Jap authors recommendations thread

!classics, just the other day, I was talking to a friend about Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows. It's about A E S T H E T I C S. Specifically, the nature and development of Eastern, particularly Japanese, aesthetics and how they contrast with Western aesthetics.

!teaparty, Okakura Kakuzō's The Book of Tea is also solid. This one is about the contrast between Eastern and Western aesthetics as well, but using Japanese tea ceremony as the focal point. And it was originally written in English, so you don't need to worry about the quality of the translation.

!historychads, check out Haruki Murakami's Underground. Murakami is typically a novelist, but this book is a series of interviews he did with both perpetrators and survivors of the Tokyo subway sarin attack, as well as his essay, "Blind Nightmare: Where Are We Japanese Going?". Unfortunately, while the English translation adds the interviews with members of Aum Shinrikyō, it cuts the number of interviews with survivors in half.

Don't worry [anime] and [g*mers], I didn't forget you, you fricking losers. You get Hiroki Azuma's Otaku: Japan's Database Animals. It's all about modern Japanese pop culture and how people consume it. Specifically, it puts forward the idea of "database consumption", where people take in the individual elements of a narrative without actually taking in the narrative itself. This contrasts it with Eiji Ōtsuka's A Theory of Narrative Consumption. That's right, you frickers get two. Maybe you'll learn something for once.

And last but not least, I recommend the works of Kenji Miyazawa to [chuds] and [nonchuds] alike. In particular, Night on the Galactic Railroad is a children's novel all about the nature of self-sacrifice.

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