Here are 100 books that The Tattoo Murder Case fans have personally recommended if you like
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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.
One of the best Japanese crime novels, this is the story of four women trapped in suburban hell, seeking to escape their empty lives. When one of them murders her husband in a fit of rage, they collude to dispose of his body, gradually sinking into a criminal netherworld.
I loved it for its crisp and taut prose, solid and relatable characters, dense and fast-paced plot, and heavy themes of urban isolation and aimlessness.
Winner of Japan's Grand Prix for Crime Fiction • Edgar Award Finalist • Nothing in Japanese literature prepares us for the stark, tension-filled, plot-driven realism of Natsuo Kirino’s award-winning literary mystery Out.
This mesmerizing novel tells the story of a brutal murder in the staid Tokyo suburbs, as a young mother who works the night shift making boxed lunches strangles her abusive husband and then seeks the help of her coworkers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime. The coolly intelligent Masako emerges as the plot’s ringleader, but quickly discovers that this killing is merely the beginning,…
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.
Serialized in 1934 by Hinode (Sunrise) magazine, this is one of Japan’s most famous crime novels by one of Japan’s most famous novelists, Edogawa Ranpo. It stars his most famous character, Detective Kogoro Akechi, in a battle of wits against the titular Black Lizard, a melodramatic female jewel thief, as she attempts to steal the priceless “Star of Egypt.”
I have a huge love affair with pulp fiction, and much of Ranpo’s work can definitely be classified as pulp, despite the fact that the term did not really exist in Japan at the time. Although a bit dated, it is still an enjoyable read.
Discover the new Penguin Crime and Espionage series
A master criminal and a master detective are locked in battle. Who will win?
They call her the 'Dark Angel'. Queen of Tokyo's underworld, Mme Midorikawa is famed for her beauty, her jewels and the tattoo of a black lizard on her arm. Crime is so easy for her that she warns her victims in advance. When a wealthy jewel merchant receives letters saying his precious daughter Sanae is about to be kidnapped, he entrusts the renowned detective Akechi Kogoro to protect her. But he may have met his deadliest adversary yet...
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.
Set in modern-day Tokyo, this is the first entry in the Reiko Himekawa series about a female detective in the Tokyo Police Department. I enjoyed this book mostly for the plot, which involves Himekawa tracking down a serial killer who tortures victims on a snuff website called “Strawberry Night.” It provides great insights into Japanese culture, both personal and workplace, and the inner details of the Tokyo Police Department.
When a mutilated body wrapped in a blue tarpaulin is found in a quiet neighbourhood, Lieutenant Reiko Himekawa and her squad are assigned the case. As the youngest female detective in the Homicide Division, Reiko has a lot to prove, but she has an undeniable ability to solve crimes. When she uncovers more murders with the same signature, she know sthere is a serial killer at work.What is Strawberry Night, the dark web group that links all the victims? And how long will Reiko survive, now the killer knows her name?
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.
I actually found this book on a recent trip to Japan, as it has finally been translated into English. Set in 1869, at the dawn of the tumultuous Meiji Era, a series of murders plague Tokyo. Inspectors Kazuki and the real-life Toshiyoshi Kawaji are called in to investigate, leading them through the lowest and highest parts of the city.
As a historical fiction writer myself, I am extremely partial to novels in this genre, especially historical crime thrillers. This book fills a spot which is relatively unknown in the West and one I highly recommend.
'An audacious puzzle mystery, woven into an exquisitely crafted historical tale. One of the most original works in the history of Japanese mystery writing' Haruo Yuki, author of The Ark
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Tokyo, 1869. It is the dawn of the Meiji era in Japan, but the scars of the recent civil war are yet to heal. The new regime struggles to keep the peace as old scores are settled and dangerous new ideas flood into the country from the West.
A new police force promises to bring order to this land of feuding samurai warlords, and chief inspectors Kazuki and Kawaji…
At age thirteen, sprawled on our shag-carpeted living room floor, I watched Poltergeist’s scariest scenes reflected in the glass doors of an old-school encyclopedia case. The blur made the film less scary—and aftewards, I noticed two smaller books leaned against Volumes 15-16: Italy to Lord. Reading Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time back-to-back that night rattled me harder than seeing Carol Anne sucked into the netherworld. I woke up with my worldview rearranged, and I hope you’ll find these books every bit as pleasantly unsettling.
This year, revisiting this book drove me deep into a madness that, at its center, is rooted in empathy for “hostiles” and “enemies.”
The novel was written in 1952, and its protagonist's been conscripted into World War II, but what Private Tamura endures is the insanity of every war. Booted out of his platoon due to a lack of resources, Tamura withstands and commits atrocities including cannibalism, amid a conflict he never sought.
"Written with precise skill and beautifully controlled power. The translation by Ivan Morris is outstanding." -The New York Times
**Winner of the 1952 Yomiuri Prize**
This haunting novel explores the complete degradation and isolation of a man by war. Fires on the Plain is set on the island of Leyte in the Philippines during World War II, where the Japanese army is disintegrating under the hammer blows of the American landings. Within this broader disintegration is another, that of a single human being, Private Tamura. The war destroys each of his ties to society, one by one, until Tamura, a…
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.
The Woman in the Dunes (Suna No Onna, Sand Woman) was a 1962 novel written by Kobo Abe. The story is about an amateur entomologist who ends up as a forced partner to a recently widowed woman living at the bottom of a sand dune. The story, of course, goes far deeper than that.
While reading the book I recalled the Tottori Sand Dunes on Japan’s West Coast, one of the most surprising landscapes in the island nation. After reading the book and visiting Tottori I watched the 1964 film adaption of the book directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara and starring Eiji Okada and Kyoko Kishida. It is one of the few instances where the film is at least equal to or perhaps surpasses the book version. I highly recommend first reading both books then watching the films to see how skillfully the written word can be converted…
The Woman in the Dunes, by celebrated writer and thinker Kobo Abe, combines the essence of myth, suspense and the existential novel.
After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers that the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd…
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.
Floating Clouds tells the story of a young woman who returns to Tokyo from Japan’s ex-colony in Indochina after the war and resumes the love affair with the man she met there. Their relationship is tormented and ultimately broken, like Japan’s dreams of empire and the promises of youth. The author, who had experienced destitution when she was young, weaves into the story the contrasting luxuriance of the colony’s tropical forests and the grime and spiritual emptiness of post-war Tokyo. This is such an honest and heart-wrenching novel.
In this groundbreaking novel, Fumiko Hayashi tells the powerful story of tormented love and one woman's struggle to navigate the cruel realities of postwar Japan. The novel's characters, particularly its resilient heroine Koda Yukiko, find themselves trapped in their own drifting, unable to break out of the morass of indecisiveness. Set in the years during and after World War II, their lives and damaged psyches reflect the confusion of the times in which they live. Floating Clouds follows Yukiko as she moves from the physically lush and beautiful surroundings of Japanese-occupied French Indochina to the desolation and chaos of postwar…
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.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
