The Ash garden : a novel / Dennis Bock.
Emiko Amai is six years old in August 1945 when the Hiroshima bomb burns away half of her face. To Anton, a young German physicist involved in the Manhattan Project, that same bomb represents the pinnacle of scientific elegance. And for his Austrian wife Sophie, a Jewish refugee, it marks the start of an irreparable fissure in their new marriage.

Before Hiroshima : the confession of Murayama Kazuo : and other stories / Joshua Barkan.
As death approaches, an old Japanese man finds it necessary to clean his soul, to confront the mistakes of his youth, and to confess about a time when he might have been able to save the thousands who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Country of origin : a novel / Don Lee.
Lisa Countryman vanishes in Tokyo in 1980. The young U.S. Embassy official assigned to her case, Tom Hurley, is in over his head, tangled in an unsavory love affair with the wife of a CIA officer. Lisa's best chance at being found may lie in the improbable hands of Kenzo Ota, a neurotic Japanese cop ridiculed by his peers.

Days of infamy / Harry Turtledove.
It is December 7, 1941, and the Japanese launch an attack against United States naval forces stationed in Pearl Harbor. The Japanese follow up their air assault with an invasion and occupation of Hawaii. With American military forces subjugated and civilians living in fear of their conquerors, there is no one to stop the Japanese from using the islands' resources to launch an offensive against America's western coast.

The Floating girl / Sujata Massey.
Half-American, half-Japanese, Rei Shimura is finally beginning to feel like Tokyo is home. Now a writer on art and antiques at the Gaijin Times, a comic-style magazine aimed at affluent young readers, Rei's latest assignment is a piece on the history of comic book art.

The Fox woman / Kij Johnson.
Yoshifuji is a man fascinated by foxes, a man discontented and troubled by the meaning of life. A misstep at court forces him to retire to his long-deserted country estate, to rethink his plans and contemplate the next move that might return him to favor and guarantee his family's prosperity.

Ghost of a smile : stories / Deborah Boliver Boehm.
Modern Tokyo is turned into a shadow world where life and death are simply matters of perspective, and where love, longing and sexual desire last beyond the grave.

Hokusai : the man who painted a mountain / Deborah Kogan Ray.
The life story of the Japanese artist Hokusai (1760-1849), who rose from poverty, taught himself to draw, became the promising pupil of a great master, and then defied tradition to become one of the most important and influential artists in the world.

In darkness, death / Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler.
Samurai Lord Inaba has been murdered in his sleep. To make matters worse, the crime took place under the protective eye of the Shogun himself. This is a case for Judge Ooka, Japan’s own real-life Sherlock Holmes. And, of course, for his 14-year-old apprentice, Seikei. Their only clue — a bloodstained origami butterfly — leads them on a journey filled with mysterious shape-shifting ninjas, vengeful peasants, and a power-hungry killer.

The Island of bicycle dancers / Jiro Adachi.
This is the coming-of-age story of twenty-year-old Yurika Song, a Korean-Japanese woman who comes from Japan to New York City for a summer to work with her Korean relatives and improve her English. But cross-Asian ethnicities turn out to be far less jarring than her entree into New York life in the guise of bicycle messengers and the street culture in which they thrive.

Kill the shogun : a samurai mystery / Dale Furutani.
Matsuyama Kaze, the masterless warrior destined to travel the seventeenth-century Japanese countryside until he fulfills the dying wish of his murdered lord's wife, is the object of a deadly manhunt when an attempt on the Shogun's life fails.

The Mask carver's son / Alyson M. Richman.
Set in turn of the century Japan in the world of the Noh theater, and in Paris during the heady days when French Impressionism was the avant-garde, this heartbreaking, beautifully written novel tells of a young Japanese artist who sacrifices everything: family, love and wealth for his art.

Number9dream : a novel / David Mitchell.
Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, is thrust out on his own by his sister’s death and his mother’s breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses — through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck — a number of its secret power centers.

The painting : a novel / by Nina Schuyler.
In 1869 Japan, a young woman escapes the confines of her arranged marriage by painting memories of her lover on mulberry paper. She secretly wraps the painting around a ceramic pot that's bound for Europe. In France, a disenchanted young man works as a clerk at an import shop. When he opens the box from Japan, he discovers the brilliant watercolor of two lovers locked in an embrace under a plum tree. He steals the painting and hides it in his room. With each viewing, he sees something different, and gradually the painting transforms him.

The Pearl diver : a novel / Jeff Talarigo.
This unusual debut novel set in 1940s postwar Japan renders brutality and intolerance in quiet, lyrical prose. When a 19-year-old pearl diver, the youngest of a crew working the Seto Inland Sea, discovers she is sick with leprosy, she is banished to Nagashima, an island leprosarium, where she is told to change her name and forget her past. Nagashima is its own kind of civilization, where the renamed "Miss Fuji" must care for the sicker patients, which includes helping the island doctors perform forced, often late-term abortions

The Perfumed sleeve / Laura Joh Rowland.
November 1694. The streets of Edo are erupting in violence as two factions struggle for control over the ruling Tokugawa regime. One is led by the shogun's cousin, Lord Matsudaira, and the other by the shogun's second-in-command, Chamberlain Yanagisawa. Each side pressures Sano Ichiro, the shogun's most honorable investigator, to join its ranks.

The Samurai's wife / Laura Joh Rowland.
Far from the Shogun's court at Edo, Most Honorable Investigator Sano Ichiro begins the most challenging case of his career. Upon the insistence of his strong-willed and beautiful wife Reiko, Sano arrives with her at the emperor's palace to unmask the murderer--who possesses the secret of kiai, "the spirit city," a powerful scream that can kill instantly.

Shitsurakuen. English.
A lost paradise / Jun'ichi Watanabe ; translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter.
A relentlessly detailed chronicle of the folie d'amour that consumes a middle-aged publishing executive and a younger woman, both unhappily married to other spouses, each devoted to histories and images of others before them who gave all for love.

Shopping / Gavin Kramer.
An awkward English lawyer on business in Tokyo becomes obsessed with a teenage Japanese girl who lives to shop. Shopping won the David Higham Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and was short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award.

Tokyo suckerpunch : a novel / Isaac Adamson.
Meet Billy Chaka, ace reporter for Cleveland's hottest-selling Asian teen magazine. He's brash, savvy, and prone to hair-trigger fits of karate. Billy's in Tokyo to cover the 19-and-Under Handicapped Martial Arts Championship and meet up with his friend Sato Migusion, but Sato never shows.

Tōi hi no sensō. English.
One man's justice / Akira Yoshimura ; translated from the Japanese by Mark Ealey.
It is just after the second World War. Takuya, an officer in Japan's former Imperial Army, is not surprised when he receives a postcard asking him to report to the U.S. Regional Command Headquarters in Tokyo. He assumes that the Americans have learned of his involvement in the execution of prisoners-of-war. Now he is a fugitive in his own country.

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Shadow family / Miyuki Miyabe ; translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter.
This compelling murder mystery focuses on the murky world of Internet chat rooms. Veteran Desk Sergeant Takegami finds himself in center stage of the investigations after his colleague is hospitalized.

The devil of Nanking / Mo Hayder.
A young Englishwoman obsessed with an indecipherable past, comes to Tokyo seeking a lost piece of film footage of the notorious 1937 Nanking Massacre, footage some say never existed. Only one man can help Grey. A survivor of the massacre, he is now a visiting professor at a university in Tokyo.

The samurai's daughter / Sujata Massey.
Antiques dealer Rei Shimura is in San Francisco visiting her parents and researching a personal project to trace the story of 100 years of Japanese decorative arts through her own family's history. But Rei's work is interrupted by the arrival of her long-distance boyfriend, lawyer Hugh Glendinning, who is involved in a class action lawsuit on behalf of people forced to engage in slave labor for Japanese companies during World War II.

Slatewiper / Lewis Perdue.
When Lara Blackwood, a brilliant genetic engineer, receives a call asking for her help in solving a ghastly epidemic in Tokyo, she's happy to do what she can. To her horror she discovers that her life's work has been perverted to produce a revolutionary new genetic weapon that kills by turning people's own ethnic-related chromosomes against them.

Pastries : a novel of desserts and discoveries / Bharti Kirchner.
The success of Sunya Malhotra’s beloved bakery is put in jeopardy, however, when a chain bakery threatens to open up down the street from her. To add to her misery, Roger, her hip, Japanese boyfriend has left her for a "perfect" Japanese girlfriend and her mother has just become engaged to a man Sunya detests. Sunya is surprised to find herself listening when her new Japanese baker offers her a solution to her problems - enroll in a baking school in Japan.

The hell screen / I.J. Parker.
Eleventh-century Japan: After a difficult but successful assignment as provisional governor of Eichigo, Akitada Sugawara is finally allowed to return to Heian Kyo. A woman has been murdered, and because of his reputation for detective work, Akitada must solve another mystery.

The great fire / Shirley Hazzard.
A brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself.

The floating world / Cynthia Gralla.
Olivia and her Japanese-American family are constantly on the road, looking for a home in the 1950s. Then traveling becomes a kind of home, a place for her parents to work out their difficulties, in towns that barely linger in memory, hanging in the air among them as the part of a family history that reaches further back than they care to recall.

Rain fall / Barry Eisler.
After the assassination of a government official in a crowded subway car, John Rain's carefully ordered world comes under siege. Agents within and without the international intelligence communities have been circling him for some time and, having connected him to the subway incident.

The pillow book of Lady Wisteria / Laura Joh Rowland.
Sano Ichiro, Most Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations, and People, awakens from a turbulent dream into a real-life nightmare. Lord Matsudaira Mitsuyoshi, the shogun's cousin and heir, has been murdered after a night of debauchery in the city's pleasure quarter.

When duty whispers low / John J. Gobbell.
It's 1943, and the U.S. Navy is caught in a fierce battle against the Japanese in the South Pacific. At stake, is the Allies' newly won Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. But Isoroku Yamamoto, admiral of the Combined Fleet and architect of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, desperately wants Guadalcanal back and prepares to launch a series of bombing raids in the Solomons.

The fourth treasure : a novel / Todd Shimoda ; art & calligraphy by L.J.C. Shimoda.
This novel weaves a suspenseful love story across and through two very different countries, cultures, and generations. Dual narratives are enhanced by marginalia that illuminate the sensei’s Japanese calligraphy and studies of the brain.

December 6 : a novel / Martin Cruz Smith.
Amid the imperialist fervor of late 1941 Tokyo, Harry Niles is a man with a mission - self-preservation. But Niles was raised by missionary parents and educated in the shadows of Tokyo's underworld - making his loyalties as dubious as his business dealings.

Across the nightingale floor / Lian Hearn.
The debut novel of Tales of the Otori series, Across the Nightingale Floor, is set in a feudal Japan on the edge of the imagination. Young Takeo is saved, not by coincidence, by the swords of Lord Otori Shigeru. As Lord Otori's ward, he discovers he is a member by birth of the shadowy "Tribe," a mysterious group of assassins with supernatural abilities.

The man with the red tattoo / Raymond Benson.
In Tokyo, a fatal strain of West Nile virus has infected-and killed-the head of the world's largest genetic research company and his family. Whoever is behind the murders is far more dangerous than the average assassin-dangerous enough to send in James Bond. Teamed with a beautiful Japanese agent, 007 must predict the next attack-and stop a weapon powerful enough to destroy the Western world.

Cloud of sparrows / Takashi Matsuoka.
It is the dawn of the New Year, 1861. After two centuries of isolation, Japan has been forced to open its doors to the West, igniting a clash of cultures and generations.

Tsugumi. English.
Goodbye Tsugumi : a novel / by Banana Yoshimoto ; translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich.
Goodbye Tsugumi is an offbeat story of a deep and complicated friendship between two female cousins.

Rashomon gate / I.J. Parker.
In Heian Kyo, the capital city of 11th century Japan, Akitada Sugawara serves as a minor official in the Ministry of Justice. Though born into a noble family, his family's estate is sadly diminished, forcing Akitada to toil fruitlessly at an unsuccessful career.

Dragon dance / Peter Tasker.
The year is 2006. Global recession is spreading and Japan is sunk in economic and social crisis. While Japan is weakening, China is growing ever stronger. A secret group headed by an aged war hero plots to destabilize relations between Japan and the United States in order to strengthen China's position in Asia and ultimately to achieve world hegemony.

Old soldiers sometimes lie / Richard Hoyt.
More than five decades ago, MacArthur permitted General Tomayuki Yamashita, the famed Tiger of Malaya, to be executed for alleged war crimes against the Filipino people. Now, Dr. Tomiko Kobayashi, the general's intrepid granddaughter is determined to clear Yamashita's name.

The defection of A.J. Lewinter : a novel of duplicity / Robert Littell.
A tale of espionage and counterespionage that reveals the dirty tricks and dangerous secrets concerning the subjects he knows intimately - The CIA and American history, past and present.

The love of stones / Tobias Hill.
Burrowing through the goldsmiths’ quarters and hidden archives of London, Tokyo, and Istanbul, Katharine Sterne is on the trail of a ruby, diamond, and pearl brooch once worn by Queen Elizabeth I.

Crawling at night / Nani Power.
Ito can't help but live part of every waking day reliving the tragedy he left behind in Japan, and across town Mariane yearns for the baby girl she abandoned almost fifteen years before.

Genpei / Kara Dalkey.
Throughout the twelfth century, two rival clans attempted a rebellion and, for a time, the Taira gained ascendancy. But their rule turned despotic and at last, during the Genpei War of 1179-1185, the Minomoto drove the Taira out of the capital and took control for themselves.

Black Lotus / Laura Joh Rowland.
When veteran samurai-detective Sano Ichiro, the most Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations, and People, is called on to investigate the burning of a cottage belonging to the Black Lotus Temple, he makes a shocking discovery.

American Fuji : a novel / Sara Backer.
Gaby Stanton, an American professor living in Japan, has lost her job teaching English at Shizuyama University. (No one will tell her exactly why.) Alex Thorn, an American psychologist, is mourning his son, a Shizuyama exchange student who was killed in an accident.

Supūtoniku no koibito. English.
The sputnik sweetheart : a novel / by Haruki Murakami; translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.  A college student falls in love with his classmate, Sumire. But devotion to an untidy writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments - until she meets Miu, an older and much more sophisticated businesswoman. A love story combines with a detective story.

The Yokota Officers Club : a novel / by Sarah Bird.
After a year away at college, military brat Bernadette Root has come “home” to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, to spend the summer with her bizarre yet comforting clan.

Stupeur et tremblements. English.
Fear and trembling / Amélie Nothomb ; translated by Adriana Hunter.
According to ancient Japanese protocol, foreigners deigning to approach the emperor did so only with fear and trembling. Terror and self-abasement conveyed respect. Amélie, our well-intentioned and eager young Western heroine, goes to Japan to spend a year working at the Yumimoto Corporation.

America's children / James Thackara.
It is a multi-layered story of Christian and Marxist values; of love of family and land; of invisible high energy particles and Pentagon technocrats; of thrilling scientific discovery and the unspeakable reality of Hiroshima.

The gourmet club : a sextet / Jun’ichirō Tanizaki ; translated by Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy.
The stories presented here, all of them translated into English for the first time, vividly explore an array of human passions.

The earthquake bird / Susanna Jones.
In Tokyo, a love triangle tragically unravels. One woman is presumed dead and the man has disappeared. Now, the third party, a young Englishwoman named Lucy Fly is in custody-and considered the chief suspect.

Genji monogatari. English.
The tale of Genji / Murasaki Shikibu ; translated by Royall Tyler.
Written in the eleventh century, this exquisite portrait of courtly life in medieval Japan is widely celebrated as the world's first novel. Genji, the Shining Prince, is the son of an emperor.

Samurai boogie / Peter Tasker.
Kazuo Mori, PI, is struggling to make ends meet. When he falls in with a prostitute called Angel he is soon struggling for survival in a vicious game that has the Yakuza and Japan’s two major computer game makers as players.

The gardens of Kyoto : a novel / Kate Walbert.
This novel begins with the death of a favorite cousin who died on Iwo Jima.

Autumn bridge / Takashi Matsuoka.
Takashi Matsuoka grew up in Hawaii. He lives in Honolulu, where he was employed at a Zen Buddhist temple before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of the acclaimed novel Cloud of Sparrows.

The Neptune strategy / John J. Gobbell.
From the Philippine Sea to the Nazi U-boat pens in Lorient, France, The Neptune Strategy is a complex cat and mouse game between the Japanese submarine 1-57 and a U.S. Navy determined to save one of their own and is the most thrilling novel yet by a master of the WWII thriller.

The laws of evening : stories / Mary Yukari Waters.
These stories explore Japanese society caught between the long shadow of World War II and the rapid advance of Westernization. The women and children who inhabit these crystalline tales have lost husbands and fathers in the war and now face a world dramatically altered by Western influence.

You only live twice : a James Bond novel / by Ian Fleming.
Only hours away, 007 must transform into Japanese; take a wife and accept the help of secret service ninjas to avoid a nuclear struggle by busting a crime rings theft of space capsules.

My name is Sei Shōnagon / Jan Blensdorf.
In a small incense shop in modern Tokyo a young woman sits behind a painted screen, listening to men unburden themselves about their work-dominated lives. She calls herself "Sei Shonagon," after the eleventh-century woman who wrote The Pillow Book.

The dragon king's palace / Laura Joh Rowland.
On a whim of the shogun's mother, a procession has left the sweltering heat of Edo, bound for the cooler climate of Mount Fuji. The entire retinue is viciously slaughtered and the four women are bound and taken away, imprisoned by a mysterious kidnapper.

Hard rain / Barry Eisler.
John Rain-half-Japanese, half-American, is trying to leave his life as a freelance assassin. After killing a CIA officer who hunted him halfway around the globe, Rain goes underground, hoping to find the peace that has eluded him.

One hundred million hearts / Kerri Sakamoto.
Miyo and her father, Masao, live a reclusive life in Toronto. When Masao dies, Miyo discovers he harbored a secret life, including a previous wife and child. Miyo travels to Tokyo to meet Hana, her half-sister (who is obsessed with their father's war history) and is shocked to learn he was a member of the Special Attack Forces-a kamikaze.

The last goodbye : a novel / Malcolm Bell.
Sleeping with a client's gorgeous girlfriend may have been the gutsiest move in Jack Hammond's formerly booming law career, but it wasn't the smartest. Booted from his elite law firm, Jack now scrapes by as a court-appointed attorney, his client list a revolving door of small-time drug offenders and petty thieves.

The sexual occupation of Japan : a novel / Richard Setlowe.
Attorney Peter Saxon arrives in Tokyo to secretly negotiate an historic merger between a Japanese electronics giant and an American movie and media conglomerate, a multibillion-dollar marriage that will dominate communications in the next century. But before the talks even begin, the government official with whom he is to meet is gruesomely murdered and mutilated.

Honeymoon to nowhere / Akimitsu Takagi ; translated by Sadako Mizuguchi.
Etsuko has fallen in love with a shy, studious lecturer at a university. But she has to tell her parents she's pregnant to force their agreement to her marriage. Their objection is to the rest of her fianc's family: his father was a war criminal; his deceased younger brother, a murderer. His only respectable relative is a research chemist who says he's too sick to come to the wedding. And then the groom is called away on the first night of the honeymoon by an urgent telephone call. His body is found the next morning and State Prosecutor Kirishima must discover who killed him, and why.

The Pachinko woman / Henry Mynton.
American intelligence has nicknamed Helim Kim the Pachinko Woman, but because of her complex North Korean, Japanese, and American roots, they aren't sure whose side she is really on. What they are sure of is that she has high-level connections in each country and could be a deadly opponent to her enemies.

On parole / Akira Yoshimura ; translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder.
After spending sixteen years in prison for a crime of the heart, Shiro Kikutani is released into a world he no longer recognizes. He must readjust to the bright and vigorous stimulus of Tokyo while fending off his own dark memories.

Riding the east wind / Otohiko Kaga ; translated by Ian Hideo Levy.
In the fall of 1941 a senior Japanese diplomat is sent on a desperate mission - a last-ditch attempt to secure peace with the United States. But, unknown to him, the Japanese military have their own plans.

Leopard / Richard La Plante.
In the sequel to Mantis, a local doctor is discovered dead in S/M gear, every bone in his body broken. In his closet, the police find a videotape that shows two men torturing, raping and possibly killing a masked and bound woman.

N.P. : a novel / by Banana Yoshimoto; translated from the Japanese by Ann Sherif.
A celebrated Japanese writer has committed suicide, leaving behind a collection of stories written in English, N.P. But the book may never be published in his native Japan: each translator who takes up the ninety-eighth story chooses death too -- including Kazami Kano's boyfriend, Shoji.

Honorable enemies / Joe Weber.
A cruise ship at Pearl Harbor is strafed, resulting in the deaths of several Japanese tourists. Fearing retaliation, the White House places high priority on determining responsibility for the attack, yet before the investigation gets off the ground, a group of American tourists is ambushed in Osaka.

Rules of the hunt / by Victor O'Reilly.
Hugo Fitzduane, Anglo-Irish nobleman and retired war photographer/warrior, is attacked and left for dead while horseback riding with his beloved three-year-old son, Boots. In Games of the Hangman, Hugo had killed the mastermind of international terrorist groups, and now the Cutting Edge, a Japanese-based group, seeks revenge for their leader's murder. Hugo's romantic attachments lend a nice touch of humanity to the text.

The Japan conspiracy [LARGE PRINT] / Jack Anderson.
Since the end of the Cold War, thriller writers have had to scramble to find villains able to throw the world into chaos. Anderson has reached back into the past and uncovered a powerful group of Japanese extremists who plan to avenge Japan's loss of World War II by manipulating the U.S. economy into an irreversible tailspin.

Shinjū / Laura Joh Rowland.
When beautiful, wealthy Yukiko and low-born artist Noriyoshi are found drowned together in a shinju, or ritual double suicide, everyone believes the culprit was forbidden love. Everyone but newly appointed yoriki Sano Ichiro.

Quicksand / Jun’ichirō Tanizaki ; translated from the Japanese by Howard Hibbett.
Sonoko Kakiuchi, the bored and willful upper-class wife of an Osaka lawyer, recounts the story of her desperate love in the year 1927 for a willowy young woman named Mitsuko.

James Clavell's Gai-Jin : a novel of Japan.
Gai-Jin : a novel of Japan / James Clavell.
The second volume in James Clavell's “Shogun” quartet.

The last high ground / by Robin A. White.
In Hiroshima, a dying crime czar releases his power, his mistakes, and his money. . . . In Washington, a lawyers investigator uncovers the truth about the worst U.S. aviation disaster in history. . . . And 40,000 feet above Utah, an airline pilot feels a sudden shudder and knows the impossible is about to happen - again.

The pillow boy of the Lady Onogoro / Alison Fell.
This erotic novel set in feudal Japan, tells the story of a concubine who hires a stable boy to whisper erotic stories from behind a screen while she entertains her master, a samurai general.

The Sailor who fell from grace with the sea / Yukio Mishima; translated from the Japanese by John Nathan.
An English widow and an American merchant seaman fall in love and plan to marry. This angers the widow's precocious young son, who, under the influence of one of his friends, conspires a shocking plot against the sailor.

The man from Japan / by Clive James.
A comic take on the mutual misunderstandings between Japan and the West, Akira Suzuki, a sensitive, shy young Japanese writer and bookseller living in London, has an affair with a suicidal English punk rocker turned freelance journalist by the name of Jane Austen. She's not the only one who finds him enticing: Suzuki's randy landlady and an attractive yuppie stockbroker throw themselves at his feet, and a cultured homosexual journalist with whom he swaps informal language lessons also makes passes at him.

Love and infamy / Frank Deford.
Cotton Drake, son of missionaries in Japan, and Kiyoshi Serikawa meet in the fourth grade and become best friends, inseparable until they choose different U.S. colleges. Each has grown to love the other's homeland, but they return to Japan to enter business together in 1936. Politics and intrigue slowly alter the relationship between the two men.

69 : sixty-nine / Ryu Murakami ; translated by Ralph F. McCarthy.
69 is a roman a clef about coming of age during a time that left its mark on baby boomers around the world - a time when we really believed we could change the world before it changed us. The book is composed of the following: "Arthur Rimbaud," "Iron Butterfly," "Lady Jane," "Daniel Cohn-Bendit," "Claudia Cardinale," "Power to the Imagination," "Just Like a Woman," "Alain Delon," "Lyndon Johnson," "Cheap Thrills," "Amore Romantico," "Wes Montgomery," "Led Zeppelin," "April Come She Will," "Velvet Underground," and "It's a Beautiful Day."

Castaways : two short novels / Masuji Ibuse ; translated by Anthony Liman, David Aylward.
Based strictly on historical fact, the longer of these two stories is the tale of an illiterate boy from a remote fishing village in southern Japan, whose boat is blown off course in a storm in 1841. Rescued by a Yankee whaling ship, he is taken off to see a world far wider than his fellow countrymen could ever have imagined, and after years abroad - via the goldfields of California and Hawaii - he returns home in triumph.

The seventh stone / Nancy Freedman.
Japan is the setting for Freedman's first novel in ten years. Its main characters are four generations of a wealthy Japanese family. Joined in an arranged marriage, Nobaru and Momoko come truly to love one another, but the demands of family and country force them apart. Left pregnant and a widow at war's end, Momoko finds love with her husband's friend, but again family traditions demand sacrifice.

The Tōkaidō road : a novel of feudal Japan / Lucia St. Clair Robson.
After the execution of her father, the young and beautiful Lady Asano, who now calls herself Cat, is in grave danger: the powerful Lord Kira's campaign against her family is continuing and she must find Oishi, the leader of the fighting men of the Asano clan. Cat believes he is three hundred miles to the southwest in the imperial city of Kyoto. Disguising her loveliness in the humble garments of a traveling priest, Cat begins her quest along the fabled Tokaido Road. All she has is her samurai training, her deadly, six-foot-long naginata, and her quick wits. And she will need them all, for a ronin has been hired to pursue her, a mysterious man who will play a role in Cat's drama that neither could have ever imagined.

Rising sun : a novel / by Michael Crichton.
During the grand opening celebration of the new American headquarters of an immense Japanese conglomerate, the dead body of a beautiful woman is found. The investigation begins, and immediately becomes a headlong chase through a twisting maze of industrial intrigue and a violent business battle that takes no prisoners.

Victory over Japan : a book of stories / by Ellen Gilchrist.
This collection of 14 short stories won the American Book Award for fiction when it was published and confirmed the author's reputation as one of the preeminent literary talents of her generation. She enjoys both critical acclaim and great popularity with readers.

Tun Huang / Yasushi Inuoue ; translated by Jean Oda Moy.
Translated from the original Japanese. The date is 1026. In the remote western frontier of China a fierce battle is raging. The powerful Sung dynasty is struggling to defend its desert outposts against the most energetic of the barbarian tribes, the Hsi-hsia.

Village of the vampire cat / Lensey Namioka.
When Zenta and Matsuzo visit an old friend, they discover that his village is being tormented by an unknown force. A killer known as the Cat is on the loose, and Zenta and Matsuzo must confront the terror.

Lou-lan and other stories / Yasushi Inoue ; translated by James T. Araki, Edward Seidensticker.
The title story, "Lou-lan," recounts the turbulent history and final disappearance of an ancient city in Central Asia. "The Sage" and "Princess Yung-t'ai's Necklace" also recreate the tempestuous past of continental Asia. The remaining three stories - "The Opaline Cup," "Passage to Fudaraku," and "The Rhododendrons" - are set in Japan.

The burning mountain : a novel of the invasion of Japan / Alfred Coppel.
Lieutenant Harry Seaver spent many childhood years living with a Japanese family near Tokyo, as a result of which he is bilingual and deeply familiar with the Japanese way of life. The March 1946 landings as seen through the eyes of various Japanese and Allied participants.

Miyamoto Musashi. English.
Musashi / by Eiji Yoshikawa ; translated from the Japanese by Charles S. Terry ; foreword by Edwin O. Reischauer.
Miyamoto Musashi was the child of an era when Japan was emerging from decades of civil strife. Lured to the great Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 by the hope of becoming a samurai - without really knowing what it meant - he regains consciousness after the battle to find himself lying defeated, dazed and wounded among thousands of the dead and dying.

Some prefer nettles / by Junichirō Tanizaki ; translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker.
Kaname considers himself to be a modern man in a modern marriage. The other characters, including his wife, mistress, and father-in-law, and even the cities in which they live, each symbolize either modernity or ancient ways of life.

The snow fox : a novel / Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.
A great samurai and a beautiful poet fall in love in a novel that captures medieval Japan in breathtaking detail. The heartbreaking story of their renewed love is fraught by the Japanese concept of mono no aware — life's ephemeral nature — that weighs on the lovers.

Across the nightingale floor / Lian Hearn.
This first book of the Otori Trilogy is the story of a boy who is suddenly plucked from his life in a remote and peaceful village to find himself a pawn in a political scheme filled with treacherous warlords, rivalry and the intensity of first love.
What happened to Henry / Sharon Pywell.
A tale of a family's struggle to understand their own son - who is either crazy or blessed, not unlike the Cold War America in which they live. Nine-year-old Lauren Cooper is devoted to her brother, Henry, who becomes obsessed with a picture of a man near Hiroshima's firestorm.

Grass for his pillow / Lian Hearn.
Book II of Tales of the Otori trilogy, Grass for His Pillow returns to a mythical, medieval Japan, in a story of clashing powers, divided loyalties, and passionate love played out on a dazzling landscape.

Brilliance of the moon / Lian Hearn.
The third installment of Tales of the Otori, this book is set in an imagined medieval Japan, Book Three is a thrilling-and surprising-follow-up to the previous adventures of Takeo and Kaede.

Some deaths before dying / Peter Dickinson.
Rachel is old, paralyzed, barely able to speak, and dying. She has a strong mind and vivid memories though, and is determined to hold on to both until the end, so that she can die fully aware, fully herself. Suddenly she learns that a precious possession, one with a dangerous history, has gone from the place where she thought she had hidden it.

My year of meats / by Ruth L. Ozeki.
Jane, a struggling filmmaker in New York, is given her big break--a chance to travel through the U.S. to produce a Japanese television program sponsored by an American meat exporting business. But along the way, she discovers some unsavory truths.

Meeting Luciano : a novel / by Anna Esaki-Smith.
After graduating from college, Emily Shimoda moves back home in upstate New York to live with her eccentric, well-bred mother, Hanako. Little has changed there. Her father's silk ties still hang limply in the closet even though he left years ago.

Jade palace vendetta : a Samurai mystery / Dale Furutani.
Matsuyama Kaze Kaze is waylaid when he saves a helpless merchant from a vicious gang of killers and soon discovers that everything is not what it appears.

The tattoo murder case / Akimitsu Takagi ; translated by Deborah Boehm.
Miss Kinue Nomura survived World War II only to be murdered in Tokyo, her severed limbs left behind. Gone is that part of her that bore one of the most beautiful full-body tattoos ever rendered by her late father.

Fortunes of war / Stephen Coonts.
Four Japanese nationalists storm Tokyo's imperial palace and behead the emperor. Their goal: to invade Russia and conquer oil-rich Siberia in order to dominate the globe. Soon the world explodes in war, as Japan, Russia and the United States go head-to-head in a struggle that threatens total destruction.

Death at the crossroads : a samurai mystery / Dale Furutani.
Matsuyama Kaze stumbles upon a corpse shot with an arrow at the crossroads leading to a small town. He becomes embroiled with an unlikely - and untrustworthy - cast of characters.Each has secrets to keep and axes to grind, and it will take all of Kaze's subtlety, stealth, and Samurai skills to unravel the mystery and unmask the killer.

Memoirs of a geisha / Arthur Golden.
Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house.

All she was worth / Miyuki Miyabe ; translated by Alfred Birnbaum.
Ordinary people plunge into insurmountable personal debt and fall prey to dangerous webs of underground creditors-so dangerous, in fact, that murder may be the only way out.

The way of the traitor : a samurai mystery / Laura Joh Rowland.
A volatile, corrupt city threatened by foreign invasion and run by an iron-fisted government, Nagasaki is the last place Sano Ichiro wants to be, Unfortunately, the shogun's Most Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations, and People has been banished there by a wicked adversary in the shogun's court.

Buddha kiss / Peter Tasker.
Blending headlines about cult poisonings in Japan and tales of Hong Kong money-market manipulation with a strong fictional basis, Peter Tasker sets up two unusual investigators: a Japanese private eye named Mori and a British securities expert named Mitchell.

The best Japanese science fiction stories / edited by John L. Apostolou and Martin H. Greenberg ; consulting editors Grania Davis and Judith Merril.
A compilation of 13 symbolic, psychologically based stories written by 10 of the most talented Japanese science fiction writers, including Shinichi Hoshi, Ryo Hanmura, and Sakyo Komatsu.

Amrita / Banana Yoshimoto ; translated from the Japanese by Russell F. Wasden.
After losing her beautiful younger sister, a celebrated actress, to suicide, Sakumi falls down a flight of stairs and loses her memory to a head injury.

The wind-up bird chronicle / Haruki Murakami ; translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin.
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo.

Audrey Hepburn's neck : a novel / by Alan Brown.
Leaving behind a sad, silent childhood - which was spent living in two rooms above the family noodle shop on an isolated peninsula in the far north of Japan - Toshi moves to Tokyo to pursue his career. There he falls under the spell of three Americans.

Bundori : a novel of Japan / by Laura Joh Rowland.
It is early spring, 1679, and the feudal Japanese capital, Edo, is beginning to blossom. But along its peaceful, misty streets evil lurks. With one stroke, the favored vassal of the ruling family is decapitated, his head taken for a bundori - a war trophy.

Burning your boats : the collected short stories / Angela Carter ; with an introduction by Salman Rushdie.
Includes Fireworks : nine profane pieces, 1974 ; A souvenir of Japan.

Thief of light / David Ramus.
Ramus was a high-stakes art dealer during the volatile 1980s when art became as hip a commodity as junk bonds and narcotics. When the whole inflated scene self-destructed, Ramus was left in dire straits: his debts were enormous; he was the subject of a federal investigation; and he was addicted to heroin.

Idoru / William Gibson.
21st-century Tokyo after the millennial quake - where something violently new is about to erupt.

Yoshiko and the foreigner / Mimi Otey Little.
In spite of her upbringing, a young Japanese woman begins seeing an American soldier and finds that he is not like the foreigners her parents have taught her to avoid.

Lizard / Banana Yoshimoto ; translated from the Japanese by Ann Sherif.
Short stories from Japan.

The time of the cricket : a novel / William D. Blankenship.
Kimura, an ambitious thug in Tokyo's crime organization, has been assigned to squelch a lawsuit that could lead back to his boss in the Yakuza. His method is murder, and his means is a samurai sword.

The Samurai's garden / Gail Tsukiyama.
The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Tsukiyama uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for her unusual story about a 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen who is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis.

Japanese game / Richard Hoyt.
Shoji Kobayashi, owner of the Yokohama Bay Stars baseball team and godfather to the Japanese mob buys a beautiful woman from Filipino pirates. When he discovers that the woman is the daughter of the Vice President of the United States, he uses her to upset ongoing trade negotiations with the U.S.

Coin locker babies / Ryū Murakami.
Abandoned at birth in adjacent train station lockers, two troubled boys spend their youth in an orphanage and with foster parents on a semi-deserted island before finally setting off for the city to find and destroy the women who first rejected them.

The revenge of the forty-seven samurai / Erik Christian Haugaard.
In the days the shogun ruled Japan, two hundred samurai suffered a grave insult when their master met an unjust death. Forty-seven of them were courageous enough to avenge him.

High flight / David Hagberg.
Intrigue and danger heighten as America faces its worst industrial challenge since the Great Depression. With the Cold War over, Japanese industrial espionage may succeed tomorrow where, fifty years ago, their military might failed.

Rhoda : a life in stories / Ellen Gilchrist.
Red-haired, spunky, and precocious, Rhoda grows up in the shadow of World War II, experiencing rites of passage that include puberty, drinking, first love, and elopement.

Kamen no kokuhaku. English.
Confessions of a mask / by Yukio Mishima ; translated by Meredith Weatherby.
Story of a Japanese boy’s development toward a homosexual identity during and after the Second World War.

Death in midsummer, and other stories / by Yukio Mishima.
A collection of ten short stories. The title story "Death in Midsummer" is about a family tragedy that occurs at a beach resort and how it continues to haunt everyone involved. The other story of note from the collection is "Patriotism" a tale about a young army officer and his wife who following a failed military coup during the 1930's choose to vindicate their belief in ancient values by performing seppuku. The story is very similar to Mishima's own life.

The silent cry / Kenzaburō Ōe.
The Silent Cry traces the uneasy relationship between two brothers who return to their ancestral home, a village in densely forested western Japan. While one brother tries to sort out the after-effects of a friend's suicide and the birth of a retarded son, the other embarks on a quixotic mission to incite an uprising among the local youth.

Little sister / Kara Dalkey.
As a girl in the Japanese imperial court of the 1200s, Mitsuko is shielded from reality. But when her brother-in-law is murdered, and her family taken away by a warlord, she summons the courage to venture into the netherworld.

Gorin no sho. English.
A book of five rings / Miyamoto Musaschi ; translated by Victor Harris.
Gorin no sho. English.
The book of five rings / Miyamoto Musashi ; a new translation from the Japanese by Thomas Cleary, including the book of family traditions on the art of war, by Yagyū Munenori.
The Book of Five Rings was composed in 1643 by the famed duelist and undefeated samurai Miyamoto Musashi.

Shōgun; a novel of Japan.
The Book of Five Rings was composed in 1643 by the famed duelist and undefeated samurai Miyamoto Musashi.

The big wave / Pearl S. Buck ; illustrated with prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai.
His family and village swept away by a tidal wave, Jiya learns to live with the ever-present dangers from the sea and volcano.

The samurai's tale / Erik Christian Haugaard.
In turbulent sixteenth-century Japan, orphaned Taro is taken in by a general who is serving the great warlord Takeda Shingen. Taro grows up to become a samurai fighting for the enemies of his dead family.

Murder in Japan : Japanese stories of crime and detection / edited by John L. Apostolou and Martin H. Greenberg.

Japanese tales / selected, edited, and translated by Royall Tyler.
Here are two hundred and twenty tales from medieval Japan about a faraway world populated by saints and scoundrels, ghosts and magical healers, and a vast assortment of deities and demons. Stories of miracles, visions of hell, jokes, fables, and legends, these tales reflect the Japanese worldview during a classic period in Japanese civilization.

An artist of the floating world / Kazuo Ishiguro.
This is the story of an artist as an aging man, struggling through the wreckage of Japan's World War II experience.

Bloody sunrise / Christopher Nicole.

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