Books like Children of the Sea, Vol. 1 — picked by fans

This is one of those graphic novels where the drawing style completely matches the harrowing events of being a comfort woman (cw rape) for the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Maybe I’m biased as a Korean-American who gets emotional watching Asian elders suffering before my eyes, but every five pages, I have to stop and take a deep breath.

I learned so much in this book than what we were ever taught in the American education system. It’s a gift to have the story of a real former comfort woman told like this. I’ll treasure this book forever.

Everyone I love who’s seen my shelf knows how much I love this picture book. I adore the simple ink drawings; it’s all I need to understand to story.

I never expected a 32-page book to break me like this. It makes me want to hug my cat Marlie and never let go (to her annoyance). To me, it explained life and death so perfectly—when one goes away, another comes into our lives.

Ever loved a book series so much that you got it permanently etched on your skin? (That’s me) Punpun, the titular character seen to readers as a line drawing of a bird, has one of the most broken families I’ve ever read about. Still, I found solace in his life. Ending the series (even though I couldn’t sleep that night) I wanted to go back and start again just to see how much he has developed.

Most of the characters are pretty unlikeable which makes them realistic. Even with the way Asano draws them, you’d think he’s pretty pessimistic about the overall human spirit too. I will say that this book has nearly every trigger warning I can think of, so be careful.

My god, the cover picked me up so quickly, and the story is just as beautiful as that painting. I think about everyone I’ve known as a child, what they might have been going through in their lives, and how they evolved as adults, just like me.

To hear about a friend who took their own life and realize that what you have seen over a decade ago had something to do with it is so gut-wrenching. It makes me want to back and hug every sad kid I was friends with. Huge trigger warnings for rape and suicide.

I love Edgar Allan Poe. His stories are so visceral and yet so simplistic in their scares. Of all of the stories by Poe, however, I think this book was a bit of a sleeper agent for me. It wasn’t until COVID-19 happened that I really saw how terrifying this story really was.

The idea of the rich hiding out from a plague that’s destroying the world was much too relatable in 2020. Just like in other titles in this list, the actual ghost itself isn’t necessarily what’s scary. It’s what the ghost represents. Not just death but pride, privilege, selfishness, guilt, and apathy.

Re-reading this book back in 2020 was an experience much too understandable, and it really scared me in a way it hadn’t before. The message Poe was trying to convey stuck with me in a new and horrifying way.

I came across this anthology in my local library in the late 1980s or early 1990s. It is a real treasure trove of classic Christmas ghost stories from giants of the genre such as Dickens, Le Fanu, Peattie, Blackwood, and Nesbit. As an added bonus, it contains M. R. James’ only story actually set at Christmas, The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance. One thing that I liked about this anthology was that it collected together stories ranging from the Victorian era through to what was then the present day. Although I never owned a copy of my own, it became an annual tradition to reserve it and borrow it from the library to read over the Christmas period. Now living in Japan, it has been several decades since I last read it. Despite the stories being available in many anthologies, this seems a perfect collection, and as… show more.

Though potentially incomplete (some scholars argue we're missing one or two chapters, or that the story was never meant to end), The Tale of Genji manages to paint a vivid picture of the life of a lost age, with its own array of traditions, values, and fashions; a world where one's skill with poetry was just as valuable as political acumen and their outlook is so different from a modern perspective. At the same time, it presents the timeless complexity of relationships between men and women, and the social expectations and norms that impact those connections.

Both the Italians and the Japanese are obsessed with food, and I’m an Italian living in Japan. You do the math. My first shocking encounter with sushi notwithstanding (I mistook wasabi for some kind of green mayonnaise) I love Japanese cuisine, and anime stories are full of people eating all kinds of food. 

If you have found yourself watching an anime and wishing that you could taste a particular dish, with this book you can go one step further: you can make it yourself. Here you will find simple but detailed instructions on how to make lots of Japanese dishes, and their connections with a particular anime title. I wish I owned this book when I first entered Otakudom. 

Several years ago, when I was living in Tokyo, I needed a blender.

So, I went to MUJI and bought the one they had on offer. It was smaller than a US model, but the components fit together so easily, and the blades did their job so efficiently. I had to marvel. Unsurprisingly, the appliance I purchased was the product of Naoto Fukasawa who has a gift for making ordinary, everyday goods better. They practically intuit the user’s movement. Like my blender, these are things one buys to fulfill a basic need. But then cannot imagine living without them.

Filled with first-person explanations, this book is a window into the mind of one of Japan’s most accomplished designers. 

Yasunari Kawabata was the first Japanese author to ever win the Nobel Prize in Literature – and Snow Country is a perfect example of why he did.

It’s the simple tale of a Tokyo businessman who meets a geisha when he takes a trip to a rural onsen (hot springs) town. It’s a melancholy tale, and you feel for the geisha and her harrowing circumstance much more than the Tokyoite.

It’s also a slim book, but one with beautiful descriptions of the snow. You can read it in one sitting, but it will stick with you long after.