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            Award-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguru, born in Nagasaki, Japan, raised since age six in England, became an international success with “Remains of the Day”, which became a film starring Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson and Christopher Reeve.  Set in England, its themes of class structure and the melancholy waning of empire are equally Japanese.

            Reverting to books about Japan, Ishiguro’s first two novels are set in his homeland.   “An Artist of the Floating World” examines Japanese attitudes towards World War II through the eyes of a former artist and his son, who blames the father and his generation for the horrors generated by the Atomic Bomb.  Although Ishiguro’s work is set in many countries, his latest novel “Never Let Me Go”, a haunting science fiction novel, is set in the world of the future and it’s unforgettable.  Japanese writers have always mined the ghost story genre and now are gleefully leading the pack in horror films (“The Ring”).  Other worlds are close to the surface of the Japanese psyche.

              Natsuo Karino is the woman who tops Japan’s gothic fiction best-seller list, most recently with “Grotesque”, a scathing allegory about the subjection of Japanese women and their secret lives.  Several of her books have been made into films

.            In “My Year of Meats”, Ruth Ozeki writes about a Japanese-American woman crossing the Unites States to film America for the Japanese and, in Tokyo, the difficult life for women personified by the Japanese wife of the show’s advertising executive.            

          Yukio Mishima’s dramatic suicide (performing the act of seppuku (hari-kiri) with a samurai sword) wrote finis to a brilliant career.  His stunning body of work includes “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion” which uses the burning of a national treasure, carefully spared by American bombers in World War II, by a disfigured crazed Japanese man as a departure point for an examination of identity and the importance of beauty and art.  “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea” was made into a film starring Kris Kristoffersen.Director Paul Schrader created a notable cinematic tribute in “Mishima:  A Life in Four Chapters”, a fictionalized account of four segments in Mishima’s life, of which three parallel his novels “The Temple of the Golden Pavilian”, “Kyoko’s House” and “Runaway Horses, while the fourth depicts his last day.A fascinating oddity is “Mishima’s Sword”, Christopher Ross’s 2006 account of his encounters and experiences while searching for the legendary samurai sword Mishima used to kill himself.    Burning is also the theme of Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard’s “The Great Fire”,  winner of The National Book Award, which focuses on the love affair of an Englishman and an Australian girl in the traumatized late 1940s after World War II.  Ruth Benedict’s classic “The Chrysanthem and the Sword” is an anthropologist’s account of Japanese history and culture. 

           For a recent chronicle, consult  “A History of Japan” by R.H.P. Mason and J.G. Craiger, a thorough and readable contemporary classic that covers history, religion, culture and arts.