As a kid growing up in Taiwan, I spent many weekends with my grandpa watching black-and-white Japanese classics like Seven Samurai (七人の侍) (1954), Ran (乱) (1985), and Lone Wolf and Cub (子連れ狼) (1972), the series that later inspired The Mandalorian, as Jon Favreau has explicitly confirmed it was the core narrative framework for his hit Star Wars show.
Back then, I was sometimes called the "alien kid." My grandpa was Japanese-educated under Japanese rule in Taiwan, so he only spoke Japanese and Taiwanese Hokkien, while I only spoke Mandarin. Despite not understanding a single word, I was completely spellbound by what was happening on screen.
By the time I was in high school, everyone around me was binge-watching Long Vacation (ロングバケーション) and Neon Genesis Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン), or passing around copies of Dragon Ball (ドラゴンボール) and Berserk (ベルセルク). J-Pop and anime were everywhere in Taiwanese media, a good 20 years before K-Pop took over the global stage.
That childhood fascination eventually led me to major in Japanese at university, where I dug deeper into just how far Japanese culture's influence reaches: how Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (富士三十六景) shaped Claude Monet and the French Impressionists, or how Japanese scholars during the Meiji Restoration (1868) coined new Kanji terms: Wasei-kango (和製漢語) for Western political concepts, terms later adopted into modern Taiwanese and Korean systems. And of course, I immersed myself in Japanese literature, from Matsuo Bashō's (松尾芭蕉) haiku to the magical realism of Haruki Murakami (村上春樹).
It still surprises me how few people have read the classic books that hooked me early on. So I wanted to share a few of my favourite Japanese authors and works, in case you'd like to explore them too.
Snow Country (雪国)
By Yasunari Kawabata (川端康成)
As the very first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kawabata's writing beautifully captures the pure essence of traditional Japanese aesthetics, deeply intertwined with his own childhood trauma. Having watched his entire family pass away one by one before he turned fourteen, his personal relationship with death and isolation aligns perfectly with the Japanese philosophy of Mono no Aware (物の哀れ), which captures the bittersweet beauty of impermanence.
It reminds me of my favourite phrase I learned at university: Sakurafubuki (桜吹雪), the cherry blossom blizzard. An overwhelming beauty that catches you by surprise, a complete sensory overload, before everything returns to quietness.
That same combination of breathtaking beauty, deep sadness, and peaceful acceptance shows up again and again in Japanese daily life, in the literature, in the music, and, I'd argue, in the national temperament itself.
The novel itself mirrors this fragile worldview through the doomed romance between Shimamura, a detached Tokyo aesthetician, and Komako, a passionate hot-spring geisha. Set against the freezing backdrop of an isolated mountain town, the narrative moves away from traditional plot lines. Instead, it relies on sensory detail to capture the ache of a love destined to fade into the landscape, just like the falling snow.
Quotes from the book:
"Her eyes were remarkably clear. They were not large, but the black and the white were distinct, and they had a way of looking straight out that made one feel they were looking at something far away."
"There was a naive, open honesty about her... the impression she gave was one of absolute cleanliness. It was an impression that came from the clarity of her skin and the freshness of her voice."
(Photo caption) Matsuei, the real-life hot-spring geisha on whom Kawabata based the character of Komako in Snow Country.
Kawabata's work preserves the most delicate, elegant, and mysterious traditional qualities of Japanese literature; at the same time, he has survived the perilous decades of continuous modernization in this century. His disappointment with modern society is always dissolved into a quiet, pristine, and classical beauty."
Confession of a Mask
By Yukio Mishima
When I think of Mishima, the closest comparison in English literature would be a mix of Oscar Wilde's dark beauty (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and the intense identity crisis of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, that exhausting struggle of surviving while wearing a social mask.
Confession of a Mask, written when Mishima was just twenty-four, is the deeply fragile, painfully raw confession of a young man struggling to hide his true self from a conservative world. He became the brightest novelist of the 1950s, and was later nominated for the Nobel Prize three times. But his singular personality, and the mythology that grew around it, often overshadowed the writing itself.
This experimental fiction is also an autobiography. Watakushi shōsetsu (私小説), or "I-Novel," is a well-known style of storytelling in Japan, in which the author is both narrator and protagonist. Once you accept that premise, you're drawn deep into his mind and his life, and forced to share in his raw self-revelation.
But who's to say how much of it is factual? Is the confession itself a performance? Or is the true self he reveals just another facade? Who am I? That question is exactly what makes the novel so compelling, the kind you finish in one sitting.
"A genius of this caliber appears only once every three hundred years."
"Mishima is one of the grand masters of the psychological novel. His prose is so brilliant, so meticulously structured, that it can make even the most forbidden desires seem elegant and inevitable."
Rashomon
By Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Rashomon is a lightning-fast, bone-chilling psychological masterpiece. It forces us to confront a terrifying question: when society collapses and starvation sets in, does morality even matter? Or is evil just a luxury we abandon in order to survive?
I actually watched the film first, with my grandfather. He didn't speak Mandarin, only Japanese and Taiwanese Hokkien, having been educated under the Japanese system during Taiwan's occupation. We watched a lot of black-and-white classics together, like Seven Samurai, Tokyo Story, and Rashomon.
Of course, the story isn't trying to teach you right from wrong. Instead, it throws you into each character's situation, their reasoning, their frustration, their raw need to survive. The way each account, shaped by its teller's own self-interest, weaves a web of lies that traps everyone in the story is what gave rise to the term " Rashomon effect," now used well beyond literature. As Wikipedia defines it, the term describes the phenomenon of unreliable eyewitness accounts.
"Akutagawa’s stories are like finely honed crystals—small, sharp, and blindingly bright. He remains the greatest short-story writer Japan has ever produced."
Read Akira Kurosawa's ultimate inspiration first. This gripping Penguin Classics collection features "Rashomon" and "In a Bamboo Grove," the twin stories that birthed the legendary film. Reading Akutagawa's razor-sharp prose before you watch will unlock a deeper, darker layer of the famous four-way murder mystery, and show you exactly how a brilliant director transformed text into cinematic history.
This very film shocked international critics, put Japanese cinema on the global map, and instantly launched Kurosawa into world cinema stardom. It paved the way for his future epics like Seven Samurai, and cemented his legacy as one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live.
