Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Set in a Foreign Country (can be your own if you usually read about foreign ones or choose a different continent)

For this Monday update’s purpose, I have decided to feature books set in Japan as it will be my next literary destination.

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
Author: Kenzaburō Ōe
Translator (from Japanese): John Nathan
Publisher: Grove Press
Publishing Date: 2002 (1986)
No. of Pages: 250

Synopsis: 

Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is a virtuoso novel from one of today’s finest authors. K is a famous writer living in Tokyo with his wife and three children, one of whom is mentally disabled. This child Eeyore, has been doing disturbing things – behaving aggressively, asserting that he’s dead, even brandishing a knife at his mother – and K, given to retreat from reality into abstraction, looks for answers in his life-long love of William Blake’s poetry. As K struggles to understand his family and his place in it, he must also reevaluate his relationship with his own father and the duty of artists and writers in society. A remarkable portrait of the inexpressible bond between a father and his damaged son, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is the work of an unparalleled writer at his sparkling best.

Title: Wonderful Fool
Author: Shusaku Endo
Translator (from Japanese): Francis Mathy
Publisher: Peter Owen
Publishing Date: 2002
No. of Pages: 237

Synopsis: 

Wonderful Fool is the story of Gaston Bonaparte, a young Frenchman who visits Tokyo to stay with his pen-friend Takamori. Gaston is a trusting person with a simple love for others even after they have demonstrated deceit and betrayal, but his appearance and his behaviour proves a bitter disappointment and embarrassment to Takamori and his associates, as Gaston spends his time making friends with street children, stray dogs, prostitutes, and gangsters. Endo charts his misadventures with irony, satire, and humanity.

Title: The Key
Author: Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
Translator (from Japanese): Howard Hibbett
Publisher: Perigree
Publishing Date: January 1981
No. of Pages: 183

Synopsis: 

The Key is a novel told in the form of parallel diaries kept by a husband and wife which describe the last four months of their marriage. The husband (a professor in his fifties) frenziedly drives himself to even more intense sexual pleasures with the wife with whom he has lived for almost thirty years. He resorts to various stimulants: brandy and a handsome young man for her. In the day they record the previous night’s experiences. Each suspects that the other is secretly reading their respective diaries, and wonders at the same time if the other does not actually intend that his daily confession be read. It is a masterful example of a theme which dominates all of Tanizaki’s writing: the relationship of sexual desire to the will to live.

Title: The Rainbow
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Translator (from Japanese): Haydn Trowell
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: 2023 (1950)
No. of Pages: 215

Synopsis: 

With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters – born to the same father but different mothers – struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. Momoko, their father’s first child – haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together – seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers.

A thoughtful, probing nove about enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family, and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a powerful, poignant work from Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Title: Thirst for Love
Author: Yukio Mishima
Translator (from Japanese): Alfred H. Marks
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: 2009
No. of Pages: 200

Synopsis: 

After the early death of her philandering husband, Etsuko moves into her father-in-law’s house, where she numbly submits to the old man’s advances. But soon she finds herself in love with the young servant Saburo. Tormented by his indifference, yet invigorated by her desire, she makes her move, with catastrophic consequences.

Title: Seventeen
Author: Hideo Yokoyama
Translator (from Japanese): Louise Heal Kawai
Publisher: Riverrun
Publishing Date: 2018 (2003)
No. of Pages: 394

Synopsis: 

Five hundred and twenty people died on that mountain. That sparkling mountain.

1985. Kazumasa Yuuki, a seasoned reporter at the North Kanto Times, runs a daily gauntlet against the power struggles and office politics that plague its newsroom. But when an air disaster of unprecedented scale occurs on the paper’s doorstep, its staff are united by an unimaginable horror, and a once-in-a-lifetime scoop.

2002. Seventeen years later, Yuuki remembers the adrenaline-fuelled, emotionally charged seven days that changed his and his colleagues’ lives. He does so while making good on a promise he made that fateful week – one that holds the key to its last unsolved mystery, and represents Yuuki’s final, unconquered fear.