Japanese Literature Flashcards
This father of the Japanese short story is most famous for his works “Hell Screen” “In a Grove” and “Rashomon.” The latter features a thief taking the robes of an old woman who had tried to steal corpse hair and “In a Grove” was the basis for a hit movie confusingly called Rashomon.
Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Japanese Haiku poet who wrote the collection “Narrow Road to the Deep North” of haikus about a trip he made and “The Seashell Game” critiquing and comparing haikus against each other.
Matsui Basho
Japanese author who wrote about the aristocrat Shimamura’s liaison with a geisha in Snow Country along with a master player’s last game with a young and up and coming star in The Master of Go. In his work Thousand Cranes, WWII orphan Kikuji has affairs with both Ms. Ota and her daughter Fumiko. This author also wrote a bunch of very short “Palm-of-the-hand” stories.
Yasunari Kawabata
This Japanese author and friend of Kawabata is known for “Confessions of a Mask” about the gay Kochan and “Temple of the Golden Pavilion.” Politically far-right, he committed seppuku on live TV after a coup to restore imperial power failed.
Yukio Mishima
This Japanese author of 1Q84, in which the woman Aomane gets involved with both her childhood love Tengo and a religious cult in a fictionalized 1984, and the sci-fi novel The Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, also wrote The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, where a character meets different people while searching for his wife’s missing cat.
Haruki Murakami
This novel is titled after a Beatles song which when heard by the 37 year old Toru Watanbe ignites his memory of his college days. The rest of the novel is a flashback, with Watanbe getting into relationships with both the emotionally fragile but beautiful Naoke (his dead friend’s old boyfriend) and the outgoing and vivacious Midori Kobayashi (his classmate).
Norwegian Wood
This novel follows the title runaway in the odd chapters and the old and somewhat mentally challenged cat-finder (not to be confused with Wind Up Bird Chronicle) Nakata.
Kafka on the Shore
Author of Tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu
Probably the first novel in world history, featuring the title son of the Emperor Kiritsubo who has a forbidden love for his young step-mother Lady Fujitsubo and who bears a son Reizei with her. The title character has three actual marriages, but all of them fall apart and in a blank chapter titled “Vanishing into the Clouds” he presumably dies. The last few chapters are called the “Uji chapters” and deal with the title character’s nephew’s son Kaoru.
The Tale of Genji
This Japanese author wrote about Bird grappling with the reality of having a mentally disabled son in “A Personal Matter,” fifteen boys in a plague-stricken village in “Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids” and Takashi’s rebellion against a Korean supermarket owner amusingly called “the Emperor” in The Silent Cry. He was inspired for many of his books by his autistic son and is a prominent anti-war activist.
Kenzaburo Oe
