In the 35 years since I graduated with an East Asian studies degree, I’ve read a considerable amount of Japanese literature. So, my little contribution to Fandom Pulse is a list of my 10 favorite novels, with the caveat that only one novel per author was allowed.
Japanese literature is like no other. What the wedding is to the English novel, the suicide is to the Japanese novel. Furthermore, the absence of Christian sexual mores, the cultural inclination toward passivity and fatalism, and the lack of an individualist hero tradition will tend to strike the average Western reader as strange and, in some cases, even bordering on the perverse.
But the technical skill of Japanese novelists, combined with their very different takes on the human condition, makes Japanese literature one of the most interesting and rewarding literatures available for reading on the planet. Below are my favorite books by ten different Japanese authors translated into English, since I don’t read kanji, and a list of my ten favorite Japanese novels would amount to little more than an incomplete bibliography of Haruki Murakami.
Read the whole thing there. And yes, I’ve read Natsumi Soseki, Ryu Murakami, Kenzaburo Oe, Banana Yoshimoto, and all the other big names. This is a list of my favorite novels, not the technically best or most representative, or most important.