100 books like Floating Clouds

By Fumiko Hayashi, Lane Dunlop (translator),

Here are 100 books that Floating Clouds fans have personally recommended if you like Floating Clouds. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

Loren Stephens Author Of All Sorrows Can Be Borne

From my list on the traditional and modern Japanese mind.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always been fascinated by family histories, and am the self-selected historian in my family. I wrote my mother’s memoir, I Turned a Key and the Birds Began to Sing, put together a newsletter for aunts, uncles, and cousins near and far, and became a ghostwriter to help other people mine their personal and family stories. I’ve worked with company CEOs, survivors of the Holocaust; World War II U.S. veterans, and Hollywood celebrities. In the midst of writing books for other people I turned my sights on my husband who was born in Osaka, Japan and asked his permission to write his family’s story.  

Loren's book list on the traditional and modern Japanese mind

Loren Stephens Why did Loren love this book?

Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, this book gives the reader an in-depth analysis of the effects of World War II on the political, economic, and social life of the Japanese people. It depicts the ways in which Japan moved into the twentieth century and gave up many of its feudalistic habits – some for the better and some for the worse. 

By John W. Dower,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Embracing Defeat as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources and illustrated with dozens of astonishing documentary photographs, Embracing Defeat is the fullest and most important history of the more than six years of American occupation, which affected every level of Japanese society, often in ways neither side could anticipate. Dower, whom Stephen E. Ambrose has called "America's foremost historian of the Second World War in the Pacific," gives us the rich and turbulent interplay between West and East, the victor and the vanquished, in a way never before attempted, from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes…


Book cover of Empire of Signs

Nadine Willems Author Of Ishikawa Sanshiro's Geographical Imagination: Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth-Century Japan

From my list on Japan’s postwar years.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an academic historian in the UK, and before that, I was a journalist in Tokyo, where I lived for twenty years. To me, Japan is one of the most intriguing and sensuous places on earth. I never tire of its smells, sounds, signs, and flavours. The language is mesmerizing. The landscapes are stunning. The culture is endlessly surprising. I research and write about Japan’s past – its transformations, upheavals, and traditions – to make sense of the incredible array of experiences I have encountered while living there. 

Nadine's book list on Japan’s postwar years

Nadine Willems Why did Nadine love this book?

Philosopher Roland Barthes visited Japan in the 1960s when it had rebuilt and reinvented itself as a global economic power. Empire of Signs, which he published a few years later, is a profound, yet entertaining reflection on “otherness” and how it helps us see ourselves. I read the slim volume – in the original French – in the plane that took me to Tokyo for the first time. It was a revelation and has inspired me ever since to look for the myriads of little things that fascinate and contradict all preconceived ideas. The book is a wonderful and subtle lesson in seeing the invisible!

By Roland Barthes, Richard Howard (translator),

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Empire of Signs as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Now it happens that in this country (Japan),' wrote Barthes, 'the empire of signifiers is so immense, so in excess of speech, that the exchange of signs remains of a fascinating richness mobility and subtlety.' It is not the voice that communicates, but the whole body - eyes, smiles, hair, gestures. The body is savoured, received and displays its own narrative, its own text. Barthes discusses bowing, the courtesy in which two bodies inscribe but do not prostrate themselves, and why in the West politeness is regarded with suspicion - why informal relations are though more desired than coded ones.…


Book cover of An Artist of the Floating World

Richard C. Morais Author Of The Man with No Borders

From my list on thinking deeper about the human condition.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a journalist and a novelist. I was both Forbes Magazine’s longest serving foreign correspondent – having served 18 years in London as their European Bureau Chief – and wrote the feel-good international best-seller The Hundred-Foot Journey, a novel that Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey made into a much-loved 2014 film starring Helen Mirren. These twin careers have shaped my approach to writing in that I believe a good micro-story (fiction) should also make astute macro points (journalism). So, the journeys my characters undertake in my novels are also trying to address points about the world or life or humanity at large.

Richard's book list on thinking deeper about the human condition

Richard C. Morais Why did Richard love this book?

The Nobel-prize winning laureate has written many more famous books dealing with the human condition, most notably The Remains of the Day and Never Let me Go, but this is, to my mind, his best rumination on humanity's familiar ache. Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is a flawless book and similarly themed, but there is something about the post-war regrets, delusions, and self-justifications of the aging Japanese artist Masuji Ono that just slay me and make me want to weep. Ishiguro is of course the king of unreliable narrators, so I don't want to give away the big reveal here, but how denial of the truth and self-delusion can misdirect us in life, is at the core of this masterful insight into the human condition.

By Kazuo Ishiguro,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked An Artist of the Floating World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE WHITBREAD (NOW COSTA) BOOK OF THE YEAR

1948: Japan is rebuilding her cities after the calamity of World War II, her people putting defeat behind them and looking to the future. The celebrated painter Masuji Ono fills his days attending to his garden, his two grown daughters and his grandson, and his evenings drinking with old associates in quiet lantern-lit bars. His should be a tranquil retirement. But as his memories continually return to the past - to a life and…


Book cover of Tokyo Year Zero

Nadine Willems Author Of Ishikawa Sanshiro's Geographical Imagination: Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth-Century Japan

From my list on Japan’s postwar years.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an academic historian in the UK, and before that, I was a journalist in Tokyo, where I lived for twenty years. To me, Japan is one of the most intriguing and sensuous places on earth. I never tire of its smells, sounds, signs, and flavours. The language is mesmerizing. The landscapes are stunning. The culture is endlessly surprising. I research and write about Japan’s past – its transformations, upheavals, and traditions – to make sense of the incredible array of experiences I have encountered while living there. 

Nadine's book list on Japan’s postwar years

Nadine Willems Why did Nadine love this book?

Tokyo Year Zero follows detective Minami on the hunt for a serial killer in the immediate post-war period. It is a haunting and addictive journey inside the underbelly of Japan’s shattered capital city in the glaring light of defeat. There is crime, gang warfare, desolation, corruption, and decay. But Peace is above all a master of language, and his prose – fragmentary, truncated, hallucinatory – produces an idiosyncratic rhythm that mirrors the mental disintegration of a man and the convulsions of an entire city. A novel that will stick to your skin years after reading it.

By David Peace,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Tokyo Year Zero as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Part one of David Peace's 'Tokyo Trilogy', and a stunning literary thriller in its own right, from the bestselling author of GB84 and The Damned Utd.

August 1946. One year on from surrender and Tokyo lies broken and bleeding at the feet of its American victors.

Against this extraordinary historical backdrop, Tokyo Year Zero opens with the discovery of the bodies of two young women in Shiba Park. Against his wishes, Detective Minami is assigned to the case; as he gets drawn ever deeper into these complex and horrific murders, he realises that his own past and secrets are indelibly…


Book cover of The Little House

Milena Michiko Flašar Author Of Mr Kato Plays Family

From my list on diving into modern Japan from someone half Japanese.

Why am I passionate about this?

As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.

Milena's book list on diving into modern Japan from someone half Japanese

Milena Michiko Flašar Why did Milena love this book?

This book, which appeared in English translation in 2010, is the tender love story of Tokiko, a married woman, and her lover Itakura.

The story is told from the perspective of Taki, the devoted attendant who cares for the house and the family who lives there. In this respect, the reader is dealing with the gaze of a marginal figure, and it is this which makes the book so great: Taki’s gaze is intimate, taking into account everything that happens within the home’s four walls, but is at the same time the cool gaze of an observer on the periphery of all the action.

The book plays out in the pre-war years, but it also depicts the war and the years following. Over the course of this long period, the reader learns that this isn’t just about the love that exists between Tokiko and Itakura. It is also about Taki’s…

By Kyoko Nakajima, Ginny Takemori (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Little House as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Little House is set in the early years of the Showa era (1926-89), when Japan's situation is becoming increasingly tense but has not yet fully immersed in a wartime footing. On the outskirts of Tokyo, near a station on a private train line, stands a modest European style house with a red, triangular shaped roof. There a woman named Taki has worked as a maidservant in the house and lived with its owners, the Hirai family. Now, near the end of her life, Taki is writing down in a notebook her nostalgic memories of the time spent living in…


Book cover of Neighborhood and Nation in Tokyo, 1905-1937

Blair A. Ruble Author Of Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka

From my list on for understanding Japanese urban history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a comparative urban specialist who came to Japanese urban history through my aspiration to place Russian urban studies within a comparative context.  Several Japanese and Western Japan specialists encouraged me to advance this exploration by examining capitalist industrial urbanization in Japan.  Historians and political scientists -- particularly at Kyoto National University -- provided a platform for me to expand my engagement with Japanese urbanization; relations which have continued for some three decades.  More recently, I included Kabuki in The Muse of Urban Delirium, a collection of essays that seeks answers to the challenges of urban diversity, conflict, and creativity using various performing arts – opera, dance, theater, music – as windows onto urban life.

Blair's book list on for understanding Japanese urban history

Blair A. Ruble Why did Blair love this book?

Cities often look quite different from the bottom up than from the top down. The practical demands of making cities work often rest on the shoulders of the most local of officials.  Consequently, neighborhood officialdom often engages with citizens and residents more openly, even in authoritarian systems. Such engagement may hold the seeds of future democratic change. Hastings’ study of Honjo Ward and other proletarian Tokyo districts before World War II reveals a surprisingly robust participatory political and cultural environment across the early twentieth century.

By Sally Ann Hastings,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Neighborhood and Nation in Tokyo, 1905-1937 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this pre-World War II analysis of working-class areas of Tokyo, primarily its Honjo ward, Hastings shows that bureaucrats, particularly in the Home Ministry, were concerned with the needs of their citizens and took significant steps to protect the city's working families and the poor. She also demonstrates that the public participated broadly in politics, through organizations such as reservist groups, national youth leagues, neighborhood organizations, as well as growing suffrage and workplace organizations.


Book cover of Vintage Murakami

Mark Edward Harris Author Of The Way of the Japanese Bath

From my list on books that offer glimpses of ancient and modern Japan.

Why am I passionate about this?

My Master’s is in history, so books in the field are particularly of interest, especially those focused on the asides of the subject. One of the most unusual is No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War by Hiroo Onoda. When World War II ended in 1945, a number of Japanese soldiers, mostly in the jungles of the South Pacific, refused to surrender. Onoda was one of them. For three decades, the Japanese government tried to convince him that the war was over and flush him out of his hiding place in the Philippines, but to no avail. I found it fascinating to see his confirmation bias at work and described so clearly.

Mark's book list on books that offer glimpses of ancient and modern Japan

Mark Edward Harris Why did Mark love this book?

While I have read books by Kawabata, Mishima, and other well-known Japanese writers, there’s something very approachable and identifiable in the works of Haruki Murakami.

This book includes both fiction and nonfiction works, both equally enthralling:  “Shizuko Akashi” from Underground, his nonfiction book on the 1995 Tokyo subway attack, is shockingly powerful, especially for those who have ridden those cars many times, and the short story “Ice Man,” a story that, for some reason, I particularly identified with.

By Haruki Murakami,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Vintage Murakami as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the greatest modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions.

“Murakami’s bold willingness to go straight over the top is a signal indication of his genius. . . . A world-class writer who has both eyes open and takes big risks.” —The Washington Post Book World

Not since Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata has a Japanese writer won the international acclaim enjoyed by Haruki Murakami. His genre-busting novels, short stories and reportage, which have been translated into 35 languages, meld the surreal and the hard-boiled, deadpan comedy and delicate introspection.

Vintage…


Book cover of The Makioka Sisters

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been a journalist for years, and to write my first book, I ended up doing a ton of original research and reporting about photography, fashion, the art world, and the magazine industry in midcentury New York. But certain passages in the twins’ interviews reminded me strongly of many books I’d read growing up, that address the challenges young women face as they confront choices in life. And their story, with its wild and colorful characters, begged to be structured like a novel. It also took place when American society was changing dramatically for women, as it is today. So, I kept books like these in mind while writing.

Carol's book list on best books about young women figuring out their lives while society is changing around them

Carol Kino Why did Carol love this book?

I read this book in college and still recall it vividly.

A family seeks to marry off its daughters in prewar Japan, but while the world around them is evolving, they cling to tradition, insisting that the betrothals and marriages must happen in order. The youngest has a suitor and is eager to move forward with her life, but the first in line isn’t interested in being matched or hurried, which provokes a cascade of crises. Although the goal is finally achieved, there’s no sense of triumph.

Even in translation, the story is rich, complex, and naturalistic, and the characters seem so real that I once dreamed about encountering them on the street.

By Junichirō Tanizaki,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked The Makioka Sisters as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Tanizaki's masterpiece is the story of four sisters, and the declining fortunes of a traditional Japanese family. It is a loving and nostalgic recreation of the sumptuous, intricate upper-class life of Osaka immediately before World War Two. With surgical precision, Tanizaki lays bare the sinews of pride, and brings a vanished era to vibrant life.


Book cover of The Tattoo Murder Case

Matthew Legare Author Of Shadows of Tokyo

From my list on Japanese crime novel recommendations.

Why am I passionate about this?

As many of my novels are set in Japan, I try to read as many Japanese authors as I can. Firstly, they offer great insight into the Japanese psyche and Japanese culture, and secondly, they are extremely enjoyable reads. My main series is the Reiko Watanabe/Inspector Aizawa novels, crime thrillers set in 1930s Japan, and while only one of these books takes place during that era, I feel they all provide a great springboard into Japanese crime fiction, a genre that hopefully gains more notoriety in the West.

Matthew's book list on Japanese crime novel recommendations

Matthew Legare Why did Matthew love this book?

First published in 1948, this was one of the first Japanese crime novels that I read. It is about a beautiful, tattooed woman who is brutally murdered and dismembered. However, the piece that contained her most exquisite tattoo has gone missing. It’s up to her hapless admirer and a brilliant amateur detective to discover why she was murdered and track down the killer.

Like The Silent Dead, I enjoyed this novel mostly for its plot, taking place just after World War II, offering interesting insights into the postwar Japanese mindset.

By Akimitsu Takagi, Deborah Boehm (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Tattoo Murder Case as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Can you solve the mystery of the tattoo murder?
Tokyo, 1947. At the first post-war meeting of the Edo Tattoo Society, Kinue Nomura reveals her full-body snake tattoo to rapturous applause. Days later she is gone. A dismembered corpse is discovered in the locked bathroom of her home, but her much-coveted body art is nowhere to be found.
Kinue's horrified lover joins forces with the boy detective Kyosuke Kamizu to try to get to the bottom of the macabre crime, but similar deaths soon follow. Is someone being driven to murder by their lust for tattooed skin, and can they…


Book cover of Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire

John J. Domagalski Author Of Forgotten Island: The WWII Story of One Sailor's Survival on Japanese-Occupied Guam

From my list on World War II from a World War II author.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am the author of six books on World War II, including my book that's listed below and Escape from Java: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the USS Marblehead. My fascination with history began at a young age when I built model ships and read books about World War II. My interest eventually grew into research and writing. I have interviewed scores of veterans from the Pacific War. My articles have appeared in World War II History, Naval History, and World War II Quarterly Magazines.

John's book list on World War II from a World War II author

John J. Domagalski Why did John love this book?

A well-known historian brilliantly tells the last months of World War II in the Pacific. 

Frank immerses readers in the details of strategy, planning, and thinking on both sides, culminating with the dropping of the atomic bombs and the Japanese surrender. The book provides a clear record of the often misunderstood end of the Pacific War.

By Richard B. Frank,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Downfall as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In a riveting narrative that includes information from newly declassified documents, acclaimed historian Richard B. Frank gives a scrupulously detailed explanation of the critical months leading up to the dropping of the atomic bomb. Frank explains how American leaders learned in the summer of 1945 that their alternate strategy to end the war by invasion had been shattered by the massive Japanese buildup on Kyushu, and that intercepted diplomatic documents also revealed the dismal prospects of negotiation. Here also, for the first time, is a comprehensive account of how Japan's leaders were willing to risk complete annihilation to preserve the…


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in Japan, Tokyo, and modernism?

Japan 513 books
Tokyo 92 books
Modernism 31 books