100 Books Like Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

Haruki Murakami is probably the most famous Japanese author in the world and the father of Japanese magical realism. I have read a large portion of his work, and I have enjoyed many of his books (even with his weird ear fetish).

This one, however, is one of my favorites. It’s two stories in one, and although others sometimes criticize it for not being a good blend between the two stories, it is that separation that actually makes this book a gem for me. It captures your imagination as you follow a human computer down into a psychological miasma of perception and thought.

If that seems confusing, I’m sorry, but I don’t want to spoil for you one of my all-time favorite Murakami books. Also, if you want to know what I mean by human-computer, I guess you’ll just have to pick up the book.

This book is a bit of a departure from the first two. It also falls into the realm of magical realism but of a very different type. It’s a short, heartwarming novel broken into four chapters or stories, each highlighting a different aspect of the character and teaching a lesson about how we connect to books.

It manages to be easy to read yet meaningful in content. It is a love letter to books from all of us who truly love books. Also, it will give you some interesting insights into the culture and dynamics in Japanese high schools and the hikikomori culture. I particularly love it because it expresses exactly this concept that I’m trying to convey with this list. To understand a culture, a people, you need to read their books! Love it!

All of Higashino’s books are great, but this is one of the best, and it happens to be the first novel in the Detective Galileo series, where a physics professor helps a detective solve crimes. Imagine Sherlock Holmes, except set on the streets of Tokyo. We follow Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police as he tries to piece together the mysterious events surrounding a murder where we, the reader, already know who committed the crime.

The format is so very different from your normal crime novel, and that is one of the truly interesting things about this book. It’s still a marvel to me that Higashino keeps you wondering the whole time, even as you already know key parts of the outcome. If you want to understand the Japanese mind in advance of a trip (or move) to Japan, this is a great place to start!

Sadly, I think this book is, in my opinion, underrated by readers. It’s a novel with scenes always starting at 1 am, and it follows interconnected characters through their nights working and living in Tokyo. The reader not only gets a really interesting peek into life for graveyard workers, but the setting is evocative.

I particularly love how the mundanity of working the night shift as a cab driver, a social assistance hotline worker, or a procurer for movie sets, etc., are really captured in a very quintessential Japanese way that many American readers may overlook. Read this one to learn more about honor and obligation in modern Japan as told through interesting characters!

This is a gorgeous coming-of-age novel about a young, poor fisherman named Shinji who falls head over heels in love with a new girl on the island of Utajima. Japan’s most famous writer, Mishima, sets his romance in post-WWII where the innocence of Shinji and Hatsue is as pure and passionate as can be. The wind, the waves, the sea, the kiss that tastes of salt—all of nature intertwine with human life. The problem: Hatsue is actually the long-gone daughter of a major family who wants her to marry someone of equal social standing. With its humorous episodes, close descriptive imagery, and a plot that displays Mishima’s unabashed devotion to old-style traditions and customs, this little novel is one of my all-time favorites. 

During my schooling years, mathematics was my forte, though I hardly found it interesting. When I read the book, I felt that my pride was dwarfed by the beautiful writing on mathematics, about which I realized I had known almost nothing.

The writing endowed mathematics with a life full of various feelings, and enabled it to become ties of love, friendship, care, etc. which, in turn, changed people’s life for better. In a way, the book reshaped my view of the world.

I love books that explore how ordinary people might react in extraordinary circumstances, and this one takes that to another level.

The main characters, Tengo and Aomame, see that the world has changed—the most obvious clue being that there are now two moons in the sky—and it is fascinating to watch how these two very different people cope with living in a new and mysterious context. Murakami has a knack for making the surreal seem believable, and in this book, he is at the top of his game.

This contemporary, quirky tale centers around the life of Keiko, a young woman who has never done anything in a conventional way and has her mother very worried that her daughter will never find a man and settle down into a conventional life. No, Keiko’s ways of thinking are startling and odd in ways that are both amusing and somewhat horrifying, as she really does fall outside the realm of conventional thinking and socially rewarded behavior. The reader comes to love her as she grows into womanhood (and personhood) as a worker in a fast-paced convenience store, where she memorizes hundreds of products and practices behaving more “normally” by mimicking the actions and words of her co-workers. Then a man named Shiraha enters the picture, for a new twist.

This is a novel that I suspected I was falling into as much as reading—that is, I felt utterly and, at times, uncomfortably immersed in Murakami’s story universe.

I love the blending of contemporary realism in the novel (our protagonist’s day-to-day life) with the historical and the way the Japanese military’s atrocities in Manchuria in the 30s haunt the recognizably contemporary world so that even a man sitting at the bottom of a well contemplating existence and history feels like an acceptable and dreamlike weirdness.

I’m completely taken with such a strange and affecting representation of lesser-known histories and the ghosts such events leave us with.

Blue Flag features an intense love rectangle between four unlikely friends and explores everything from cliques, crushes, self-hatred, projecting your insecurities onto others, and figuring out how to grow as a person. The relationships in Blue Flag are very complex, and almost uncomfortably real in their strengths and shortcomings. This is a series I wish I could have read as a teen; I would have loved it to be my companion in navigating the unnavigable maze of school social life.