aListofBooks

Ultimate Best Books

Genre: Japan (7 books)

The best classic books from the Japan genre.

Memoirs of a Geisha

Memoirs of a Geisha

Arthur Golden

4.54 (13)

One evening in the spring of 1936, when I was a boy of fourteen, my father took me to a dance performance in Kyoto.Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, 'That afternoon when I met so-and-so ... was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon.'

#62
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11,539
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami

4.0 (3)

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to and FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's <i>The Thieving Magpie</i>, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

#261
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2,338
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The Tale of Genji

The Tale of Genji

Murasaki Shikibu

4.0 (4)

In a certain reign (whose can it have been?) someone of no very great rank, among all His Magesty's Consorts and Intimates, enjoyed exceptional favor.

#382
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1,327
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Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Haruki Murakami

4.4 (5)

The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent.

#423
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1,023
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A Wild Sheep Chase

A Wild Sheep Chase

Haruki Murakami

4.0 (5)

It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition.

#433
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971
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Snow Country

Snow Country

Yasunari Kawabata

3.25 (4)

The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.

#469
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746
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An Artist of the Floating World

An Artist of the Floating World

Kazuo Ishiguro

4.5 (2)

If on a sunny day you climb the steep path leading up from the little wooden bridge still referred to around here as ‘the Bridge of Hesitation’, you will not have to walk far before the roof of my house becomes visible between the tops of two gingko trees.

#478
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706
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