Born in Tokyo in 1964, Yoshimoto was raised in a liberal and forward-thinking household by a father who himself was a well-renowned artist: the poet, philosopher, and literary critic, Takaaki Yoshimoto.

Here’s our full review of Kitchen

Banana Yoshimoto’s Progressive Politics

It is easy to see the impact such a liberal childhood had on Yoshimoto with one quick glance at the elements which form the real beauty of her 1988 novella Kitchen. In the story we are introduced early on to a pair of characters wholly unique to 1980s Japanese literature: Yuichi and Eriko Tanabe.

As I mentioned in my review: ‘Yuichi lives with his mother, though it is quickly revealed that Eriko was in fact, at one time, his father. After the death of Yuichi’s mother some years ago, Eriko made the choice to undergo a sex change and dedicate herself to continuing her wife’s legacy as a devoted and loving mother’.

This embracing of a trans character (especially one not defined by being trans, thus avoiding becoming a two-dimensional token minority character) would be seen as a hugely progressive step today, let alone thirty years ago, and Eriko’s very existence is the perfect demonstration of the importance of Yoshimoto as an artistic voice in today’s Japan.

Looking at the dedication Eriko has for her son, and the steps she has taken to ensure a good upbringing for him, the value Yoshimoto places on love in all of its forms is plain to see. Love leaves its mark on every single one of her stories.

“Those women lived their lives happily. They had been taught, probably by caring parents, not to exceed the boundaries of their happiness regardless of what they were doing. But therefore they could never know real joy. Which is better? Who can say? Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by ‘their happiness’ is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really all if us, alone. That’s not a bad thing.”

Love in All its Forms

A year after the release of Kitchen came the publication of Goodbye Tsugumi. Set in a sleepy seaside town, this novel explores not the love of a mother or a spouse, but the kind of love that tests all the patience we have in our youth: sisters.

Though in fact cousins, Maria and Tsugumi grew up as part of a very close-knit family and suffered all the frustrations and animosity two sisters are often left with no choice but to suffer, with the added handicap of a disease which Tsugumi was born with.

The illness leaves Tsugumi frequently feverish and tired, and has twisted her, over time, into someone jaded and ugly inside; believing that death will come for her at any moment has left her with an anarchistic hard shell but a vulnerable centre full to bursting.

Regardless of Tsugumi’s venomous nature, her erratic behaviour, and the stress she places on others, often without intention and sometimes for fun, Maria’s attachment to her never wavers, even after she leaves for university in Tokyo.

“For some reason it had occurred to me that love doesn’t ever have to stop. It’s like the national water system, I thought. No matter how long you leave the faucets running, you can be sure the supply won’t give out.”

In the afterword to her short story collection, Lizard, Yoshimoto discusses how she believes that ‘we create our own heaven or hell in the very process of becoming and being our “selves” […] I believe that we are not born with hope, but rather that it comes to us as a transforming force.’

She goes on to discuss our emotional baggage, and the feelings of liberation that come to us at certain times in our lives. In many of the stories found in this collection, men and women are faced with each other, and learn to share the load of one another’s emotional baggage.

In the course of our lives, we learn more about one another: our beauty, our faults and our shortcomings, the growing we have yet to do, and how we may yet help each other. Yoshimoto sees beauty and opportunity in the love we share, and the love we try to hide.

“When I see an elderly man tottering along, and wonder how much longer he has to live. Dogs and cats peeking out from alleyways. A beautiful view from a tall building. The warm blast of air you feel when you go down into a subway station. The phone ringing in the middle of the night. Even when I have crushes on other men, I always see you in the curve of their eyebrows.”

She’s a Rebel; She’s a Saint

In today’s popular literature, rules have formed and solidified. The English author of Japanese birth, Kazuo Ishiguro, has commented more than once on his dislike of genre, feeling that everything has literary merit, and that categorising fiction has led to pomposity and too much judgement.

The dangers of genre certainly ring true when we consider the ways in which books are marketed. There’s the romance novel targeted at middle-aged women on holiday in Barbados, and the unspoken rule that a novel dressed in the trappings of fantasy must have a romantic sub-plot shoehorned in somewhere so as to widen its appeal.Only literary fiction is free where love is concerned.

Banana Yoshimoto is not regarded as literary fiction, and her stories of love defy genre. She is a beast of her own making, a punk amongst composers and pop stars, and she is adored for it. Rightly so. In all her sharp rebellion, Yoshimoto is the patron saint of love.

Explore some of Yoshimoto’s books here.

It doesn’t matter if these are the best Chinese novels or the worst, censorship does not empathise. Not all writers in China butt heads with censorship laws.

Some, like sci-fi writer Chen Qiufan, have managed to avoid it entirely, though they may not know why. Yan Lianke, however, is one of the unlucky few. But then, it only takes a cursory read of any one of his novels to understand why.

Yan Lianke, acclaimed author of some of the best Chinese novels of all time, was born in Henan province (where most of his books are set) in 1958 and now lives in Beijing. He has been writing since the age of twenty, and has produced some of the greatest works of Chinese fiction ever penned. His novels and stories are all inescapably, and heavy-handedly, political.

Here is a writer of deep scepticism, who uses his genius of plotting, writing, setting, and characterisation to challenge the norms of the world he was born into. Chinese historian Jung Chang called Yan Lianke “One of the masters of modern Chinese literature” and with good reason. There is nobody in the world like Yan Lianke.

English translator of Yan’s novels, Carlos Rojas, has remarked that, “several of Yan Lianke’s own works had run into problems with the authorities … following the publication of his 2004 novel Lenin’s Kisses, which describes a harebrained plan to purchase Lenin’s embalmed corpse from Russie and use it as the basis for a Chinese tourist site, Yan was dismissed from his position with the People’s Liberation Army … His following novel, Serve the People!, which offers a parody of Maoist rhetoric during the Cultural Revolution, never got through the censors … his 2006 novel about China’s rural AIDS epidemic, Dream of Ding Village, was initially published but then recalled.”

It’s rare for Yan Lianke’s books to be published in mainland China. As a result, publishers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore frequently pick up and publish his works. All of this is to say that Yan Lianke is an author of extreme political venom, with the wit and wisdom to deconstruct and expose cracks in the recent history, political structure, and economic system of his own nation.

For all of his battles with censorship in his home country, what we in the English speaking world have is an uncensored library of some of the best Chinese novels ever written.

Yan Lianke’s Novels

Few authors in the entire world right now have the imagination and courage of Yan Lianke. Frequently whispered about in excited tones when the Nobel Prize comes around, Yan Lianke is China’s most revolutionary, exciting, and entertaining writer; author of some of the best Chinese novels ever written.

Here are five of Yan Lianke’s best novels, all available in English right now.

Lenin’s Kisses

A darkly satirical novel which began its author’s journey down a road of suppression and censorship. Lenin’s Kisses tells the story of a small rural village (as do most of his novels). This village is populated by sick and elderly people who are struggling against starvation and natural disasters.

In a desperate bid to bring money and attention to their village, a scheme is hatched to steal the corpse of Vladimir Lenin from Russia and bring it to the village as a source of tourism and media attention.

Dream of Ding Village

Henan province is where Yan Lianke was born and raised. It is also the province once hit by its own AIDS epidemic at the hands of commercial companies known as “bloodheads”.

One Guardian article explained, “offered Chinese peasants a tempting deal in the early and mid-1990s: give us your blood, we will extract the plasma and let you have the rest back – plus some cash. Red blood cells were returned to the peasants from a tainted pool using unhygienic equipment.”

Dream of Ding Village is a novelisation of this epidemic and how it affected one Henan village. Full of angry satire and told from an intimate family perspective, this novel gives voices to those unknown people affected by Chinese hushed AIDS epidemic.

For proof of why Yan Lianke writes some of the very best Chinese novels, look no further than Dream of Ding Village.

Read More: 10 Incredible Chinese Novels in Translation

The Four Books

Here is a book that exists as a kind of response to the Chinese government’s dismissal and censorship of its writer. The Four Books is set during the Cultural Revolution, in a re-education camp where educated (and therefore dangerous) citizens would be imprisoned, put to work, and re-educated in order to toe the line of the Mao regime.

Our protagonists are The Author, The Scholar, The Musician, and The Theologian. Each of them is recording their experiences in their own voice, making for a disjointed narrative that refreshes with each chapter. The unique and varied structure of this novel is half of its genius. The other half lies in its unfiltered, unrestrained political satire.

The re-education camp’s leader is a man known only as The Child; his actions and commands reflect so much of the Mao regime, especially with regards to its pride-fuelled rhetoric and impossible demands (like the farming of crops that didn’t exist, which led to a famine that caused the deaths of millions).

No Yan Lianke book is as unsheathed and brutally damning as The Four Books. This is China’s best writer at his peak, and therefore undoubtedly one of the best Chinese novels ever written.

The Explosion Chronicles

This is a novel that satirises greed and self-indulgence, and takes a scathing look at the repercussions of this attitude to life. It’s a book pointed at the Chinese government and at modern China in general, but that doesn’t mean its morals and message can’t be applied to any country and culture in the world right now, as is the case with almost every one of Yan’s novels.

The Explosion Chronicles is set in a village near the Balou Mountains – a frequent setting for Yan’s novels. The village has stood for a thousand years, but in the post-Mao era it has been hit by rapid economic and structural growth, transforming it from a village into a city.

The novel explores how such an expansion affects a place and the people who live there in the darkest and most truthful ways possible.

The Day the Sun Died

At the time of writing, this is Yan Lianke’s newest novel. Translated by Carlos Rojas, The Day the Sun Died explores and deconstructs the Chinese Dream. It tells the story of a quiet rural village from the perspective of a young, wide-eyed boy called Li Niannian.

One night, after the village falls quiet, its residents begin to get up and sleepwalk back to work. They till the fields diligently, in a zombie-like state, for a while until things begin to unravel. Li is the only one not under this spell.

The Day the Sun Died is a deconstruction of the Chinese Dream. It takes the concept literally and asks readers to consider what the enactment of the Chinese Dream looks like on the ground level, in the small and unknown places that hide the backbone of China’s economy and social structure.

It’s a surreal and strange novel with bold and clear ideas and a laser focus pointed at government legislation and political rhetoric. Another work of genius and one of the best Chinese novels of this century.

Read our full review here!

Sadly, it’s only really in the years following his death that he’s started to gain wider recognition in the English speaking world through posthumous translations of his work that have garnered much critical acclaim. His bibliography spans poetry, short stories, novels and essays.

‘Books can do so many things – sometimes they spur you on to study, sometimes they entertain and sometimes they drive you to write yourself. Every time I read Bolaño I feel so inspired, I just want to write…He’s a genius – the expansiveness he creates, how he relates one book to another – he’s set a new template for writing. [When I read] I look for new landscapes, new experiences and, most importantly, for beautifully written books. That’s why I love Bolaño – he’s a master of language.’

– Patti Smith

On paper, Bolaño comes perilously close to sounding like a caricature of the high-brow literary experimentalist, given, as he is, to name-checking and referencing other literary and poetic figures both well known and obscure. Bolaño also had many of his characters (who are often writers, poets, publishers and literature professors themselves) engage in detailed literary critique and often centring his stories around imagined authors and literary movements.

His work is literature that grapples with its own identity as literature, interrogating its own nature whilst trying to shine a none-too-flattering light on the wider intellectual culture it stems from.

Throughout his work Bolaño imparts on his reader an acute feeling of melancholy and apprehension that derives not from a surreal otherness or existentialist probing of the absurdity of existence, but rather through an almost hyperreal magnification of the eerily haunted surfaces that already coat the world all around us.

Bolaño considered himself first and foremost a poet, only turning to fiction much later as a way to support his family, and the effects of this on his prose writing are clear. Bolaño plucks away the membrane separating the inner world of the human being with its perennial seeking and questioning from the external world that refuses to give us answers yet will not be silent either.

It’s an excellent choice of vehicle because it naturally facilitates an exploration of another of Bolaño’s common themes: violence. For all of his fixation on literary movements and the poetic community, Bolaño remained a deeply political figure (though these two domains often walk hand in hand in Latin America).

He spent time involved with journalism and political activism and allegedly spent a few days under arrest during the Pinochet regime.

As a result, there is also a very visceral element to much of his work, a reminder that however lofty our intellectual aspirations may be there is a very solid, very physical world out there threatening to snatch away our foundations at any moment.

The Best Books of Roberto Bolaño

It’s fair to say that Roberto Bolaño remains a difficult read, but more often than not it’s a difficulty born of trying to comprehend the not quite comprehensible. He shows us confronting a world that is fundamentally wrong yet one that offers no clue as to what right is either. Robert Bolaño has an extensive back catalogue as numerous unpublished works were found after his death.

The Savage Detectives

Bolaño’s fourth and really breakthrough novel. It traces the movements over several decades of the core figures of a poetic movement called the Visceral Realists. This was a group that most likely takes inspiration from and to an extent parodies the real life Infrarealist movement of which Bolaño was a founding member.

In fact, one of the central figures of the novel is a Chilean poet named Arturo Belano who in many ways represents Bolaño himself.

The novel tells its story through a myriad of different voices, some recurring numerous times, others only making single appearances, some sections last whole chapters and could almost stand alone as short stories whereas other narrators are only allotted half a page. It’s a bold and exciting work that won Bolaño the 1999 Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize.

“Belano, I said, the heart of the matter is knowing whether evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it0 is random or purposeful. If it’s purposeful, we can fight it, it’s hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less.

If it’s random, on the other hand, we’re fucked, and we’ll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. And that’s what it all comes down to.”

2666

Bolaño’s final work and one that can rightly be considered a tour de force. Published a year after his death and originally intended to be released as 5 separate books, it was instead compiled into one 5 volume novel with the English translation weighing in around 900 pages.

It draws together the hallmarks of Bolaño’s style; forlorn mystery and literary speculation, violence and crime, and the sense of unease and something bad lurking in the skin of the world.

The novel links the search for a reclusive German novelist Benno von Archimboldi with the seemingly unending spate of murders of women taking place in the Mexican city of Santa Teresa (based on the real-life Ciudad Juárez).

It’s a staggering work that left me feeling untethered and disorientated in once familiar spaces for days after and dare I say that it even made me feel previously unfelt emotions.

Last Evenings On Earth

This English language collection gathers together stories found in the Spanish language collections Llamadas Telefonicas and Putas Asesinas.

The stories introduce us to an array of the lost, the wandering and the despondent, taking us between South America and Europe on the way. Although some of the stories veer too far into these are more than made up for by the stronger pieces.

The highlight is the titular story in which Bolaño injects an insidious sense of uneasiness into a father and son’s coastal vacation mounting to a climax that leaves you grasping and flinching. It’s a masterwork of mounting anticipation and unresolved tension. Taken as a whole, the collection is one that will haunt the reader’s imagination.

The Unknown University

A deluxe collection of most of Bolaño’s poetry, Laura Healy’s translation was shortlisted for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award. Many of the poems here were written whilst he was still a youth and the growing mind of the writer is evident in the variety of different forms and style on display. 

The quality varies greatly but there are some truly penetrating pieces on offer. Some of the poems are almost prose pieces and provide a glimpse into the germination of his later fiction style. He can create a beautiful lyricism out of the coldness of neon lights spread across Mexico City nights.

Related: Exploring Cambodia’s History with Jon Swain’s River of Time and Author Spotlight: The Life and Works of Banana Yoshimoto

Yasunari Kawabata endured the sorrow of his early years and went on to become a highly acclaimed writer in his homeland, gaining recognition right from the very start of his writing career with the publication of a number of short stories, including The Dancing Girl of Izu, not long after graduating from university.

Kawabata would proceed to publish numerous acclaimed novels and novellas, some of which, such as The Master of Go, would initially appear in serialized form in national newspapers. He founded the literary journal Bungei Jidai (The Artistic Age) along with other young Japanese writers, including the modernist novelist Riichi Yokomitsu.

The journal’s philosophy was termed ‘Shinkankukuha’ and sought to explore and deliver new sensations and perceptions in reaction to both the traditionalist approach to Japanese literature and the newly emerging proletarian literature associated with the socialist and communist schools.

In 1968, Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, becoming the first Japanese writer to win the award. Yasunari Kawabata died on the 16^th of April 1972 and there is still speculation to this day as to whether or not he took his own life.

Related: Japan’s Nobel Prize Winners

Kawabata wrote with a graceful and light touch that retained a sense of refined composure even when dealing with subject matter as dark as suicide, adultery and abandonment. His novels exemplify a honed efficiency, many of them can easily be read in a single long afternoon and even the longer works are written in a clean and concise prose that allows the reader to glide through the pages.

The brevity of many of Kawabata’s writings, however, is not for want of depth or content, but rather evidence of an aversion to excess and an artful balancing of a few carefully selected elements that come across as unmistakably and quintessentially Japanese in character.

 Poetry and the Sublime

Many of his novels have the feel of a bell chime, opening with a loaded image that continues to resound throughout the rest of the story before drawing to a close with the final pages of the book.

For example, in his most famous work, Snow Country, the novel opens with a train ride through the mountainous countryside in which the narrator, staring out the window, superimposes the reflected face of a beautiful female passenger onto the darkening night sky and landscape outside.

Kawabata’s sparse yet wholly poetic opening is a masterstroke of foreshadowing in a novel that will confront the relationship between art, beauty, lust and love, in a near ethereal landscape, shown through a fragmented and sometimes drunken narration in which the main character finds himself unable to truly feel present and real before the beautiful geisha he has an affair with.

It reaches a harmony in the way the final image of the novel is of a brilliant moon hanging above that same night sky and illuminating the shocking climax.

This same technique is apparent in A Thousand Cranes and The Old Capital which, together with Snow Country, are the works cited by the Nobel Commission in its decision to award Kawabata with the prize.

In A Thousand Cranes the protagonist Kikuji finds himself subject to the manipulations of Chikako, a teacher of tea ceremony and an embittered former mistress of his deceased father, who uses the setting of the tea house to engage in a jealous war against Mrs Ota, another former mistress of Kikuji’s father, who has transferred her affections on to the son.

Early on in the novel we are presented with the image of Chikako sat in the tea house, trimming the hairs from a disfiguring birthmark on her breast as rats scurry in the hollow ceiling and a peach tree blooms outside. A still life that displays both the elegance and grace of the tradition that is the short novel’s setting, whilst simultaneously containing the moral corruption and decay of the jealous flesh that is its story’s principal driver.

A Thousand Words Paint a Beautiful Picture

The Old Capital is set in Kyoto and centres on Chieko Sada, the adopted daughter of a kimono designer, Takichiro, who, whilst mournful at the decline of the traditional arts and crafts, finds himself inspired to produce strange and unusual new kimono designs.

A chance meeting with her estranged twin and a glimpse into the rural mountain life that she otherwise would have lived, set Chieko on a path of doubt and self-questioning.

The novel opens with Chieko stood in the garden contemplating the spring violets blooming on the twisted, moss-covered trunk of an old maple tree. She meditates on two violets in particular that have been there for as long as she can remember yet have always remained a foot apart:

“Do the upper and lower violets ever meet? Do they know each other?” Chieko mused. What could it mean to say that the violets “meet” or “know” one another?…

…Sometimes she was moved by the “life” of the violets on the tree. Other times their “loneliness” touched her heart.

Another perfectly composed still life that gathers together the themes of separation and reunion, youth and age, and the contemplation of beauty that run through The Old Capital.

Beauty and Sadness begins with another train ride and leaves the reader with the lingering image of a rattling chair in a near empty carriage – a fitting metaphor for a story that sees the main character’s long-ago love affair with a young Kyoto artist come back to haunt him and set into motion a calamitous swirl of revenge and eroticism at the hands of the artist’s jealous new lover whose venomous machinations will cause his successful and neatly ordered life to unravel before culminating in a final unavoidable and dreadful act of revenge.

Kawabata’s writing career started and ended with short stories. He developed a style of brief, sharp and lucid prose pieces, often only a page and a half to two pages in length, that he termed ‘Palm-of-the-hand stories’, a delightful image that also serves as the title of a collection of many of these pieces.

Of these stories Kawabata commented:

Many writers, in their youth, write poetry; I, instead of poetry, wrote the palm-of-the-hand stories. Among them are unreasonably fabricated pieces, but there are more than a few good ones that flowed from my pen naturally, of their own accord…. [T]he poetic spirit of my young days lives on in them.

An illuminating commentary as, besides from their brevity, many of these stories operate more like poems in the way that they bind images to moods to convey their insights, often their meanings more in a feeling or an altered perception, rather than in an explicitly articulated moral, much as how the best poetry tends to work.

Highlights include the tragi-comedy of Lavatory Buddhahood, the examination of lust and sexuality in The Shin-O Jizo, and the dark nightmare vision of Goldfish on the Roof.

Tradition vs Modernity

Much of the portrayal of Japan in English-speaking Western world centres on a facade of eccentric kitsch, high-tech neon utopia, and zany video game and anime exuberance; or an equally lampoonable and cliched sense of Eastern mystique.

Anyone who has more than a passing acquaintance with Japan will recognise much of what appears in Kawabata’s work in spite of the time gap.

Kawabata’s characters find themselves anxiously caught between a rigid and stifling expectation of obedience to tradition on the one hand and on the other, a changing modern world that threatens to pull the familiar from under their feet and leave them adrift and lacking solid foundation.

They must navigate the often oppressive world of Japanese custom and social convention, agonising over trying to read the hidden intention in subtle acts; the choice of tea bowl, the patterning of a kimono, the hour to call for a social visit and so on. Here too is the gulf in communication and understanding between the sexes which is further compounded by the divergent world views of the conflicting generations.

Nevertheless, in the spaces between and around the traps and pitfalls of the human social world, shines a calm and often unspoken beauty; Kawabata has a knack for highlighting the tranquillity and sublimity that permeate the pauses in our daily lives.

For those looking to broaden their reading of ‘serious’ literature beyond the Western canon, Yasunari Kawabata is a fine starting point, eminently readable and accessible, providing a glimpse into the troubles of his own time and society whilst still offering us a way of seeing our own.

If you liked this you might like Author Spotlight: The Life and Works of Robert Bolano or Author Spotlight: Banana Yoshimoto.

Ishiguro is my favourite author, and his win had me soaring (though I am hoping for a female Japanese writer to gain wider recognition in the western world soon – a prize for Banana Yoshimoto wouldn’t go amiss). With Ishiguro’s win, I decided to travel back and read Japan’s other two Nobel Prize winners: Kanzaburo Oe and Yasunari Kawabata.

Here, in a nutshell, are the gifts each man has given to the world of literature.

Kazuo Ishiguro (Nobel Laureate 2017)

As he delivers his Nobel acceptance speech, Ishiguro muses on the Japan of his memories, a place he left at the age of five. He recalls specific details of his early life in Nagasaki, and as he does so he remarks:

‘As I was growing up, long before I’d ever thought to create fictional worlds in prose, I was busily constructing in my mind a richly detailed place called Japan. A place to which I in some way belonged.’

As a young man Ishiguro was forced to come to terms with the fact that his own personal Japan was nothing that he could visit in the real world.

‘The Japan that existed in my head might always have been an emotional construct put together by a child out of memory, imagination, and speculation.’

This realisation brought him and his stories together.

‘What I was doing was getting down on paper that world’s special colours […] its dignity, its shortcomings; everything I’d ever thought about the place before they faded forever from my mind.’

And so from this need to write about his fantastical alternative Japan, the one that had been left to flourish in his imagination, the young Ishiguro wrote two novels: one set in Ishiguro’s hometown of Nagasaki (A Pale View of Hills, 1982) and the other in the capital, Tokyo (An Artist of the Floating World, 1986).

The theme that runs through both of these novels, as well as Ishiguro’s third (The Remains of the Day) is that of memory, specifically its ability to betray us and our willingness to ignore or distort it. Memory is not reliable, and it can be used as a tool for lying to others or to ourselves.

Looking back to Ishiguro’s fantastical memories of Japan versus the real Japan that continued to exist without his existence in it, it’s easy to see why he puts so much attention on the power of memory He has managed to build his career as a genius wordsmith and story craftsman around this idea of the daunting power of personal memory versus history.

In A Pale View of Hills we have our protagonist, Etsuko, now an aged woman living alone in rural England. Her youngest daughter, Niki, comes to visit her after the suicide of Niki’s older sister, Keiko. This sets in motion a painful journey of recollection as Etsuko wanders through memories of her past life in Nagasaki and her friendship with the elusive, naïve, and irresponsible Sachiko.

Parallels are soon drawn between these two mothers, and Etsuko’s relationship to her daughter and her own memories continue to grow brittle and strained.

Ishiguro’s second novel, and my own personal favourite (as well as that of several fans and critics), is An Artist of the Floating World. Set in Tokyo during the fallout of World War II, the story follows our narrator, the once famous ukiyo-e painter Masuji Ono, as Masuji deals with the preparations for his youngest daughter’s upcoming marriage.

As the arrangements progress, Ono is forced to face his past and the relationship between his art, his politics, and Japan’s role in the second Great War. The character of Ono is absolutely one of the most subtly complex to be found in modern literature.

A father who begins his tale stoic and self-assured, his visage begins to crumble over time and his way of seeing the world and his place in it is called into question time and again. Repeat reads of this beautiful masterpiece uncover deeper and deeper layers to Ono’s character. An Artist of the Floating World is an undisputed masterwork of literary fiction, and reason enough to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

Kenzaburo Oe (Nobel Laureate 1994)

Of the three winners, I have chosen to give Oe the title of ‘The Rebel’ because, as The Paris Review put it:

‘In 1994 Oe accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature but then declined Japan’s highest artistic honour, the Order of Culture, because of its ties to his country’s emperor-worshipping past. The decision made him a figure of great national controversy, a position he has frequently occupied in the course of his writing life […] He has remained in the political spotlight ever since and considers his activism to be as much his life’s work as literature.’

In the same Paris Review interview, Oe summed up his own political beliefs in a simple, beautiful sentence:

‘In principle, I am an anarchist. Kurt Vonnegut once said he was an agnostic who respects Jesus Christ. I am an anarchist who loves democracy.’

Much like Ishiguro, Oe’s writing stems from his interactions with his own Japan, but while Ishiguro’s Japan is one somewhat fantastical, Oe’s is one of political turmoil, social struggle, and the fight for change.

Born in 1935, Oe lived through the Second World War and saw the devastation and the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This, of course, had a profound and lasting impact on his writing. Most notably, his long essay Hiroshima Notes (1965), which describes the thoughts and lives of the victims of these tragedies.

Arguable Oe’s most famous work to date, The Silent Cry (known in Japanese as 万延元年のフットボール; Man’en Gannen no Futtoboru, literally ‘Football in the First Year of Man’en‘) tells the story of two brothers, the narrator and introverted academic Mitsusaburo, and his borderline-eccentric younger brother Takashi, who has just returned to Tokyo from New York.

After Mitsu and his wife make the choice to leave their handicapped infant child in an asylum, and Mitsu struggles with learning about the suicide of a friend (in a particularly and oddly erotic manner), he and his brother Takashi return to the village of their youth, to do business and battle with a Korean slave-turned-CEO known as ‘the Emperor of Supermarkets’ who wishes to expand his empire.

At its most philosophical, The Silent Cry is an examination of the ruination both modern/urban and ancient/rural Japan has seen, at both its own hand and that of Western influence. As the Japan Times noted about the novel:

‘Metropolitan Japan is selfish and violent, riven with riots, while rural Japan is disintegrating, populated by freaks such as Jin, “the fattest woman in Japan” and Gii, a draft-dodging hermit.’

The Silent Cry is a rare novel, the kind that may rightly win its author a Nobel Prize all on its own, and a perfect place to start your journey into Kenzaburo Oe’s works and philosophies.

Yasunari Kawabata (Nobel Laureate 1968)

What arguably defines the writing of Japan’s first Nobel Prize winner is his ability to capture a scene or a moment. Similar to the style and purpose of haiku poets, Kawabata is able to bring nature, weather, setting, and mood to life in a very tangible and dense way.

His words carry weight but they also flow and flutter playfully. He has a simplicity to his writing but a density to his tone. To marry all of these disparate feelings in such an effortless way is the reason why he was named a Nobel Laureate.

Born in Osaka in 1899, Kawabata was far more of a Japanese traditionalist than his contemporaries (Oe and Ishiguro), with much of his writing circling the themes of death and loneliness, as well as having a frequent discussion with the relationship between Japan and the influence that the West has had on his home.

Kawabata’s most famous novel, Snow Country (1948), famously took 12 years to complete and tells the story of a lonely geisha who lives in an isolated onsen (hot spring) town and her love affair with a man from Tokyo.

As expressed in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, at his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Kawabata said that, through his writing, he had attempted to beautiful death, and to seek harmony among man, nature, and emptiness.

If you liked this list, you may enjoy: Five Female Asian Writers to Move your Heart and Mind