 | The Box Man (Vintage International) by Kobo Abe
Buy new: £7.19 / Used from: £5.76 favourite book by a a japanese author. beautiful and surreal, the two qualities that best sum up contemporary japanese fiction, and this book brims over with both. erotic box magic.
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 | Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
Buy new: £5.63 / Used from: £6.07 obvious choice. sparse and beautiful. too much to say about kawabata. this book sums up all his accomplishments, sadness and beauty, breathtaking, every paragraph is like poetry.
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 | Acts of Worship: Seven Stories by Yukio Mishima
Buy new: £9.89 / Used from: £4.85 a sort of mishima primer. introduces his key themes- masculinity, eroticism and the self. the first story is especially brilliant.
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 | Naomi (Vintage International) by Junichiro Tanizaki
Buy new: £6.37 / Used from: £9.90 originally called 'chijin no ai' which means the love of a fool. witty and poignant. Tanizaki's work embodies japan's struggle with modernity and tradition.
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 | NO LONGER HUMAN O DAZAI by O Dazai
Buy used from: £6.41 The greater the artist, perhaps the greater the internal conflict. Dazai like Mishima is a hard man to like. but the book contains passages of desperation and insight that are rarely matched
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 | Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
Buy used from: £10.95 despite the disturbing Springsteen references, this is Murakami at his best. The combination of low grade sci-fi, the 80s and the surreal subconcious world are dynamite.
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