100 Books Like A History of Japan

What I appreciate most about David Mitchell’s novel is how he grounds the history in scenes full of well-developed characters. So, for example, we don’t begin the novel with a long note about the historical period or the lineage of the ruling class, but rather with the urgency of childbirth gone wrong in the house of a concubine in Nagasaki in 1799.

It’s from this rootedness in the sense-based that we move into a wider exploration of both geopolitics and the magical, which I absolutely fell in love with—this sense that there is an element of the supernatural at play in this otherwise very realistic historical world.

The actual story as told by an actual geisha (rather than the male author of Memoirs of a Geisha), I was absolutely obsessed with this book when I began studying Japanese.

I loved the depictions of Kyoto pre-war and all the festivals, ceremonies, and intricacies that go into the life of a geisha. The post-retirement part of the story is also so real and human, and while it is a much quieter book compared to the sturm and drang of Memoirs of a Geisha, it has a delicate beauty that stuck with me. 

This is one of the first books on Japan that I read when I moved to the country in 1997, and it still resonates with me. While still a college student, Alex Kerr buys a rundown farmhouse in the Iya Valley of Shikoku, re-thatches it, and maintains the traditional Japanese architecture of pre-WWII Japanese wooden houses.

Kerr went on to write many more books on Japan, most of which have become classics. He is the foundation of the akiya movement, lectures widely around the archipelago, and is responsible for revitalizing country villages around Japan.

Transience and the importance of tiny details are two important underpinnings of Japanese culture, and this book captured them beautifully. I love books that use personal stories to tell an overarching epic, and the rise of Tokyo from a little fishing village to one of the biggest cities in the world is just that.

The author’s poetic style also aligns with how thoughts and phrases would evolve in Japanese, making it very evocative. It is a love letter to this city of contradictions and gives a look into the deeper sides that most visitors would simply not think to ask about. 

Anne Applebaum's book is an engaging meld of reportage and personal anecdotes, which explores why so many people have turned towards authoritarianism and illiberal populism. With a particular focus on Poland, Hungary, and the United States, Applebaum illustrates how populist movements exploit societal fears and divisions to gain and consolidate power.

She argues that populism's appeal lies in its simplistic answers to complex problems and its promise of a return to a mythical, idealized past. For Applebaum, those who become populists aren’t just strangers—they’re her former friends, and she wrestles with the question of why people she once admired have come to support anti-democratic, polarising, and authoritarian governments.

Curious about what democratic governments can do? Check out Applebaum's 2024 book, Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Rule the World.

I liked this book despite its phlegmatic style and the politics of its author. I liked it because it spoke across a political divide to identify something seemingly quite simple—that is, the friend/enemy divide—yet once unpacked, it became enormously profound and complex.

In identifying something any concept of the political cannot ignore, it cuts across orthodox political divides and political cultures. Indeed, the very first line on the very first page of the first volume of Mao Zedong’s Selected Works begins with this same question of enemies and friends. I liked Schmitt’s book because it opened up a very different way of thinking about Maoist politics.     

It’s impossible to understand the modern economy without grasping the importance of debt, and no one understands debt better than Ann Pettifor.

Pettifor spent more than a decade campaigning to cancel the unjust and unpayable debt of African, Asian, and Latin American countries – debt that was causing mass impoverishment and robbing people of their rights and livelihoods. Then she turned her attention to the damage that debt was doing in the West, predicting the financial crash of 2007-8.

For Pettifor, the problem started in the early 1970s, when the financial system was ‘freed’ by politicians from the constraints which had forced it to behave in a more reasonable way up to that point. Pettifor argues that we won’t be able to deal with our economic problems until we constrain our banks once more.          

If you want to know what motivated ordinary British colonists to pick up a musket, spear, or sword and take on the most powerful military in the world, read Thomas Paine’s essays Common Sense and The Crisis. Common Sense was the ideological underpinning of the movement toward independence. Paine’s experiences with the Continental Army during the dark days of late 1776 inspired The Crisis, and Washington ordered it read to the troops to encourage them to stay by the Colors for one last great gamble at Trenton. In my research, I found that the average American soldier truly believed in the cause of Independence; that belief has much to do with the writings of Thomas Paine.

It is impossible to read Spinoza and not think often of Thomas Hobbes. Spinoza read Hobbes’s works and was clearly influenced by the English philosopher both in his account of human nature and, especially, in his political thinking. This is, as far as I know, the first book devoted explicitly to the two thinkers together. Field’s focus is on the political, and she does a beautiful job of analyzing and distinguishing different conceptions of ‘power’ (both in the individual and in the group), as well as illuminating similarities and contrasts between these two of the most important early modern thinkers on politics and the state.

What’s fascinating about the making of the Constitution is how every point the framers debated in 1787 rang down through the ensuing years.

Should a state’s power be determined by its land size and resources—or the size of its population? Should we abolish slavery, or pass the buck to another generation? Who should get the right to vote—rich men or all men? Deciding these big three questions consumed much of the squabbles, and led to compromise. State’s rights, for example, led to creation of the bicameral structure of Congress.

The slavery question ultimately led to war in the 19th century, and the stinging legacy of the infamous Three-fifths Compromise. Their decisions on voting rights later resulted in amendments granting African Americans and women the right of suffrage. It’s almost as if you can glimpse America’s future in those 1787 debates.

The late Richard Beeman, then a professor at the University… show more.