Japanese Short Fiction

Looking to step up your Japanese before that big trip next year? Are you getting prepared for an interview with a recruiter in Tokyo? Maybe you’re tired of reading the subtitles on the latest anime! No language is easy to learn without practicing - even if you know all of the rules and have watched the videos - you’ll still have trouble. Diving into interesting material (such as stories) can be the difference between mastering a language and never leaving the basic level.

'What are you looking for?' asks Tokyo's most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. She is no ordinary librarian. Naturally, she has read every book on her shelf, but she also has the unique ability to read the souls of anyone who walks through her door. Sensing exactly what they're looking for in life, she provides just the book recommendation they never knew they needed to help them find it.

We’re constantly trying to improve and master new skills, and the Japanese language is no exception. A skill that can help open important doors in business and tourism, knowing Japanese will lead you towards a huge number of opportunities in life that will be worth every second dedicated to your studies.

Discover Japanese classics! This book contains four different short stories to introduce beginners to Japanese literature.

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig - watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods - turns out to be inconvenient. Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful.

In this collection of classic ghost stories from Japan, beautiful princesses turn out to be frogs, paintings come alive, deadly spectral brides haunt the living and a samurai delivers the baby of a Shinto goddess with mystical help. Here are all the phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore: 'rokuro-kubi', whose heads separate from their bodies at night; 'jikininki', or flesh-eating goblins; and terrifying faceless 'mujina' who haunt lonely neighbourhoods.

At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.

From the unique standpoint of an American woman who married into a Japanese family and has lived in Japan for more than 30 years, Rebecca Otowa weaves enchanting tales of her adopted home that portray the perspective of both the Japanese and the foreigner on the universal issues that face us all - love, work, marriage, death, and family conflict.

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom: A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; idle high school students find adventure in another dimension but aren't all that impressed; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki's stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.

Originally published in 1922 and translated by Takashi Kojima, this classic short story was the inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, about the murder of a samurai. Told from the perspective of multiple witnesses.

Based on Japanese literature and foldlore, Kwaidan contains 17 stories. The story of Loichi, the blind biwa player who was called to perform for the dead; of Muso, the journeying priest who encountered a man eating goblin; of the samurai who outwitted the ghost of a dead man. All these plus 14 other spooly tales are included in this collection.

'The Two Frogs' is the story of two amphibians who live in different cities in Japan. Each desires to see the world, so each sets out on a journey towards the other's home city. When they meet at the top of a mountain, the two frogs make friends and devise a plan to work out whether their journey is worthwhile - with unintended consequences.

人生はあっという間と言うけれど、走馬灯に映し出される色とりどりの絵のごとく、たくさんの喜怒哀楽があり、これまで生きてきた年月は、実は長いのだと、このエッセイは教えてくれる。

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, was an Irish writer known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. His book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, comprises two parts, the first being the "Kwaidan Proper" and the second, "Insect-Studies", which consists of an essay each on ants, butterflies and mosquitos. According to the author, most of the folk tales and ghost stories in the first part were translated from old Japanese texts. The themes encompass resurrection, sacrifice, magic, and the realm of dreams.

هل تخيلت مرةً أن تستمع إلى جدّة يابانية تروي القصص الشعبية والموروثة هناك؟! هذا الكتاب سيمنحك فرصةً ذهبية فهو مجموعة من قصص أيام زمان اليابانية الموجهة في معظمها للأطفال لكنها لا تموت في نفس الكبار أيضًا.

岐路に立ち、惑う人々に贈る 喪失と再生の記憶。この物語は、あなたの明日をやさしく照らす――絵本作家として活躍する高城好子はかつて美弥子の継母だった。

В этот сборник вошли как принесшие Акутагаве мировую славу и автоматически ассоциирующиеся с его именем исторические рассказы и новеллы (включая легендарную "В чаще", послужившую основой для сценария бессмертного фильма "Расёмон" Куросавы), так и менее известные западному читателю, но почитающиеся на родине автора еще выше рассказы, действие которых происходит на фоне современной автору реальности Японии начала ХХ века, еще сохраняющей немало черт национального своеобразия, но жадно и стремительно "европеизирующейся".

Una preciosa colección de cuentos de realismo mágico venidos del Japón tradicional, zen e intimista. Cuentos de tradición oral que han pasado a lo largo de los siglos de la boca de las abuelas a los sueños de sus nietos y nietas, siempre de corte fantástico, siempre con enseñanzas profundas y siempre portando la esencia de la identidad japonesa a través de su tradición.

池澤春菜、初の小説集を本人が朗読！遠い未来のスペースコロニーで、亡くなった叔母の弔いを巡る情景を描いた表題作のほか、商業媒体やウェブ媒体で発表した池澤春菜のＳＦ短篇を集成。

奥多摩の、太古から神を祀ってきた霊山・御嶽山の上にある村。そこにある神官屋敷は浅田氏の実家である。彼が少年だったころ、美しい伯母から聞かされた怪談めいた夜語り。それは怖いけれど、美しくも哀しく、どれも引き込まれるものばかりだった。