Japanese Literature

The Heian court (794–1185) produced Japan's golden age of prose. Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century, follows the loves and losses of the 'shining prince' Genji and his descendants over more than fifty chapters; it is often described as the world's first novel. Her contemporary Sei Shōnagon wrote The Pillow Book, witty lists and observations of court life that established the zuihitsu, or miscellany essay. The imperial poetry anthology Kokinshū (c. 905) set the canon of waka poetry for centuries.

The warrior age brought The Tale of the Heike, the epic of the Genpei War recited by blind monks to the biwa, and reflective essays such as Kamo no Chōmei's Hōjōki (1212) and Yoshida Kenkō's Essays in Idleness, steeped in the Buddhist sense of impermanence (mujō).

Printing and a growing urban readership created a commercial literature in the Edo period. Ihara Saikaku wrote witty stories of merchants and lovers, and Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote the great plays of the bunraku puppet theatre, including his double-suicide tragedies. Matsuo Bashō raised the short haikai verse to high art; his travel diary Narrow Road to the Deep North, based on a journey of 1689, mixes prose and haiku. Popular illustrated books, comic fiction and long adventure novels such as Takizawa Bakin's Hakkenden entertained a wide public.

Meiji writers developed a modern prose style close to spoken language. Natsume Sōseki, whose portrait appeared on the 1,000-yen note, explored the isolation of the modern individual in I Am a Cat (1905), Botchan (1906) and Kokoro (1914); Mori Ōgai combined European learning with historical fiction. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke wrote short stories such as Rashōmon and In a Grove, the basis of Kurosawa's film; the Akutagawa Prize for new writers, founded in 1935, bears his name.

Kawabata Yasunari, author of Snow Country and The Sound of the Mountain, became the first Japanese Nobel laureate in literature in 1968. Tanizaki Jun'ichirō wrote The Makioka Sisters and the essay In Praise of Shadows, and Dazai Osamu's No Longer Human remains a bestseller. Mishima Yukio, author of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, took his own life in 1970 after a failed attempt to incite a coup. Ōe Kenzaburō, who wrote of his disabled son, of Hiroshima and of postwar society, received the Nobel Prize in 1994.

Murakami Haruki, whose novels include Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84, is the most widely translated Japanese author of his generation, blending everyday Tokyo life with the surreal. Yoshimoto Banana's Kitchen (1988) was a phenomenon at home and abroad. Women writers have been especially prominent since: Ogawa Yōko, Kawakami Hiromi, Kawakami Mieko, Murata Sayaka, whose Convenience Store Woman won the Akutagawa Prize in 2016, and Tawada Yōko, who writes in both Japanese and German.

Popular fiction, crime and science fiction, light novels and the manga industry reach an enormous readership. Many classics, including works by Sōseki and Akutagawa, are freely available in the Aozora Bunko digital library.