After centuries of self-imposed and almost complete isolation, Japan signed the first of several treaties in 1854 opening the country to both international trade and culture. By the early twentieth century, contemporary Japanese writing, often shaped by European and American influences, attracted considerable attention abroad. Among the literatures written in non-European languages, Japanese was easily the most prominent abroad during the twentieth century, and with authors ranging from Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) to Banana Yoshimoto (b. 1964) and Haruki Murakami (b. 1949), was the only one from which writers of both literary and popular fiction found large international audiences.
With a large, well-educated population that has sustained a strong reading culture and, for the most part, the absence of governmental interference in the form of radical censorship or suppression, literary production has thrived. Most of what has been translated into English, however, are the works of relatively few authors.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) remains the quintessential Japanese author. His output consists mainly of short stories, ranging from retellings of familiar Japanese tales and myths to introspective confessional accounts typical of the shishōsetsu genre—the so-called I-novel. With stories set in many different historical periods, including the two on which Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashōmon (1950) is based, as well as supernatural tales and contemporary stories of early-twentieth-century life in Japan, Akutagawa’s work remains the most accessible introduction to Japanese literature. Nothing resembling a collected edition of Akutagawa’s work is available in English, and his best-known stories must be sought out in various collections and renderings. Jay Rubin’s new translation in the Penguin Classics collection Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories (2006) is currently the best available.
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965) bridges several eras, his first works published during the Meiji period (1868–1912) and his last novel,
Diary of a Mad Old Man, in 1962 (English 1965). In addition, his translation of the great Japanese classic
The Tale of Genji (early eleventh century) into modern Japanese played a major role in the revival of that text. Fascinated by the novelty and art of the West in his younger years, Tanizaki eventually turned back to Japanese culture and tradition, a shift conveyed in
Some Prefer Nettles (1929, English 1955), in which the main character, Kaname, is first presented as enamored of Western culture but then finds his interest in Eastern tradition reawakened in a story revolving around the breakup of his marriage. Tanizaki’s novel of a family living in 1930s Osaka,
The Makioka Sisters (1948, English 1957), is his magnum opus and a wonderful, if fairly traditional, work. In the novel, the two eldest sisters of this family in decline already are married, and much of the plot centers on finding a husband for the third while the youngest waits her turn. Tanizaki’s narrative is detailed and occasionally slow but offers a vivid portrait of the Japan of that time. Always a sensualist, Tanizaki’s late works,
The Key (1956, English 1961) and
Diary of a Mad Old Man, are remarkably intimate novels written in diary form—in the case of
The Key, the diaries of both husband and wife. Both are filled with sexual tensions and frustrations, even though
Diary of a Mad Old Man is a great comic work.
The first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize, Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972), may seem to meet Western expectations of Japanese exoticism and sensibilities more consistently than do any of the other major authors, in both content and style, particularly in works like Snow Country (1937, English 1956), with its memorable geisha character. Nostalgia for old ideals, purity, and refinement is pervasive in his delicate fiction. Among Kawabata’s other novels of note is The Master of Go (1954, English 1972), which uses the board game as a metaphor for the contest between the old and new.
The most notorious Japanese author, and one of its greatest, is
Yukio Mishima (1925–1970). Like Kawabata, he took his own life, but the two acts could hardly have been more different. Kawabata slipped away almost quietly, but after a failed attempt to start a nationalist military uprising, Mishima staged a very public ritual suicide (
seppuku) as he disemboweled himself and then was beheaded by an acolyte. Not surprisingly, Mishima’s fiction is full of tortured souls who act out. A prolific author, he burst on the scene with an impressive autobiographical novel of a man hiding his homosexuality from society,
Confessions of a Mask (1949, English 1958). Mizoguchi, the protagonist of what is arguably Mishima’s best novel,
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956, English 1959), is an even more tortured outsider, a self-destructive youth who burns down the famous Kinkaku Temple. Loosely based on an actual incident, Mishima fashioned a philosophical novel around this sensational plot, with the temple a symbol of beauty and perfection that the protagonist, an unattractive stutterer, is driven to destroy. The disturbing
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963, English 1965), in which a young adolescent turns on the man who falls in love with his widowed mother, is another fine work. Mishima’s tetralogy,
The Sea of Fertility (1968–1970, English 1972–1974), is his impressive massive final work of fiction. The four volumes, with their different styles and settings, cover much of the twentieth century. One character, Shigekuni Honda, figures prominently throughout all four, and another character appears in a different reincarnation in each of them.
Despite being Japan’s only other Nobel laureate (in 1994), a considerable amount of Kenzaburō Ōe’s (b. 1935) writing remains unavailable in English. The variety of what he has written during a career now spanning half a century may have something to with that, as he is an author that is difficult to pin down. With their sometimes bewildering and portentous titles—Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (1969, English 1977), The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away (published in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness; 1972, English 1977)—a number of his books may also seem relatively inaccessible. Uneven and often challenging, and with even more translation issues than usual for Japanese fiction, many of them are nevertheless worth reading.
KEEP IN MIND
• Saiichi Maruya’s (1925–2012) Singular Rebellion (1972, English 1986) is a broad and gently comic novel of a widower who does not quite fit the expected Japanese mold, especially after he marries a much younger woman, offering amusing insight into Japanese life in the late 1960s. A Mature Woman (1992, English 1995), with its newspaper setting, satirizes more recent times, with a variety of organizations and people jostling for advantages in a novel of unexpected turns and consequences.
• Kōbō Abe’s (1924–1993) fiction often has science fiction or surreal premises, such as Inter Ice Age 4 (1958, English 1970), an early novel warning of the effects of global warming. Several works feature alienated protagonists, including Abe’s classic The Woman in the Dunes (1962, English 1964), in which a man becomes trapped in a sandpit, an outsider in a world cut off from his own, and the unsettling The Face of Another (1964, English 1966), in which a disfigured scientist records his attempts to make a lifelike mask that will allow him to face and be accepted in the world at large again.
• Morio Kita’s (1927–2011) The House of Nire (1964; originally published in English separately as The House of Nire, 1984, and The Fall of the House of Nire, 1985) is a grand and often humorous family epic spanning much of the twentieth century.
Ōe’s oldest son has been brain-damaged since his birth in 1963, and many of Ōe’s works feature boys who are similarly handicapped. One of the first of these,
A Personal Matter (1964, English 1968), is also his best. The novel tells the story of Bird, a father who wants to let his deformed baby die but eventually accepts him. This is an unsparing account of the man’s weakness in the face of adversity.
Other works by Ōe are overtly political, focusing on Japanese issues of national identity in a post–World War II world in which the United States wields considerable power. The Silent Cry (1967, English 1974), the story of two brothers that bridges contemporary history and an uprising from a century earlier, is the more interesting of these. The dangers of nuclear power and proliferation also have long been of concern to Ōe and inform some of his work. His somewhat long-winded novel about a religious cult, Somersault (1999, English 2003), was inspired by the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway carried out by the Aum Shinrikyo group in 1995.
The Next Generation
The old guard of Japanese authors remained dominant well into the 1980s, and only then did a new generation of Japanese authors begin to make their mark in English translation.
Haruki Murakami (b. 1949) has emerged as the most successful of them, but for a time it appeared that
Banana Yoshimoto (b. 1964) would be the leading new voice. Her first novel,
Kitchen (1988, English 1993), was radically different from most of the Japanese fiction to which English-speaking readers had been exposed.
Kitchen’s charmingly straightforward, almost naive style, contemporary setting, and young woman’s perspective were unlike the much more staid writing that heretofore had seemed to be the norm. Here was a story that was unabashedly popular fiction but that had enough pith and resonance to pass as more than just light entertainment. Yoshimoto has continued to find some success with her generally short novels of young protagonists dealing with loss, though in the American market she seems to have rather worn out her welcome. Her style has served her well, but she is best writing in smaller spaces; her one long novel,
Amrita (1994, English 1997), feels aimless. Her quirky plots also can become convoluted, but works such as
NP (1990, English 1994), with its cursed story of an author and then three of the story’s would-be translators committing suicide, retain some appeal.
It is not surprising that Haruki Murakami (b. 1949) is more popular abroad than Yoshimoto. Considerably richer, Murakami’s work offers much of what Yoshimoto’s does and then some. His protagonists tend to be male and older than hers, and they share some traits with the author. Not quite loners, many live in relative isolation with only a few other significant figures in their lives; they also tend to be fairly passive. Music, especially jazz, figures prominently, and many of Murakami’s pop references are to Western authors and musicians, lending the books a comfortable familiarity for English-speaking readers. His fiction often has a sense of nostalgia, too, as well as the melancholy of love that circumstances do not allow to be sustained.
The stories of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (English 2006), written over a quarter of a century, are a good introduction to Murakami’s work, but this collection is a big dose of short pieces by an author who fares better when he has more space to allow his fiction to unfold. The very satisfying Norwegian Wood (1987, English 1989, 2000) is a relatively conventional realist novel, centered on the narrator’s university years in the late 1960s and the two women who played a significant role in his life as he matured to adulthood. South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992, English 1998) is like an echo of Norwegian Wood, the focus here on the present, with the protagonist still clinging to some of his past as he faces the uncertainties of the future. After Dark (2004, English 2007), set during a single night in Tokyo and full of chance encounters, is still fundamentally realistic, while the airy Sputnik Sweetheart (1999, English 2001), a tale about unrequited loves, veers toward the mystic.
Several of Murakami’s other works incorporate far more fantastical elements, some closer to science fiction. The very elaborate
Kafka on the Shore (2002, English 2005) has two alternating plotlines. One follows a teenager running away from home, and the other is about an older man who underwent an unusual experience during World War II. This retiree has the ability to communicate with cats, a typical Murakami touch that, in his presentation, is not as silly or absurd as it sounds. Even though the English translation of
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995, English 1997) is a significantly diminished version of the Japanese original, it is among Murakami’s strongest works, his fantastical predilections—which here also include psychic abilities, missing cats, and a dry well in which the narrator likes to spend time—contrast with events from World War II, which Murakami confronts head-on here.
Murakami’s massive three-volume (with possibly a fourth to follow)
1Q84 (2009, 2010, English 2011) is the culmination of his work to date. It begins in the year 1984. First one and then both of the main characters, Aomame and Tengo, whose stories are told in alternating chapters, find themselves in another reality that is very similar but not identical to the 1984 they know, with minor (and a few greater) differences in the world around them, from history having taken slightly different courses to some changes in everyday details. (The Japanese word for the number 9 is
kyū, pronounced like the English
q, so the title—left unchanged from the Japanese to English version—also is a play on that idea.) Both Aomame and Tengo are loners in their thirties, and both are relatively content with their lifestyles. Tengo is working on a novel and teaches part time, but he finds his life thrown into disarray when he is asked to help polish a manuscript that has been submitted for a literary prize by a teenage girl named Fuka-Eri. The story is based on her own experiences in a cult from which she escaped when she was ten years old, but her novel reads more like an allegory or fable—with two moons in the sky and mysterious and supernatural “Little People”—than a realistic work. As it turns out, her story is not as fantastical as it first seemed, and those associated with it, including Fuka-Eri and Tengo, find themselves threatened. Aomame is a massage therapist, but she also works for a woman who helps women and girls who have suffered domestic violence and abuse and have nowhere else to turn, and it is this sideline that leads Aomame to become involved with the cult and its mysterious leader. It also turns out that Aomame and Tengo knew each other as children, and they seem fated to be reunited as a couple. The path down which Murakami leads them, however, is twisted and complicated, with many surprises. While arguably somewhat long-winded,
1Q84 rewards readers with its slow and steady buildup.
Ryū Murakami (b. 1952)—no relation to Haruki—writes considerably more explicit and rawer fiction, often presenting a darker, even brutal, side of contemporary Japanese life. The autobiographical 69 (1987, English 1993), narrated by a teenager and set in 1969, is not typical, being instead a fine look at life in a small city dominated then by an American military base. The same setting, but with slightly older and not yet wiser youths, figures in Almost Transparent Blue (1976, English 1977), which is a more graphic character study of aimless youths experimenting with sex and drugs. Coin Locker Babies (1980, English 1995) is Murakami’s most complete and expansive critique of modern Japanese society, following the lives of two boys, Kiku and Hashi, who were abandoned by their mothers as infants. They wind up in their teens in a contaminated part of Tokyo called Toxitown and indulge in sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and pole-vaulting. Murakami strains mightily for shock effects in a particularly wild and violent ride of a novel, and it is his most impressive work.
More recent novels by Ryū Murakami, including Piercing (1994, English 2007) and In the Miso Soup (1997, English 2003), explore the duality in Japanese society of a surface that is formal, orderly, and polite, contrasted with a dark underbelly to which many just turn a blind eye. Murakami’s fiction shows that underbelly as particularly dark and violent, with characters who find themselves caught up in more than they ever bargained for. Audition (2000, English 2009) is the best example of this, with its creepy premise of a widower letting himself be convinced that the way to find a new wife is to hold film auditions as a ruse to meet and audition women for the real-life role of romantic partner. Here again, neither appearance nor reality—both reflecting Japanese society—is what it seems to be, with horrible consequences.
Murakami’s satirical farce
Popular Hits of the Showa Era (1994, English 2011) is the most approachable of his novels, the violence and gore here so ridiculously over the top that they do not feel as real as they do in some of his other works. The novel pits two gangs against each other, each representing a specific demographic: a group of six disaffected and socially inept young men who occasionally get together but hardly consider themselves friends, and a group of divorcees in their late thirties who happen to share the same name, Midori. The two groups tangle, and their conflict quickly escalates into brutal violence (and then to the entirely absurd), the Midoris showing themselves quite capable of holding their own against the young men.
Two of the men from Popular Hits of the Showa Era also have cameo roles in Murakami’s From the Fatherland, with Love (2005, English 2013), another ambitious work on the scale of his Coin Locker Babies but taking place mostly in 2011. The premise of the novel is a small group of North Korean infiltrators fixing the groundwork for a takeover of the Japanese city of Fukuoka. This in turn enables Murakami to portray an economically weakened Japan humbled by its relegation to secondary status on the global stage. In this cruelly comic thriller, a traditional culture of deference to seniority and official titles rather than competence undermines most of the Japanese efforts to counter the North Korean threat, thereby facilitating the foreign occupation of Japanese territory. While also offering insight into the rigid absolutism of North Korean society, From the Fatherland, with Love is a darkly humorous and blistering critique of modern Japanese society that also works as a traditional national-crisis thriller.
Translations of Yoko Ogawa’s (b. 1962) fiction have finally started to appear in English, beginning with the three short novellas collected in The Diving Pool (English 2007) and the novel The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003, English 2009). The Housekeeper and the Professor is the story of a professor of mathematics whose short-term memory since an accident he had in 1975 has been limited to an eighty-minute span, after which he again forgets everything. Ogawa spins the clever premise well, although it is more of a conventional crowd-pleaser, and readers should be aware that it is very tame compared with most of her other work.
The stories in
The Diving Pool display a controlled calm even as the female narrators slowly reveal a world that is ever so slightly and eerily deranged. In the remarkable
Revenge (1998, English 2013), a cleverly connected cycle of stories that comes full circle, Ogawa manages a similar effect in shorter, sharper episodes. This book, whose pieces ultimately fit together so neatly that it also works as a novel, is the best introduction to the author.
Hotel Iris (1996, English 2010) is the most deeply unsettling of Ogawa’s works available in English. Here, the seventeen-year-old narrator, Mari, becomes involved with a much older man who works as a translator. Their relationship develops into a sexual one in which both of them enjoy her assuming a passive and often humiliated role, but the experimentation gets out of hand, leading to catastrophe. Although Ogawa succeeds in discomfiting readers, her narrator is too young to adequately convey the complexity of her situation.
The calm of Hiromi Kawakami’s (b. 1958) understated novels differs from that in Ogawa’s, and they contain nothing nearly as sinister. Both Manazuru (2006, English 2010) and The Briefcase (published in Great Britain as Strange Weather in Tokyo; 2001, English 2012) feature female protagonists well into adulthood and their uncertainty about their relationships with specific men. Manazuru is narrated by a mother already in her forties whose husband simply vanished from her life more than a decade earlier, a loss that continues to haunt her. Tsukiko, the narrator of The Briefcase, describes how, when she was in her thirties, she met one of her old teachers and slowly and tentatively formed a romantic relationship. Kawakami gently and effectively explores in both works how characters who are in one way or another isolated find ways of allowing others into their lives and how they deal with absence.
Minae Mizumura (b. 1951) spent her teen years in the United States and went on to study at Yale but eventually returned to Japan. Her work is explicitly rooted in Japanese literary tradition, beginning with her untranslated first novel, an attempt to complete
Natsume Sōseki’s (1867–1916) unfinished classic
Light and Darkness (1916, English 1971, and as
Light and Dark, 2013). In
A True Novel (2002, English 2013), Mizumura appropriates the outlines of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights (1847) for her story but re-creates it in a fashion more reminiscent of Tanizaki than either Brontë’s or Mizumura’s contemporaries. Its lengthy prologue takes up nearly a fifth of the more than eight-hundred page novel, in which Mizumura describes growing up on Long Island, as well as how she arrived at the story that is at the heart of
A True Novel. This introductory section—a story within the story—chronicles the shaping of both the author and the authorial process between cultures. Mizumura’s tale is nominally one of a Japanese man who achieves great success and the love of his life but, in its broad sweep, presents a fascinating picture of the changes in Japanese society and culture from the end of World War II to the turn of the twenty-first century.
A JAPANESE EXPATRIATE WRITER
Yoko Tawada (b. 1960) has long lived in Germany and writes in both German and Japanese. Where Europe Begins (English 2002) contains work originally written in both languages, providing a good overview of her creative approaches. Two other collections are available in English translated from Japanese: the surreal The Bridegroom Was a Dog (1993, English 1998) and Facing the Bridge (English 2007), with its stories of foreigners out of place. Chantal Wright’s revealing annotated “experimental translation” of one of Tawada’s German texts, Portrait of a Tongue (2002, English 2013), offers a fascinating look at the process of translating.
Surrealism and Beyond
Yasutaka Tsutsui’s (b. 1934) fiction is both surreal and comic. The collection Salmonella Men on Planet Porno (English 2006) ranges from science fiction to the relatively conventional, and Tsutsui almost invariably takes his tales in unexpected directions. His novel Hell (2003, English 2007) is a creative reimagining of what hell might be like, though it feels a bit more like a series of interconnected stories than a full-fledged novel. Tsutsui posits a device in Paprika (1993, English 2009) that allows users to see another person’s dreams, and he imagines the possible consequences of those abusing it.
Hideo Okuda’s (b. 1959) fiction is more realistic but also has a comic touch. Japanese humor does not always translate well, but Okuda’s work is among the funniest available in English. His stories of neurologist (or, rather, all-around head-case doctor) Dr. Irabu and his idiosyncratic treatment methods,
In the Pool (2002, English 2006), are very enjoyable.
Lala Pipo (2005, English 2008) is a cleverly structured novel of six episodes loosely but ingeniously connecting the lives of a number of rather sad and lonely figures, with a heavy emphasis on sex.
Many Japanese writers continue to rely a great deal on the supernatural, extrasensory, and paranormal, with Koji Suzuki (b. 1957) the best known of them. Several of his novels have been filmed in both Japan and Hollywood. Suzuki is best known for his Ring series, beginning with Ring (1991, English 2003), with its infamous videotape that promises that those who have watched it will die exactly a week later. This strained premise has a surprisingly clever resolution, and it is a passable thriller. The sequels Spiral (1995, English 2004) and Loop (1998, English 2006) have some promising twists, but Suzuki is less successful here. With its religious and personality cults, his most realistic novel, Promenade of the Gods (2003, English 2008), offers some insight into Japanese society but feels far too safe in what little it exposes and criticizes.
KEEP IN MIND
• The colorful but messy Dream Messenger (1989, English 1992) by Masahiko Shimada (b. 1961) is full of ideas, from an orphanage that rents out its wards to the protagonist’s alter ego–cum–guardian spirit and some special dreaming talents.
• Chiaki Kawamata’s (b. 1948) science fiction novel Death Sentences (1984, English 2012) is a surreal literary thriller about the power of the written word.
• Taichi Yamada’s (b. 1934) fiction has a touch of the supernatural, as in Strangers (1987, English 2003), In Search of a Distant Voice (1986, English 2006), and the unsettling tale of a woman who grows younger and younger by stages and the impossible love affair she has with the narrator of I Haven’t Dreamed of Flying for a While (1985, English 2008).
Japanese I-novels (self-absorbed fiction written in the first person) have recently become popular again, especially those featuring young women in a society that still emphasizes tradition but also in which traditional roles and both expectations and opportunities—for career and family—have changed for both men and women. The mix of innocence with spiritual and moral corruption in Ami Sakurai’s Innocent World (1996, English 2004) is typical. Its narrator, a girl cramming for her university entrance exams, also juggles a phone-sex job, an entirely inappropriate lover, and a number of family issues. Mari Akasaka’s (b. 1964) slightly confusingly entitled Vibrator (1999, English 2005)—it does not refer to the device—is not nearly as sensational, portraying a more mature young woman and focusing on the sense of isolation so prevalent in contemporary Japan. Hitomi Kanehara’s (b. 1983) work resembles that of Ryū Murakami, albeit from a younger and female perspective. Her incredibly successful first novel, Snakes and Earrings (2003, English 2005), is an effectively raw if somewhat immature text about a disaffected teenage narrator in a milieu of body piercing, tattooing, and casual violence and sex. The narrator in Autofiction (2006, English 2008) is a married woman and a successful author in her early twenties, and the novel unfolds in reverse chronological order, describing how she was marked by earlier experiences.
CELL PHONE FICTION
Cell phone fiction (keitai shōsetsu) is a growing phenomenon, especially in the Far East. These novels, written on and for mobile phones, have been immensely popular, and many of them have continued to sell astonishingly well even when published in traditional book form. The medium demands compression, so these “novels” tend to be simple narratives, heavy on dialogue and skimpy on description. With a predominantly female and young readership, the stories also tend to be variations on romances. As storytelling at its most basic level, most of it is of limited literary interest. Although the Japanese examples seem unlikely to translate well, the genre might very well spread, especially as texting technology improves and is even more widely adopted.
Crime and Mystery
Crime fiction has long been a popular genre in Japan, and although not extensively translated into English, at least a smattering of the work of the main mystery and thriller writers is available. Still, even a leading writer like Seishi Yokomizo (1902–1981) is represented by only a single title in translation, The Inugami Clan (1951, English 2003). In addition, delays in reaching English-speaking markets are common, which often gives a dated feel to what crime fiction does become available. Several works by Seicho Matsumoto (1909–1992) have been translated, but a work like Inspector Imanishi Investigates (1961, English 1989) felt more like a period piece by the time it reached American audiences. Among the works by this older generation of writers, Akimitsu Takagi’s (1920–1995) have held up the best, especially the historical exoticism of an underground world shortly after the war, in The Tattoo Murder Case (1949, English 1998), and his picture of the Japanese financial world during the 1960s boom, in The Informer (1965, English 1971).
Miyuki Miyabe (b. 1960) resorts to the supernatural in novels such as
Crossfire (1998, English 2006), in which the vengeful murderer has pyrokinetic powers (able to start fires through sheer willpower). Her novels like
All She Was Worth (1992, English 1996) and
Shadow Family (2001, English 2004) address, in a reasonably interesting fashion, contemporary Japanese issues ranging from debt collection to online role-playing games and their effect on individuals and society.
Natsuo Kirino (b. 1951) is even more successful in psychological thrillers such as
Out (1997, English 2003), with its group of women who work an overnight factory shift and are driven to murder, and the teenage girls in
Real World (2003, English 2008), who are intrigued by a loser who kills his mother and who do not observe the norms expected of them. Unfortunately, the writing often bogs down these novels, as neither Kirino nor Miyabe seems able to create her stories without an awful lot of effort showing.
KEEP IN MIND
• Fuminori Nakamura’s (b. 1977) philosophical explorations of crime and the individual can be found in his novels like The Thief (2009, English 2012) and Evil and the Mask (2010, English 2013).
• Keigo Higashino (b. 1958) has emerged as one of Japan’s most popular writers abroad. His novels include The Devotion of Suspect X (2005, English 2011), in which physicist Manabu Yukawa brings his cerebral approach to the investigation of crimes.
• Masako Togawa (b. 1933) wrote elaborate psychological mysteries.
• Shizuko Natsuki (b. 1938) wrote thrillers with more sensational premises.
Kenzo Kitakata’s (b. 1947) varied pulp thrillers with their strong protagonists—the yakuza (gangster) insider who narrates Ashes (1990, English 2003), the intense painter from Winter Sleep (1996, English 2005) who has killed before, and the former gang member who now runs a supermarket but still has a taste for his more exciting younger days in The Cage (1983, English 2006)—are consistently entertaining. Kitakata’s tone is by far the most natural and convincing of any of the recent crop of Japanese crime writers.