Factbook

A Dynamic Compendium of Interesting Japanese Literary and Publishing Facts
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    A book about an aquatic man by Kobo Abe written at the height of the Cold War is considered by some as one of the best works of science fiction written by a Japanese author[UPDATED: 3-31-2026]

    Kobo Abe (1924-1993) dubbed ‘The Kafka of Japan’ wrote about many things including for instance robots and the robotic existence of modern life in Japan, but his book Inter Ice Age 4, published at the height of the Cold War in 1959, is arguably one of the best works of science fiction ever written by a Japanese author.

    It tells the story of a submerged world in the near future in which the polar ice caps have melted, leading to the creation (through genetic engineering) of an ‘aquatic human’ capable of breathing underwater. 

    In terms of its scale and sheer imagination, its impact on the science fiction genre in Japan was significant. Nevertheless, today Abe is best known, inside and outside Japan, for his social commentary novel, The Woman in the Dunes, a jarringly dry novel about the futility and repetitiveness of modern Japanese existence. 

    A book about an aquatic man by Kobo Abe written at the height of the Cold War is considered by some as one of the best works of science fiction written by a Japanese author Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Japan’s most famous poet is a 17th century Zen Buddhist named Basho[UPDATED: 3-31-2026]

    Matsuo Kinsaku, the 17th-century Japanese haiku master, more commonly known as Basho, the son of a minor samurai born near Kyoto in 1644, is said to be Japan’s most famous poet, as well as one of the world’s most influential. 

    He is the undisputed master of haiku, short form traditional Japanese poetry, a form of poetry and creative writing that is now popular around the world with hundreds of thousands of haiku being written every year in many different languages, and not just in in Japan.

    Basho was a lay Zen Buddhist and in fact never took his vows to become a Buddhist monk despite his poetry reflecting many Zen Buddhist themes and his knowledge of the religion. Indeed, many believing him to be a Japanese Zen monk, referred to him as such.

    He established Japan’s best known poetry school of haikai no renga, the Shofu  (蕉風).  The school’s style was seen at the time as a return to traditional poetry, which retained important rules and humour but introduced new concepts in poetry such as linking poems, shiori.

    Basho wrote the most famous Japanese poem ever written, a simple poem about a frog that has been translated in myriad ways into English.

    Into the calm old lake A frog with flying leap goes plop! The peaceful hush to break. (William J. Porter)

    Old pond frog leaping splash (Cid Corman)

    Old pond – frogs jumped in – sound of water. (Lafcadio Hearn)

    A lonely pond in age-old stillness sleeps … A part, unstirred by sound or motion … till Suddenly into it a lithe frog leaps. (Curtis Hidden Page)

    The original Japanese is:

    古池や蛙飛び込む水の音

    Furu ike ya, kawazu tobikomu, mizu no oto

    Basho is also known for Oku no hosomichi, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, describing his visit to northern Japan, which is considered by critics and many experts in and outside Japan to be one of the most beautiful works of Japanese literature.

    Japan’s most famous poet is a 17th century Zen Buddhist named Basho Posted by Richard Nathan
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    William Shakespeare and the first Tokugawa Shogun are linked by one very important fact[UPDATED: 3-11-2026]

    Ieyasu Tokugawa (1543-1616), who founded a military state and a dynasty of shoguns that lasted 265 years, would not look out of place in one of Shakespeare’s Machiavellian plays. 

    Most of Shakespeare’s works were produced between 1589-1613 when Tokugawa was busy building alliances and fighting historically important battles in feudal Japan. 

    In 1603, when Tokugawa became the first Tokugawa Shogun, it is very unlikely that Shakespeare would have known anything about this samurai warlord who fought six major battles in his lifetime before initiating Japan’s longest period of peace and stability. 

    Had he known, he might have written a play about this warlord to complement such plays as The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, with a narrative that revolves around the themes of loyalty, patience and opportunistic cunning.

    The decisive battle involving 160,000 men that gave Tokugawa control of Japan was fought in 1600 at Sekigahara around the time that Shakespeare was writing Hamlet – and a few years before he penned Macbeth.  

    Tokugawa understood the importance of literature and was interested in the world outside Japan. King James I exchanged letters and gifts, including Japanese armour and a silver telescope, with him. And it is possible, but unlikely, that Tokugawa might have been made aware of Shakespeare through William Adams (1564-1620) the English navigator from Kent who become an important advisor to the Shogun on all things Western. 

    During his lifetime, Shakespeare did not enjoy the reputation he does today, and was considered by his contemporaries as one of many talented playwrights active at that time. Adams, whose life was fictionalized in the 1975 novel Shogun by James Clavell (1924-1994), arrived in Japan in 1600. The Bard of Avon’s popularity and reputation would have been growing but really only took off and became established after the publication in 1623 of Shakespeare‘s works in the First Folio, three years after Adams’s death. 

    Interestingly, when the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) adapted Shakespeare’s plays into films set in Japan, he set them in feudal Japan during the Senkoku period (1467-1603), which ended when Tokugawa came to power and the Edo Period (1603-1868) commenced. 

    Kurosawa’s first adaptation was Macbeth in 1957, which became The Throne of Blood. He then went on to make other successful films based on Shakespeare’s plays including King Lear and Hamlet. 

    Aside from the links between the dramatic narratives that featured in both Shakespeare’s plays and the events in Tokugawa’s life, the one uncanny fact that unites the two men is the year of their death: 1616. 

    Despite Tokugawa’s much riskier lifestyle, the warlord died at the age of 74, while Shakespeare died at the age of 52. Both men, however, left remarkable legacies that still resonate with students and academics today.

    William Shakespeare and the first Tokugawa Shogun are linked by one very important fact Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Osamu Dazai, the so-called ‘Bad Boy’ of Japanese literature, was brought up in a room full of poetry in an opulent house belonging to a moneylender[UPDATED: 3-11-2026]

    Osamu Dazai  (1909-1948) famous for his novel No Longer Human, Ningen Shikaku, killing himself at the age of 38, womanising, and being expelled from Tokyo Imperial University, has been dubbed The Bad Boy of Japanese literature.

    Many of Japan’s most interesting creative writers, such as Fuminori Nakamura, cite his book No Longer Human as their favourite book, or one that had a huge influence on them, and the author still has a James Dean (1931-1955) cult-like status amongst many in Japan.

    Dazai, son of a rich landowner, moneylender and politician, grew up in a beautiful Western-style home, known as Shayokan, in Aomori, Northern Japan. His real name was Shuji Tsushima.

    His father commissioned Sakichi Horie (1845-1907) a local architect to design the house for him, which consists of 11 rooms on the ground floor, including a special room know as the Money Lending Shop, and 8 rooms on the first floor much of which is made from hiba wood, considered one of Japan’s best types of wood from a tree in the cypress family.

    The property, which spans a total of 2,250 square metres, was completed in 1907.

    Horie is also famous for designing and building the Renaissance-style 59th National Bank in Hirosaki, Aomori in 1904 – a regional bank set up in 1879.

    At this time modern banking in Japan was still emerging and the type of money lending conducted by Dazai’s father, Genemon Tsushima, who owned around 300 tenanted properties or farms, was an early form of modern banking when financing in Japan was still mostly based around crop and rice yields. 

    Japan’s first bank and first company structured as a joint-stock company was founded in 1873 with the right to issue banknotes. Later it became a commercial bank after the Bank of Japan took over this responsibility. And Japan started raising funds for the first time internationally in the London money markets in the same decade, changing the sector completely.

    Dazai lived in the house for 13 years, but his father, a member of the House of Peers, was mostly absent in Tokyo during this time. His mother and aunt brought him up.

    In his mother’s living room, known as The Library, Dazai and his siblings studied and played. This beautifully crafted room has poetry displayed on one of its sliding cupboard doors. One of these poems, close to where Dazai’s desk is said to have been located as a child, included the word shayo, setting sun, a phrase, which Dazai in later life would select as the title for one of his most famous novels.

    Dazai often drew on this family background in his works. His novels The Setting Sun and No Longer Human are still both considered modern-day classics in Japan.

    Osamu Dazai, the so-called ‘Bad Boy’ of Japanese literature, was brought up in a room full of poetry in an opulent house belonging to a moneylender Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein only became available in Japanese in 1953, 135 years after its publication[UPDATED: 3-11-2026]

    Mary Shelley (1797-1851) published her novella Frankenstein in 1818 during a period of revolutions – both industrial and political, thanks to the French Revolution (1789-1799) and new sciences such as galvanism. 

    By contrast, Japan at this time was still enjoying a relatively tranquil period, its Edo Period (1603-1868), and had cut itself off from almost all Western influences including Dickensian fears of rapidly deteriorating social condition from increased productivity and the mechanisation of industry.

    Mary Shelley’s book did not become widely available or known in Japan until 1953 when Nippon Shuppan Kyodo published Giichi Shihido’s (1907-1954) translation and by then Japan had developed its own monsters and fearful threats, including the likes of Godzilla, who made his debut in Japan at about the same time, in a film in 1954.

    Authors such as Kobo Abe (1924-1993), who is often called Japan’s Kafka, have written their own brilliant robot and monster tales. Abe’s 1953, R62 go no hatsumei, The Invention of R62, highlights some of the fears of the time, and Japan also has its own long and rich local history of robot and monster literature.

    The Invention of R62 tells the tale of an engineer who loses his job after new technologies from an American firm are introduced at his workplace. Desperate about his predicament, he decides to kill himself. But before doing so, he is persuaded to enter into a financial arrangement with a university researcher who is trying to develop robots capable of replacing workers and making Japanese industry more efficient. As a last act he agrees to have his brain replaced with a controllable artificial one by the researcher. 

    The procedure is successful, but the consequences are unexpected and painful, especially for the engineer’s former employer.

    Abe’s other robot stories from the period including Eijyu undo, Perpetual Motion, have similar themes echoing the times.

    Nonetheless, the Japanese lived in blissful ignorance of Luddites, steam engines, Victor Frankenstein; as well as growing international angst over the seismic changes taking place in Western society during the period of Shelly’s life and after. And the word Frankenstein doesn’t have the same cultural legacy or impact as it does in some countries in the English reading world.

    Japanese engineers have noted, often proudly, that the nation’s love affair with robots is open and easy simply because Japan does not have a so-called Frankenstein Complex, a term that was coined by Isaac Asimov (1939-1992) while the West does, a concept that Western journalists often pick up on and write about after being informed of this.

    There are several reasons cited for this – both cultural and religious; but perhaps the most convincing arguments are simply that Japan’s development cycle has been out-of-sync with the West. So it was isolated from the negative side-effects of the industrial revolution, and perhaps additionally its early puppet designers and engineers understood the concept of the ‘Uncanny Valley’ earlier than others. And thus adopted and developed less human-like automaton preferring the cute or the industrial or a combination that elicits less fear and disgust when seen in action.

    In fact, Japan’s Frankenstein exposure came late in film format and toys, many of which were made in Japan after the Second World War for export to the United States for the American “festival” known as Halloween. Japan’s industrial revolution has had its own negative environmental and social side-effects, but Victor Frankenstein or his monster haven’t been part of their narratives.
    Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein only became available in Japanese in 1953, 135 years after its publication Posted by Richard Nathan
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    For a thousand years ‘The Tale of Genji’ was required reading for Japanese aristocratic women[UPDATED: 3-11-2026]

    The Tale of Genji written by Murasaki Shikibu, in 1010, during Japan’s Heian Period (794-1185) is said to be Japan’s oldest novel and perhaps even the world’s oldest novel, if a novel is defined as narrative prose of significant length.

    It has been since its very origin a tale for Japan’s high society, written for women by a woman. For a thousand years The Tale of Genji was required reading for Japanese aristocratic women, and was inaccessible to the general Japanese public for much of this time.

    According to academics: “it remained an aristocratic text, its manuscripts the property of aristocrats and aristocrats its principal interpreters.”

    That said, from the 17th century onwards it became more widely available after an edition was printed using movable type, a technology, which first arrived in Japan in 1593, and subsequently in woodblock printed editions.

    And due to its restricted availability, the refinement it portrays and its association with the highest and most sophisticated levels of Japanese society, it became an aspirational read for emerging upwardly mobile Japanese families in Japan’s Edo period (1603-1868) and their daughters, as well as an important tool in women’s education. Home teachers, often women used the text to teach girls reading and as part of their overall education.

    According to the Japan expert and former Editor of The New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma, The Tale of Genji, which is replete with rather promiscuous characters, is a novel all “about the art of seduction.”  And this has led, at times, to concerns being raised about the appropriateness of its content. In 1880s Japan, for instance, many worried that its lusty and emotional content might damage Meiji era (1868-1912) young women.

    This, however, didn’t put future generations of Japanese women off from wanting to read it. Hisako Yoshizawa (1918-2019) is one such interesting example. She is more famous for writing and publishing life style books and broadcasting on how to live a good life, but at the end of the Second World War durning nightly air raids, wearing her silk nightgown and a steel helmet, Yoshizawa, reportedly, liked to read The Tale of Genji to while the noisy dangerous nights away.   

    All this has helped make this 11th century tale by a Japanese noblewoman, an international publishing sensation, with translations, spin-offs and adaptations for manga, anime, film and theatre.

    Such authors as Mitsuyo Kakuta have followed a long tradition of Japan’s leading authors from each generation in updating and publishing a new version of this seductive novel about the life of “Shinning Genji”.

    This multi-generational trend has helped keep the rather long and esoteric tale, which in its original version consists of 54 scrolls or chapters; around a million words; about 430 different characters; 800 poems; as well as 8 or so love interests, fresh, and relevant to contemporary readers – while helping to expand its readership.

    For a thousand years ‘The Tale of Genji’ was required reading for Japanese aristocratic women Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Cinderella-type stories about dysfunctional stepmother and stepchild relationships don’t generally feature in the early canon of Japanese literature and are considered a Western literary import[UPDATED: 2-18-2026]

    According to Chieko Ikie Mulhern at the University of Illinois, the earliest Japanese story that features persecution and stepchildren is the 10th century Ochikubo Monogatari, The Tale of Lady Ochibuko.

    However, in its case, she argues, that despite often being compared to Cinderella due to the stepdaughter, Princess Ochikubo, being banished to a cellar and rescued by a General at the start of the tale, it isn’t the tormentation of the step-daughter and a subsequent happy ending that is the main feature of the narrative. It’s actually the abuse and humiliation that the stepmother suffers in revenge that is the tale’s main narrative theme, making it a very different type of tale altogether.

    In fact, The Tale of Lady Ochibuko is rare in narrative type for its period in Japan, the Heian Period (794-1185), as it also involves a sustainable monogamous relationship.

    In contrast, as unfortunately is now increasingly common worldwide, few Japanese folk stories or tales of the period involve happy marriages, monogamous relationships and most tales don’t have Cinderella-like ‘Happily Ever Afters’ either.

    The Prince Genji the protagonist of The Tale of Genji, Genji Mongatari, Japan’s so-called oldest novel written in 1010, is also a stepchild. Nonetheless, his story couldn’t be more different from a Cinderella-type stepmother-stepchild narrative even though at one point in this massive and complex tale of multiple seductions he is hounded by an arch viral, his father’s consort, Lady Kokiden, who perhaps is arguably a type of “stepmother” figure.

    Despite Cinderella type storytelling being found in ancient Greece and other countries with tales that sometimes also feature shoes or sandals as plot devices, research seems to suggest that the persecuted stepchild as a “motif-complex” appeared much later in Japan towards the end of Japan’s Muromachi period (1336-1573) and its early Edo period (1603-1868). Though earlier Japanese folktales about stepchildren gathering fruits, nuts and water, with twists of fate, do in fact exist.

    There are of course thousands of different variants of the Cinderella tale but Mulhern in her research speculates, using textual analysis comparing Italian and Japanese versions of the story, that Japanese-speaking Italian Jesuits based in Japan between 1570 and 1614 introduced the Cinderella narrative to Japan, with its theme of enteral redemption after suffering, in order to help proselytize Christianity in Japan.

    This was a time when Jesuit priests had brought a printing press to Japan from Rome, founding the Jesuit Mission Press known as Kirishitan-ban, and when the first Japanese book, Kobun Kokyo, Classic of Filial Piety, was produced using movable type in 1593 after the technology arrived in Japan from Korea.

    That said, ancient Japanese tales about scary and unpleasant women are common and often involve food and rarely have ‘Happily Ever Afters’, even if the actual construct of the evil bullying type of stepmother that Cinderella confronted actually being a European brand and Japanese import.

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    Cinderella-type stories about dysfunctional stepmother and stepchild relationships don’t generally feature in the early canon of Japanese literature and are considered a Western literary import Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Yukio Mishima penned a series of essays titled ‘Lessons in Immorality’ in 1958[UPDATED: 4-18-2025]

    Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) is notorious for a variety of things including killing himself; being nominated multiple-times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and never winning; as well as being one of David Bowie’s (1947-2016) favourite authors.

    In his short writing life (around 21 years), Mishima was prolific – publishing 40 novels, and also translations including a translation of Lewis Carroll’s (1832-1898) Alice in Wonderland.

    Mishima wrote for both highbrow and popular audiences and even had a novel serialised in Weekly Playboy, a Japanese adult magazine.

    Always the consummate provocateur, in 1958 Mishima penned a series of satirical essays for the weekly Japanese magazine, Shyukan Myojo, under the heading Lessons in Immorality. These essays were later adapted for film, television and the stage.

    The essays were inspired by Twenty Cases of Unfilial Children by Ihawa Saikaku (1642-1693) published in 1686, which was also a parody, in its case of a famous Chinese Confucian text. Saikaku is probably best known today as the poet who created the floating world publishing genre.

    Mishima’s essays amongst other things ridicule the series Great Learning for Women, a widely read educational text for women circulated and published in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868) when Japan was ruled by its Shoguns.

    With great wit and his usual eloquent prose, Mishima challenges readers to disrespect teachers, ignore so-called etiquette experts, be rebellious, and much more besides.

    Examples of the titles of Mishima’s series of essays on immorality, described as masterpecieces of humor and satire, include:

    You Should Go Drinking, Even with Men You Don’t Know

    You Should Tell Lies as Often as Possible

    You Should Slurp Your Soup

    You Should Abuse Women

    You Should be as Conceited as Possible

    Boys: Lose Your Virginity While You’re Young

    Yukio Mishima penned a series of essays titled ‘Lessons in Immorality’ in 1958 Posted by Richard Nathan