The Hunting Gun3 reviews Yasushi Inoue Tuttle Publishing, 2001 A Haunting Depiction of Loneliness + an extraordinary little book + The Hunting Gun In this short piece, an extramarital love between two married people is shown through the reflection of letters by the man's wife, the woman's daughter and the woman herself. With a succinctness of language rarely found elsewhere, with imagery whose starkness matches the sadness of the story's ...             Thousand Cranes20 reviews Yasunari Kawabata Vintage, 1996 Evanescent Eroticism and Death, the Japanese Forte + Subtle prose, powerful content + Kawabata rocks! + Essence of sublime + Tea without Sympathy             During the Rains & Flowers in the Shade: Two Novellas2 reviews Kafu Nagai Stanford University Press, 1994 of rain and flower + Mizu shobai. As Lane Dulop explains in the brief introduction to this book. Nagai Kafu was a ghrumpy man who always looked back to the years before as if they were some golden age. If this was true or not, the only area of society in which Nagai found traces of the days of old were in the districts in which one ...             Confessions of a Yakuza: A Life in Japan's Underworld26 reviews Junichi Saga Kodansha International, 1995 Great Insight + Yakuza book + Despite flaws, worth a read for sure + book review + Interesting...but for deeper reasons than I expected.             Lou-Lan and Other Stories (Japan's Modern Writers) Yasushi Inoue Kodansha America, 1994 Six stories in quest of the hidden treasures of Asia's past from Japanese historical fiction writer, Yasushi Inoue.             The Crazy Iris: And Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath (Oe, Kenzaburo)5 reviews Grove Press, 1994 Don't Listen to A.B.C.D. Reader! + A personal touch to war + The Point + A moving collection depicting the effects of the atomic bomb             American Stories2 reviews Nagai Kafu Columbia University Press, 2000 great read + A Young Writer in a Young Country This book was written by a Japanese man who lived and studied in the United states just after 1900. He stayed in various places around the country such as the state of Washington, Kalamazoo, and New York, among others. His writing was some of the first in its time to shed light on actual American ...             Crackling Mountain and Other Stories2 reviews Osamu Dazai, James O'Brien Tuttle Publishing, 1989 Dazed and Delighted by a Different Dazai + A NIhilistic version of Japanese famous folklore If you've read "Setting Sun" or "No Longer Human" by Dazai and think you've got him pigeon-holed, read this fine collection of his short stories and think again. This is Dazai in a very different key. While the darkness and nihilism characterizing his better known novels still hovers around in the ...             Quicksand8 reviews Junichiro Tanizaki Vintage, 1995 Another Tale Of Obsession + Oh, what a tangled web... + A very absorbing novel! I've been reading a lot of Junichiro Tanizaki lately, and the most recent book I read was Quicksand. It was another love triangle penned from the point of view of an unreliable narrator, which is similar to The Key and Diary of a Mad Old Man. It is yet another story of obsession, desire, and death. ...             The Face of Another8 reviews Kobo Abe Vintage, 2003 Great! + A face to meet the faces that we meet... + The absurdity is almost a character. + 5-stars for the eerie film version by master director Hiroshi Teshigahara + Suspenseful with a mind boggling affect!             The Gourmet Club: A Sextet3 reviews Junichiro Tanizaki Kodansha International, 2003 Overdue short stories in English from a Japanese master + tanizaki + The more Tanizaki the better. The Gourmet Club: A Sextet offers the English-reading world six stories by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, one of the twentieth-century's outstanding Japanese, indeed world, novelists. The stories that comprise this collection span the author's long literary career: Two stories ("The Children" and "The ...             The Woman in the Dunes55 reviews Kobo Abe Vintage, 1991 Scary, but somehow comforting. + Images cascaded in my mind + The World Takes a Psychological Shape The sand pit in Kobo Abe's The Woman In The Dunes is a completely artificial construct, but it never feels that way. In reality, sand doesn't behave the way described in the book. When the director Hiroshi Teshigahara made the film adaptation ("Woman In The Dunes," recently reissued by Criterion, ...             Snow Country47 reviews Yasunari Kawabata Vintage, 1996 Multi-layered thematic subtlety + Exploration of futile emotion + A Beautiful Story Set In Snow Country + Book Order             Kappa (Peter Owen Modern Classics) (Peter Owen Modern Classic)7 reviews Akutagawa Ryunosuke Peter Owen Ltd, 2004 The distorted mirror of Kappaland + Human Visits the Land of Japanese Water Sprites + Memorable satire + a book with a difference             Memories of Silk and Straw: A Self-Portrait of Small-Town Japan5 reviews Junichi Saga Kodansha International, 1990 A vanished world + far away and not so long ago + well written and interesting. + Memories of Silk and Straw + Excellent 1st person accounts of pre-war japan             Death in Midsummer: And Other Stories11 reviews Yukio Mishima New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1966 Very impressive + Classic mishima yet lacking + His talent + Piercing Clarity + Great Artist and Nationalist             The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea47 reviews Yukio Mishima Vintage, 1994 Mishima's Haunting Love Story. + Strange, Disconcerting, Beautifully Written + Stark and Spare + Sick, beautiful, euphoric - Mishima couldn't stop             Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!6 reviews Kenzaburo Oe Grove Press, 2003 As much about poetic imagination as postwar Japan + Moving, Thoughtful, Layers of Meaning + More Rousing than Most Oe Novels + floating             Beauty and Sadness13 reviews Yasunari Kawabata Vintage, 1996 Revenge + A bleak study of intertwined sexual relationships + Art and suffering + Beauty and Sadness             House of the Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories13 reviews Yasunari Kawabata Kodansha International, 2004 3 Stories, 1 Theme - The loneliness and desires of old age + Love and Death + Pushing the envelope + The terror of lust by the approach of death