The most recommended books about Tokyo

Little Yoshio lives in noisy Tokyo, where “the sounds of the city swirled all around him” like a “symphony hall.” As he walks around on a rainy day, absorbing these sounds, he comes upon a woman playing a koto, a stringed instrument. The woman shares that her favorite sound is “ma,” or silence. So, Yoshio begins a search for the sound of silence but can’t find it anywhere! Buses and trains aren’t silent; even bamboo stalks make a swishing sound. Everywhere he goes, Yoshio hears sounds but not silence. Finally, he discovers that silence is “underneath every sound.” A lovely, understated story of how “ma” exists inside all of us, if only we stop to listen. The illustrations reflect different aspects of Tokyo’s culture and energy.

The mother of all otaku guides was published by current Otaku USA magazine’s honcho Macias and famous otaku writer Machiyama and reflects their tastes and idiosyncratic approach to the subject. Admittedly, you can find better, more complete, and updated otaku travel guides now (e.g. my book… wink wink) but this colorful book has a funky turn-of-the-century design and features things that you will hardly find elsewhere, like interviews with Mandarake owner Masuzo Furukawa, magazine editor Hisanori Nukata (about action figures), past cosplay queen Jan Kurotaki and Japan’s most notorious plastic model kit collector Chimatsuri. It’s a wonderful blast from the past.

This book is a quiet, understated masterpiece about quiet, understated lives and a critical counterpoint to Soseki’s earlier I Am a Cat. That novel was a cruelly comic parody of Nietzscheanism, its arrogant feline narrator portraying his owner, a small-town schoolteacher, as embodying everything wrong with miserable, mediocre, insignificant humanity. 

This book is more ambiguous and sympathetic, portraying a similarly humble, childless couple. Initially, we feel contempt for their uneventful, indecisive, dispassionate lives. But their troubled past reveals, beneath their failings, a deep undercurrent of authentic courage and love.

They may even achieve something like Nietzsche’s “love of fate,” hinted in the title’s reference to the gate between past and future, where Zarathustra wills the “eternal recurrence” of every detail of his existence, whether joyful or painful, exciting or dreary, beautiful or ugly.  

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… show more.

The fascinating tale of Tsuneno’s journey from respectable daughter and sister in a family of Buddhist priests to a hand-to-mouth existence in Edo—now Tokyo—could well have been titled “down and out in the city.” And she chose her fate. A fiery, headstrong woman, she endured three marriages that all ended in divorce, and when confronted with the possibility of a fourth, she ran away from her home in the storied snow country region along the Japan Sea to try her luck working as a maid. She detailed her adventures and her demands for money and clothes in letters to her brother, letters that Stanley has used to wonderful effect in recreating not only Tsuneo as an individual but also the world of people on the margin among whom she lived.  

Before ‘uplit’ was even invented, there was DBC Pierre. His fiction has been described as a ‘joyful celebration of the human spirit’ and that is none more evident than in his protagonist in Lights Out, Gabriele Brockwell, a twenty-something narcissistic pleasure seeker optimistically stumbling through life before ultimately finding his place in it. A book that leaves you with the thought that optimism is the key to turning bad luck into good.

The first few chapters describe the process of finding and restoring an ancient wooden house, deep in a lost valley on Shikoku. I would have been quite happy had the entire book been about Kerr's adventures of time spent working and living at this house. But instead he dives into many other areas of Japanese life and culture: Kabuki, Calligraphy, Tea Ceremony, etc.

I liked how he uses personal anecdotes to illustrate what might be quite dry passages about arts and religion; or working for a large US real estate company in Tokyo, which was also very insightful. Kerr does not hold back on his criticism of Japan. He lambasts the destruction of nature and the homogenisation of certain arts and crafts.

Overall, this is a very interesting book, written by someone uniquely positioned in terms of his fluency in Japanese, his exceptional knowledge of Japanese arts and crafts, and… show more.

There are some writers I read purely for the pleasure of a well-written sentence. Don is one of those, because he is a Literary Writer™ – he edited one of the premier literary journals for many years. But here’s the thing – he is also one hell of a plotter. This first novel of his caught the letters community by surprise, but not me; the intricate construction of his short stories could only lead to a tale as labyrinthine as this one. Featuring classic mystery tropes, Country of Origin is a missing person case that leads our hero, an American Embassy officer in Tokyo, to seedy strip clubs, dangerous love affairs, and the CIA, all delivered with surgical prose that would make Raymond Chandler blush.

Old ground soldiers like me tend to think the airmen have it good—three hot meals a day, clean sheets at night, and only a few hours of war a day. James M. Scott’s Black Snow sure taught me otherwise. The 1945 American firebombing of Japan proved horrific for both the bombers and the bombed, and Scott tells the full awful story from both the American and Japanese sides. Major General Curtis LeMay was not some cigar-chewing caricature from Dr. Strangelove, but a young commander trying to break the will of a brave, stalwart people who had never lost a war in their country’s centuries of history. LeMay’s bomber crews won, but at a terrible price that resonates to this day.

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.