If you’re planning a trip to Japan and you want to get yourself in the mood by reading some historical fiction or perhaps something more contemporary, here are some books that have been highly recommended.
Before you dive into our reading list, don’t forget to check out our complete Japan Travel Planning Guide, packed with everything you need to plan the perfect adventure. From the best places to visit in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka to tips on using Japan’s incredible rail network, finding amazing food, understanding Japanese culture, and planning your itinerary, our guide is full of practical advice to help you make the most of your trip. Then, once your plans are taking shape, settle down with one of these fantastic books and let Japan come to life before you even arrive.
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Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
A young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. Many years later she tells her story from a hotel in New York, opening a window into an extraordinary half-hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation and summoning up a quarter of a century of Japan’s dramatic history.
- Arthur Golden Novels
- Golden, Arthur (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 512 Pages - 06/04/1998 (Publication Date) - Vintage (Publisher)
Geisha, a Life by Mineko Iwasaki
Celebrated as the most successful geisha of her generation, Mineko Iwasaki was only five years old when she left her parents’ home for the world of the geisha. For the next twenty-five years, she would live a life filled with extraordinary professional demands and rich rewards. She would learn the formal customs and language of the geisha, and study the ancient arts of Japanese dance and music. She would enchant kings and princes, captains of industry, and titans of the entertainment world, some of whom would become her dearest friends. Through great pride and determination, she would be hailed as one of the most prized geishas in Japan’s history, and one of the last great practitioners of this now fading art form.
- Hardcover Book
- Iwasaki, Mineko (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 297 Pages - 10/07/2002 (Publication Date) - Simon & Schuster Australia (Publisher)
Panchinko – Min Jin Lee
Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then Isak, a Christian minister, offers her a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife.
Following a man she barely knows to a hostile country in which she has no friends, no home, and whose language she cannot speak, Sunja’s salvation is just the beginning of her story.
- New Store Stock
- Lee, Min Jin (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 576 Pages - 01/09/2020 (Publication Date) - Apollo (Publisher)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – David Mitchell
In your hands is a place like no other: a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in the dying days of the eighteenth century, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart.
Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and concubines as two cultures converge. In a tale of integrity and corruption, passion and power, the key is control – of riches and minds, and over death itself.
- New Store Stock
- Mitchell, David (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 560 Pages - 03/17/2011 (Publication Date) - Sceptre (Publisher)
Shogun – James Clavell
This is James Clavell’s tour-de-force; an epic saga of one Pilot-Major John Blackthorne, and his integration into the struggles and strife of feudal Japan. Both entertaining and incisive, SHOGUN is a stunningly dramatic re-creation of a very different world.
Starting with his shipwreck on this most alien of shores, the novel charts Blackthorne’s rise from the status of reviled foreigner up to the hights of trusted advisor and eventually, Samurai. All as civil war looms over the fragile country.
- Amazon Kindle Edition
- Clavell, James (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 1140 Pages - 06/20/2013 (Publication Date) - Hodder & Stoughton (Publisher)
The Tokyo Trilogy – by David Peace
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 linked to those of the dead women and their killer.
- New Store Stock
- Peace, David (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 400 Pages - 09/04/2008 (Publication Date) - Faber & Faber (Publisher)
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Across the Nightingale Floor – Lian Hearn
Set in a mythical, feudal, Japanese land, a world both beautiful and cruel, the intense love story of two young people takes place against a background of warring clans, secret alliances, high honour and lightning swordplay.
Lian Hearn’s stunningly powerful bestseller, Across the Nightingale Floor, is an epic story for readers young and old.
- New Store Stock
- Hearn, Lian (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 304 Pages - 01/12/2017 (Publication Date) - Picador (Publisher)
The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion – Yukio Mishima
Mizoguchi grows up a lonely boy in a poor family, a hopeless and frustrated stutterer. Only tales of the beauty of a famous temple in Kyoto, told by his dying father, sustain him. Taunted by his schoolmates, he eventually escapes to become an acolyte at the temple. But there, witness to acts of callous violence and terrified by the bombing of the war, Mizoguchi develops an all-consuming obsession with the temple’s preservation – until the beauty of the place itself starts to feel like his deadliest enemy.
This powerful story of sacrifice and unattainable ideals brings together Mishima’s preoccupations with violence, desire, religion and national history to dazzling effect.
- New
- Mint Condition
- Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
- Guaranteed packaging
- No quibbles returns
The Tokaido Road – Lucia Clair Robinson
After the execution of her father, the young and beautiful Lady Asano is in grave danger from the powerful lord Kira. In order to save herself, she must find Oishi, the leader of the fighting men of her clan. She believes he is in the imperial city of Kyoto, three hundred miles away. To reach him she must walk there on the bustling thoroughfare called the Tokaido Road.
- Amazon Kindle Edition
- Robson, Lucia St. Clair (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 532 Pages - 12/19/2020 (Publication Date)
