Read Japan Project

Mon. Jun. 23, 2025

42 new books about Japan

The library was recently gifted 42 new books through the Read Japan Project. The goal of this project is to provide readers and young researchers around the world with an accurate picture of Japan through the donation of outstanding books. The titles received cover politics, literature, pop culture, and more.

If you’re interested in learning more about Japan, we encourage you to browse the list of donated books and borrow them at the library.

Book list

• Nakae, Chōmin, and Jeffrey Hammond. A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government. First edition, Weatherhill, 1984.
• Smith, Thomas C. Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920. University of California Press, 1988.
• Kelts, Roland. Japanamerica : How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. Martin’s Griffin, 2007.
• Bestor, Theodore C. Neighborhood Tokyo. ACLS Humanities E-Book., Stanford University Press, 1989.
• Napier, Susan Jolliffe. Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation. First St. Martin’s Griffin Edition, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2005.
• Schilling, Mark. Contemporary Japanese Film. 1st ed, Weatherhill, 1999.
• Ihara, Saikaku. The Life of an Amorous Woman : And Other Writings. 1st ed. New Directions pbk, New Directions Book, 1963.
• Karatani, Kōjin. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Duke University Press, 1993.
• Ōe, Kenzaburō, and John Nathan. A Personal Matter. Grove Press, 1969.
• Keene, Donald. The Pleasures of Japanese Literature. Columbia University Press, 1988.
• Ambros, Barbara. Women in Japanese Religions. New York University Press, 2015.
• Heine, Steven. From Chinese Chan to Japanese Zen: A Remarkable Century of Transmission and Transformation. Oxford University Press, 2018.
• Murakami, Haruki. The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. Edited by Jay Rubin, Penguin Books, 2018.
• Sayaka Murata. Convenience Store Woman. First Grove Atlantic paperback edition, Grove Press, 2018.
• Murakami, Haruki, and Hayao Kawai. Haruki Murakami Goes to Meet Hayao Kawai. Daimon Verlag, 2016.
• Shirane, Haruo. Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts. Columbia University Press, 2012.
• Yoshio Sugimoto. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Hane, Mikiso, and Louis G. Perez. Premodern Japan: A Historical Survey. Second edition, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015.
• Katsushika, Hokusai, et al. Hokusai : Beyond the Great Wave. Edited by Timothy Clark, [First Edition], Thames & Hudson in collaboration with the British Museum, 2017.
• Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (U.S.), and Yale University Press. The Artist in Edo. Edited by Yukio Lippit, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2018.
• Tsuji, Nobuo. History of Art in Japan. Columbia University Press, 2019.
• Weisenfeld, Gennifer S. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923. University of California Press, 2012.
• Sasakawa, Yōhei. No Matter Where the Journey Takes Me: One Man’s Quest for a Leprosy-Free World. Hurst & Company, 2019.
• Sasakawa, Ryōichi. Sugamo Diary. Hurst, 2010.
• Seizaburo, Sato. Sasakawa Ryoichi: A Life. EastBridge, 2006.
• Miyazawa, Kiichi. Politics and Power in 20th-Century Japan: The Reminiscences of Miyazawa Kiichi. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
• Takayama, Fumihiko. The Last and Longest Mile: Yohei Sasakawa’s Struggle to Eliminate Leprosy. Hurst & Company, 2021.
• Stanley, Amy. Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World. Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2020.
• Pitelka, Morgan, et al. Letters from Japan’s Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Correspondence of Warlords, Tea Masters, Zen Priests, and Aristocrats. Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2021.
• Hansen, Gitte Marianne, and Michael Tsang, editors. Murakami Haruki and Our Years of Pilgrimage. Routledge, 2022.
• Bird, Winifred. Eating Wild Japan Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods, with a Guide to Plants and Recipes. Illustrated by Paul Poynter, Stone Bridge Press, 2021.
• Harding, Christopher. The Japanese: A History in Twenty Lives. Penguin Books, 2020.
• Pitelka, Morgan. Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
• Steinhaus, Werner, and Simon Kaner, editors. An Illustrated Companion to Japanese Archaeology. 2nd edition, Archaeopress Publishing Ltd, 2020.
• Suzuki, Hiroyuki, and Getty Research Institute. Antiquarians of Nineteenth-Century Japan: The Archaeology of Things in the Late Tokugawa and Early Meiji Periods. Edited by Maki Fukuoka, Getty Research Institute, 2022.
• Lie, John. Japan, the Sustainable Society: The Artisanal Ethos, Ordinary Virtues, and Everyday Life in the Age of Limits. University of California Press, 2022.
• McMorran, Chris. Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan. University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2022.
• Takatsuki, Yasuo. The Dojima Rice Exchange: From Rice Trading to Index Futures Trading in Edo-Period Japan. Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture, 2022.
• Kuno, Susumu. The Structure of the Japanese Language. MIT Press, 1973.
• Carter, Steven D., editor. The Columbia Anthology of Japanese Essays: Zuihitsu from the Tenth to the Twenty-First Century. Columbia University Press, 2014.
• Hager, Thomas. Walking with the Farmer: The Journey of the Sasakawa Africa Association since 1986. Second edition, Sasakawa Africa Association, 2023.
• Sasakawa, Yōhei. Making the Impossible Possible: My Work for Leprosy Elimination and Human Rights. C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 2023.