It’s hard to even imagine the scope of the series of tragedies that have befallen Japan these last few months. First the earthquake, then the tsunami, finally, and probably worst of all, the nuclear disaster said to rival if not surpass the horror that was Chernobyl. It can seem so cruel when one place is beset by such crisis, especially when that place is such a pearl of cultural intrigue.

In an effort to put a positive spin on things, what follows is a brief literary survey of an often inscrutable-seeming culture—inscrutable, if for nothing else, for the 250 years it spent in self-imposed isolation (but more on that later).

The Weird and Wonderful Worlds of Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto

Considering that he wrote a book of short stories entitled After the Quake, inspired by the tragedy of the Kobe earthquake of 1995, Japan’s best-selling and most famous literary export, Haruki Murakami, might well be a great place to start for those not familiar with the author’s often surreal, otherworldly touch (one story in the book is about a giant frog who lives beneath the city of Kobe). While rarely straightforward and often whimsical, Murakami’s stories are also remarkably human and full of the kind of empathy that allows us as readers to enter the lives of those an ocean and so many cultures away. Touted to win the Nobel Prize, whether you read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle—widely considered his (first) masterpiece—or Norwegian Wood, the melancholy love story that remains the bestselling novel of all time in Japan, one thing is certain: if you can buy into them, Murakami’s stories are bound to enchant with their careful balance of the surreal, the tragic and the humorous.

That said, while a critics’ favourite and a bestseller in Japan and, in fact, throughout Asia, Murakami’s surreal and often non-linear tales aren’t for everyone. For a lighter, some might even say fluffier (though no less apt to be surreal), version, there is Banana Yoshimoto, whose books Kitchen and NP have rivaled Murakami’s as blockbuster sensations back in Japan. These deceptively simple, yet always unusual narratives seem to resonate most with young women, being as they are stories of love and melancholy.

The Darker Side of Japan

Not all works out of Japan need be surreal or even strange. Before turning to the ancient side of this old-world culture, it seems pertinent to also present a few of the racier books that have come out of Japan regarding the less savoury aspects of its nightlife. Ryu Murakami (no relation to Haruki) has written some of the more shocking tales of prostitutes and Yakuza gang members. His books, it must be noted, can be rather graphic. For a less intense version of this dark side, Natsuo Kirino, who writes wildly successful thrillers, is a great start. Two of her most famous novels translated into English—Out, and Grotesque—while certainly dark and at times, also fascinatingly provide a slightly feminist spin on a famously patriarchal society. In her page-turning yarns, the women, in other words, get to have their revenge!

Geisha Geisha Geisha

For many a Westerner Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha is an enchanting, if romantic, take on an older, if not ancient, Japan. The book, set in Kyoto before World War II, is also a heck of a page turner and has been a bestseller since its 1997 release for good reason. Meanwhile, for an insider’s take on a geisha tale, Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata is a poetic and sensual love story between a man from Tokyo and the geisha working at the inn he frequents in the rural town near Niigata northwest of Tokyo, in the snow belt that gives the story its name (an area of Japan so deeply embedded in snow much of the winter as to rival the most snow laden parts of British Columbia). Like a haiku poem in no rush to tell its tale but oh so careful to set the scene—and what a stunningly beautiful snowy setting it is—this novel is often considered Kawabata’s masterpiece: no small shakes for an author awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1968.

250 Years of Isolation

Finally, going back a few hundred years in time, perhaps the single most unique aspect to Japan’s modern development comes in response to the over 200 years of self-imposed isolation Japan put itself through from the mid 15^th century until 1854, when Commodore Matthew Perry of the US Navy forced Japan to open its ports to trade, a period all the more notable as it corresponds with a time when the rest of the world was beginning to engage in trade, or, to put it in modern parlance, become globalized. Winner of the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is a virtuoso work of historical fiction set in the late 17^th and early 18^th century (before those doors had been pried open) that imagines a story based around the true event of the Dutch East Indies Company trading post situated at a place called Dejima: a man-made island off the coast at Nagasaki. This post was the only contact the outside world had with Japan and vice versa, and the tale is of the complex politics of these different worlds colliding, trading and, of course, in at least one character’s experience, falling in love.

When not writing fiction or blogging about it, Jonathan Mendelsohn teaches English language at the University of Toronto and writing at York University. He has prayed in synagogues and churches, in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, but mostly he finds his sanctuary inside and in between novels and movie theatres, art galleries and the comfort of a not uncomfortable set of headphones.

For Further Reading:  Murakami fans may enjoy Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Dunes or Kangaroo Notebook.  More realistic but nonetheless fascinating are Junichiro Tanizaki’s Makioka Sisters or Some Prefer Nettles.