Here are 100 books that Kokoro fans have personally recommended if you like
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Like many people, I have experienced my share of suffering. I have also spent a lifetime exploring the suffering of others through great works of literature and art. My attraction to Japanese literature–imbued with a Buddhist sensitivity to loss–reflects my taste for the melancholy beauty of works of art that transmute suffering into aesthetic form. The qualities I find in Japanese literature are in wonderfully long supply in writings from around the world. My list of favorite books is a small testament to that aesthetic work which has the potential to heal us.
Who among us has never felt shame? Who has never felt one’s spirit crushed? I myself have returned for relief from that periodic loss of inner spirit to this brave, unsentimental memoir of the ravages on Lucy Grealy’s face of a disease that condemned her to a punishing self-loathing.
Reading this boldly unabashed memoir of conquering shame, of finding an “inner eye” (and inner life) that could come to see as beautiful what the seeing eyes of the world saw only as ugly, I have felt buoyed by the possibility of reclaiming your own true self against the ravages of a hostile world.
"Grealy has turned her misfortune into a book that is engaging and engrossing, a story of grace as well as cruelty, and a demonstration of her own wit and style and class."—Washington Post Book World
“It is impossible to read Autobiography of a Face without having your consciousness raised forever.” – Mirabella
In this celebrated memoir and exploration of identity, cancer transforms the author’s face, childhood, and the rest of her life.
At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
Like many people, I have experienced my share of suffering. I have also spent a lifetime exploring the suffering of others through great works of literature and art. My attraction to Japanese literature–imbued with a Buddhist sensitivity to loss–reflects my taste for the melancholy beauty of works of art that transmute suffering into aesthetic form. The qualities I find in Japanese literature are in wonderfully long supply in writings from around the world. My list of favorite books is a small testament to that aesthetic work which has the potential to heal us.
Though I am not religious, I have been aesthetically moved and spiritually stirred by these deeply personal, profoundly philosophical, and poetically enigmatic essays, which I find myself returning to when faced with the most fundamental questions about our spiritual lives.
Written by a French Jewish convert to Christianity whose own suffering is exquisitely attuned to the suffering of others, these essays have continued to inspire readers from across a broad spectrum of religious and philosophical orientations—including the most secular among us.
Gravity and Grace was the first ever publication by the remarkable thinker and activist, Simone Weil. In it Gustave Thibon, the farmer to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death, compiled in one remarkable volume a compendium of her writings that have become a source of spiritual guidance and wisdom for countless individuals. On the fiftieth anniversary of the first English edition - by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1952 - this Routledge Classics edition offers English readers the complete text of this landmark work for the first time ever, by incorporating a specially commissioned translation of…
Like many people, I have experienced my share of suffering. I have also spent a lifetime exploring the suffering of others through great works of literature and art. My attraction to Japanese literature–imbued with a Buddhist sensitivity to loss–reflects my taste for the melancholy beauty of works of art that transmute suffering into aesthetic form. The qualities I find in Japanese literature are in wonderfully long supply in writings from around the world. My list of favorite books is a small testament to that aesthetic work which has the potential to heal us.
For anyone who has been shattered by a terrible loss and could not imagine a road to recovery, this intimate, poetic, and philosophically astute exploration of bereavement, of the mental ravages brought on by the loss of a child, will be a bracing and transformative reading experience.
This short and brilliant book has forever changed how I understand what it means to grieve and to master one’s suffering—it makes you feel less alone.
'One of the most eloquent thinkers about our life in language' The Sunday Times
Time Lived, Without Its Flow is a beautiful, unflinching essay on the nature of grief from critically acclaimed poet Denise Riley. From the horrific experience of maternal grief Riley wrote her celebrated collection Say Something Back, a modern classic of British poetry. This essay is a companion piece to that work, looking at the way time stops when we lose someone suddenly from our lives.
The first half is formed of diary-like entries written by Riley after the news of her son's death, the entries building…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Like many people, I have experienced my share of suffering. I have also spent a lifetime exploring the suffering of others through great works of literature and art. My attraction to Japanese literature–imbued with a Buddhist sensitivity to loss–reflects my taste for the melancholy beauty of works of art that transmute suffering into aesthetic form. The qualities I find in Japanese literature are in wonderfully long supply in writings from around the world. My list of favorite books is a small testament to that aesthetic work which has the potential to heal us.
Reading these messages in a bottle discovered buried under a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, I am staggered and amazed at the indomitable human capacity for resilience and creativity.
I read these harrowing literary masterworks, which report on the most hellish degradations, and I am stunned that Zalmen Gradowski, from deep within his suffering, could wrest from the horrors before him and from his own despair, a literary art that is beautiful and solacing. I am reminded of the human capacity, which we all must certainly share, to snatch shreds of beauty from the darkest of circumstances and of the human hope that somewhere beyond one’s own hell lives a sympathetic ear.
A unique and haunting first-person Holocaust account by Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando prisoner killed in Auschwitz.
On October 7, 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz obtained explosives and rebelled against their Nazi murderers. It was a desperate uprising that was defeated by the end of the day. More than four hundred prisoners were killed. Filling a gap in history, The Last Consolation Vanished is the first complete English translation and critical edition of one prisoner's powerful account of life and death in Auschwitz, written in Yiddish and buried in the ashes near Crematorium III.
From the age of 11, and an encounter with an illustrated anthology entitled The World of Zen, I have been drawn to and fascinated by the spiritual, philosophical, and folkloric aspects of East Asian Culture. I studied the subject at Cambridge University and subsequently trained in Zen Shiatsu therapy. Most of my books draw from my passion for East Asian culture, and Japan in particular. I have travelled widely in Japan over the last two decades, and for Tsunami Girl spent four years researching, interviewing survivors, and visiting Fukushima. I am now working on a new book on Japanese yōkai and ghosts…
Away from the 2011 disaster itself, Fumio Obata’s Just So Happens is a wonderful graphic novel again exploring that borderland between konoyo (this world) and anoyo (that world). And it just happens to be another story that bridges Japan and the West, this time Japan and the UK. Central character Yumiko travels back to Japan for a family funeral, and is immersed in a world of ritual, Shinto temples, Noh theatre – at once both familiar and strange to her. Word and image combine beautifully to draw on themes that have obsessed me for years.
Yumiko was born in Japan but has made a life in London, losing herself in its cosmopolitan bustle. She has a gallery show of her art, a good job, and a good guy she plans to marry. The culture she grew up in seems very far away-until her brother phones with the news that their father has died. Yumiko returns to Tokyo and finds herself immersed in the rituals of death while also plunged into the rituals of life-fish bars, bullet trains, pagodas-as she confronts the question of where her future really lies. Just So Happens deals both gently and…
As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
This is a fast-paced story about a young man named Sugehara.
He is a so-called Zainichi Chosenjin who falls in love with a Japanese woman. Through him, the North Korean minority is given a face and a voice, and what the reader learns, namely, that every step he takes is a step against an invisible wall of racism and marginalization, is more evident here than practically anywhere else.
“Go!” you want to scream at him. “Run up against the wall! Knock it down!” The weight of the subject matter goes hand in hand with language that masterfully expresses the hunted but determined nature of the main character and his closest circle.
Not a book that can be put lightly aside after reading. It stays with you for a long time, and its reverberations – of Sugehara’s running, of his footsteps – remain in the ether for a long time, like…
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A Freeman Award Winner for Young Adult Literature
For two teens, falling in love is going to make a world of difference in this beautifully translated, bold, and endearing novel about love, loss, and the pain of racial discrimination.
As a Korean student in a Japanese high school, Sugihara has had to defend himself against all kinds of bullies. But nothing could have prepared him for the heartache he feels when he falls hopelessly in love with a Japanese girl named Sakurai. Immersed in their shared love for classical music and foreign movies, the two gradually grow closer and closer.…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I think that most writers throughout time have had a relationship with coffee shops. For myself, the shabbier and more run down, the better. One of the first lessons of creative writing is to pay attention to your surroundings. Notice what people are doing and jot down observations or snippets of things that you have overheard, and coffee shops are the perfect place for that. I have been an expat for years and have found that coffee shops are a place where everyone is equal. A transient place where we come together and stay a while, even if we are just taking time out from sightseeing or revealing deep, dark secrets to our friends.
Unforeseen forces, mystery, and time travel in the confines of a coffee shop, what isn’t to like?
I read this book when I was in the middle of moving countries. The book helped me to slow down amongst all the turbulence of movers and then the dreaded Covid vaccination certificates. But with moving, I had to say goodbye to friends, and there was one close friend who did not like the fact I was leaving and, therefore, refused to see me before I left. There are many reasons why people react in certain ways, but I was hurt during that time and hoped that our friendship was more than that.
This book made me think about what I would say to her in the future—hindsight is a great gift if only we could activate it in the present.
If you could go back in time, who would you want to meet?
In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time.
Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most…
I'm a retired economics professor from the US who studied Japan for most of my 46-year career and have lived in Kyoto since 2008. I first visited Kyoto in 1981, naively hoping to revel in the splendors of the Heian era, and was disappointed to find that the physical manifestations of medieval Japan as evoked in The Tale of Genjihad vanished. But the persisting legacy of that ancient age is still evident to the trained observer. Japan today embodies its past. It's not enough to know that Japan today is a prosperous country. Curious people also want to know how it got that way. The roots lie deep in the past.
The best way to start one’s reading about Japanese history is to pick a short overview written by an expert who writes well. This decades-old book is a splendid example of that and still the best in my opinion. Hall was an American who grew up in prewar
Japan and spent his later years as a distinguished scholar of premodern Japanese history at Yale University. The book is a joy to read and identifies the main historic events from prehistoric time up through the American occupation that ended in 1952.
Japan: From Prehistory to Modern Times has a heavy emphasis upon the premodern period of Japanese history. No attempt has been made to provide the usual kind of textbook completeness. Hall’s fascination with Japanese history lies within the manner in which Japan’s political and social institutions have changed and diversified over time and how this fundamentally “Eastern” culture gave rise to a modern world power. Japan is today a modern nation in the full sense of the term. Yet its history is less familiar to us than the histories of those Western powers that it has now outstripped, or of…
Between 2004 and 2020, I made twenty-five road trips around Japan’s four main islands, covering over thirty thousand miles, mainly in a rental car with my partner Karen. We traced the 1689 journey of the poet Bashō to northeastern Honshū and searched for famous places depicted in woodblock prints of nineteenth-century artist Utamaro Hiroshige. My recommendations include the books I consulted to explore roads less traveled and sites less frequented to learn about the literature, history, and culture of our ancestral homeland. The road trips are documented in my featured book and online at my website.
Wilson describes his walking journey along the ancient Kiso Road through the Kiso Valley and the stops he made in the eleven post towns along the road. Today, some of the towns, like Narai, Tsumago, and Magome, are popular tourist destinations because they have maintained something of the look and character of the Edo Period, but in Wilson’s narrative, even the lesser known towns have something interesting to offer. Walker describes personal experiences with local people he met in the inns where he stayed and provides historical and literary backgrounds that add depth to his journey. The Kiso Road was the most scenic segment of the Kisokaidō (aka Nakasendō), the inland road between Kyōto and Edo during the nineteenth century.
Step back into old Japan with this fascinating travelogue of the famous Kiso Road, an ancient route used by samurai and warlords
The Kisoji, which runs through the Kiso Valley in the Japanese Alps, has been in use since at least 701 C.E. In the seventeenth century, it was the route that the daimyo (warlords) used for their biennial trips—along with their samurai and porters—to the new capital of Edo (now Tokyo). The natural beauty of the route is renowned—and famously inspired the landscapes of Hiroshige, as well as the work of many other artists and writers.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I have lived in Japan for the last 30 years but my love for manga, anime, and games is much older and dates back to when UFO Robot Grendizer was first shown on Italian TV a fateful summer evening in 1978. Many years later, I was able to turn my passion for all things Japanese into a job and now I regularly write about politics, society, sports, travel, and culture in all its forms. However, I often go back to my first love and combine walking, urban exploration, and my otaku cravings into looking for new stores and visiting manga and anime locations in and around Tokyo.
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.
Experience the World of Japanese Pop Culture Through a Whole New Medium-Japanese Food!
#1 New Release in Animated Humor & Entertainment
With dishes inspired by otaku culture, this cookbook brings Japanese anime and manga to chefs of all levels.
Experience Japanese culture like never before. Japan fever has taken the West by storm. Praised for its attention to detail, it's no wonder that some of the most appealing images are colorfully culinary. From beautifully animated bowls of ramen and curry to cakes and confectionery, Japanese food culture never looked so good. If only you could reach out and take a…
