Here is a List of 10 Best Japanese Novels. These Novels are available on Amazon. Japanese literature were heavily influenced by cultural contact with China and Chinese literature, and were often written in Classical Chinese.
Author : Héctor García, Francesc Miralles
It's the Japanese word for ‘a reason to live’ or ‘a reason to jump out of bed in the morning’.
It’s the place where your needs, desires, ambitions, and satisfaction meet. A place of balance. Small wonder that finding your ikigai is closely linked to living longer.
Finding your ikigai is easier than you might think. This book will help you work out what your own ikigai really is, and equip you to change your life. You have a purpose in this world: your skills, your interests, your desires and your history have made you the perfect candidate for something. All you have to do is find it.
Author : Mieko Kawakami
A quixotic and funny tale about first love - from the akutagawa Prize-winning author. A boy is obsessed with a woman who sells sandwiches. He goes to the supermarket almost every day, just so he can look at her face. She is beautiful to him, and he calls her “MS ice sandwich”, and endlessly draws her portrait. But the boy’s friend hears about this hesitant adoration, and suddenly everything changes. His visits to MS ice sandwich stop, and with them the last hopes of his childhood. A moving and surprisingly funny tale of growing up and learning how to lose, MS ice sandwich is mieko kawakami at her very best.
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Author : Haruki Murakami
Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy.
The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down.
As their parallel odysseys unravel, cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghost-like pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since World War II. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle - one of many which combine to create an elegant and dreamlike masterpiece.
Author : Keigo Higashino
Acclaimed bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found brutally murdered in his home on the night before he's planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver. His body is found in his office, in a locked room, within his locked house, by his wife and his best friend, both of whom have rock solid alibis. Or so it seems.
Police Detective Kyochiro Kaga recognizes Hidaka's best friend. Years ago when they were both teachers, they were colleagues at the same high school. Kaga went on to join the police force while Osamu Nonoguchi left to become a full-time writer, though with not nearly the success of his friend Hidaka. But Kaga thinks something is a little bit off with Nonoguchi's statement and investigates further, ultimately executing a search warrant on Nonoguchi's apartment...
Author : Haruki Murakami
She waited on tables as usual that day, her twentieth birthday. She always worked Fridays, but if things had gone according to plan on that particular Friday, she would have had the night off.
One rainy Tokyo night, a waitress’s uneventful twentieth birthday takes a strange and fateful turn when she’s asked to deliver dinner to the restaurant’s reclusive owner. Birthday Girl is a beguiling, exquisitely satisfying taste of master storytelling, published to celebrate Murakami’s 70th birthday.
Birthday Girl is also available in Birthday Stories and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.
Author : Haruki Murakami
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
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Author : Toshiyuki Horie
A Japanese man, far from home, travels the countryside of Normandy with a friend - talking about war, literature, and everything in between. As his ideas of his life become more entangled with his personal writing, the pangs of his past and his half-forgotten memories overlap and threaten his peace.
Owing a debt to French writers from La Fontaine to Proust, the three fable-like tales in The Bear and the Paving Stone are stories of loss, memory and a longing to belong.
Author : Toshiki Okada
In two stunning tales by novelist-playwright Toshiki Okada, characters stagger and thrash, bound by a generational hunger for human connection. On the eve of the Iraq War a couple find unexpected deliverance - fleeting and anonymous - at a love hotel. And wheels spin as a woman aches for something more from her husband, even as she knows she has enough.
Snapshots of moments high and low, these stories introduce us to an unsettlingly honest voice in contemporary Japanese fiction.
Author : Shunmyo Masuno
Zen is the perfect antidote to the stress and uncertainty of modern life . . .
In clear, practical and easy to follow lessons - one a day for 100 days - renowned Buddhist monk Shunmyo Masuno draws on centuries of wisdom to show you how to apply the essence of Zen to modern life.
You will learn how to exhale deeply to eliminate negative emotions, to arrange your house simply to clear your thinking, to line up your shoes at night to bring order to your mind, to plant a single flower and watch it grow, to worry less about what you cannot control, and so much more . . .
Simplify your life with the art of Zen, and learn how to feel more relaxed, fulfilled, and with a renewed sense of peace. Full of the simplest yet richest rituals to adopt in order to live a long and happy life, this book of wisdom is a soothing balm of peace for anyone living in the busy modern world' Psychologies
Author : Yoko Ogawa
Each morning, the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to one another. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant mathematical equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles – based on her shoe size or her birthday – and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.
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