upward of 5000 for Chinese.

Though in reply to this guy don't invest time or money into the language unless you know you have good reason to. If you are not even sure about your reasons for learning it there is no point.

So essentially what you're telling me is I need to buy the unabridged version?

You need to buy 3 unabridged versions.

>tfw I mess up my chance to date a cute chinese girl that fled to my random country

I am an atheist but this book was the shit, defiantly not a meme

Read the Kojiki.

I liked Master of Go so much more than Snow Country

>Showa lesbian literature is great

Few recs?

How's Eiji Yoshikawas work?

cant be bothered to read whole thread but in case no one has mentioned ryu murakami yet read him. almost transparent blue.

Where I work I can't read but I can wear my headphones. Anybody got a good audiobook recommendation?