The Greatest Works of Japanese Literature

Japan is one of the very few literary cultures that can credibly claim to have invented the novel independently of the West. The Tale of Genji, written by the Heian courtier Murasaki Shikibu around the year 1010, is longer than Don Quixote, psychologically more subtle than anything in European literature until Austen, and — in the judgment of scholars who have made the comparison seriously — the first true novel in world literature. That it was written by a woman at a court where literary Chinese was the male prestige language, and that it survived intact for a millennium, makes it one of the most improbable masterpieces ever produced.

The tradition that Genji helped found is distinctive. Japanese literature has a long love affair with extreme concision (the haiku, at seventeen syllables, may be the shortest durable literary form anywhere), with seasonal awareness, with the pathos of transience — mono no aware, the sadness of things — and with the aesthetic productive of understatement. The Heian diaries of Sei Shōnagon and the haiku of Bashō sit next to long narrative works in a tradition where no one form has ever quite dominated.

The modern period, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, forced Japanese writers to absorb European literary forms at high speed. The result, by the twentieth century, was a Japanese novel that drew on both traditions — Sōseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata, Mishima, Ōe. Kawabata and Ōe each won the Nobel Prize. The list below includes the Japanese-tradition works in our catalog, ranked by Great Books of Mankind score. It is short but it is concentrated — the entry-point for anyone who wants to understand the most continuous non-Western literary tradition in the world.