As the first half of the 2020s comes to a close, one global literary trend shows no signs of abating: a hunger for the stories of Japanese writers. The past five years saw authors from Japan win prestigious literary prizes at home and abroad, while a growing interest in translated East Asian literature contributed to an uptick in the number of Japanese novels translated into English.
Over the past year, for example, Asako Yuzuki’s “Butter,” a thriller inspired by a real-life femme fatale and translated by Polly Barton, was named the Waterstones Book of the Year. Meanwhile, Haruki Murakami — who retains his own center of gravity in the literary landscape, perennially drawing Nobel speculation but no prize as of yet — saw two new releases arrive in 2024 with the publication of “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” translated by Philip Gabriel, and “End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland,” translated by Jay Rubin. The former is a translation of the author’s latest novel after a six-year hiatus, while the latter revisits Murakami’s earlier work, “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” (1991), previously translated by Alfred Birnbaum. Both titles tread familiar territory in fantastical worlds, iterating on previous works or themes from Murakami’s extensive oeuvre — a kind of literary deja vu that satisfies die-hard fans but hasn’t won over all critics.
Readers’ tastes, however, have not been restricted to scintillating crime stories or literary titans, and the thematic preoccupations of Japanese authors have ranged from the deadly serious and melancholic to the weird, the uncategorizable and the notably softer, fluffier works of the iyashi-kei (healing type) persuasion. Feline-focused fiction by the likes of Syou Ishida and Kiyoshi Shigematsu, translated by E. Madison Shimoda (“We’ll Prescribe You a Cat”) and Jesse Kirkwood (“The Blanket Cats”), are among this year’s releases, as well as the memoir “Mornings With My Cat Mii” by Mayumi Inaba, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
