Books like The Man Without Talent — picked by fans

Nietzsche’s greatest admirers often distort his views. Mishima is no exception. Considering his nationalism, militarism, and ritualistic suicide, it’s little surprise he endorses the popular misconception of Nietzsche as a champion of egoism and power. 

In this fascinating, disturbing story, adolescent boys create a club devoted to an amoral, pseudo-Nietzschean ideal. When they encounter a mysterious sailor, they worship him as a living embodiment of their values until he defies the image they’ve created. 

Mishima misinterprets Nietzsche but in a critically illuminating way. The boys’ ultimate reaction to their disappointing demi-god proves their hypocrisy, revealing that they idolize precisely the qualities they lack. So Mishima inadvertently debunks the stereotypical image of the “overman,” a cartoonishly impossible superhero, a fantasy who attracts only his polar opposites: the insecure, resentful, conformist, and childish.

Thanks to its love/hate relationship with Western individualism, Japanese literature boasts the most sophisticated examples of the Nietzschean novel. This book's simple story about school bullying is really a philosophical meditation on friendship, courage, and meaning. 

The bully shares the contradictions of the stereotypical “overman,” declaring his right to immorality and feigning indifference while seeking others’ approval. His victim, in turn, mirrors “slave morality,” nursing bitterness rather than finding his own path. 

However, this predictable setup is upended by Kojima, a schoolgirl who takes defiant pride in her outcast status. Exploding the simplistic dichotomies of pop-Nietzsche, Kojima combines the inner strength of the “ascetic,” the compassion of the “slave,” and the courageous self-affirmation of the “noble” in a nuanced, critical Nietzscheanism that’s truer to Nietzsche in spirit than perhaps any other novel.

This book is a quiet, understated masterpiece about quiet, understated lives and a critical counterpoint to Soseki’s earlier I Am a Cat. That novel was a cruelly comic parody of Nietzscheanism, its arrogant feline narrator portraying his owner, a small-town schoolteacher, as embodying everything wrong with miserable, mediocre, insignificant humanity. 

This book is more ambiguous and sympathetic, portraying a similarly humble, childless couple. Initially, we feel contempt for their uneventful, indecisive, dispassionate lives. But their troubled past reveals, beneath their failings, a deep undercurrent of authentic courage and love.

They may even achieve something like Nietzsche’s “love of fate,” hinted in the title’s reference to the gate between past and future, where Zarathustra wills the “eternal recurrence” of every detail of his existence, whether joyful or painful, exciting or dreary, beautiful or ugly.  

The most charming and subtly Nietzschean of Dazai’s usually bleak novels, this book plants readers directly inside the mind of a young girl over the course of a day. Some compare her to Catcher in the Rye’s Holden, a child pretending to be a grown-up. But schoolgirl’s a true contradiction: too childish and too mature, naive and wise, Holden’s little sister mixed with Mrs. Dalloway. 

Holden is a “bad Nietzsche,” overcoming internal strife with protective cynicism, but schoolgirl’s a bundle of possibilities: Nietzsche’s “undersouls” battle to control her identity, veering between “becoming what she is” or expected to be and “decadence.” 

She’s confusing, endearing, and heartbreaking because everything’s still possible. She could as easily become Holden, a dutiful daughter, or a Dazai double-suicide, and any passing experience might decide that fate. 

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.

Tsuge is another of the early gekiga greats, who only recently allowed English translation of his classic work from the 1960s and 70s. Tsuge pushed the boundaries of what manga stories were about, into more abstract and surreal areas and visual presentation. This book is, like Tatsumi’s books, a glimpse of a little-known Japan beneath the common stereotypes. Its stories are told in an understated and sophisticated fashion. Literary manga indeed. Wonderful stuff, personally I love it.

Junji Ito is the master of the unsettling.

His storytelling and artwork combined create books which even the strongest stomached would find uncomfortable. And yet, we are drawn to them, unable to look away. And he understands that the most terrifying thing is not an invasion by something outside of our world but the realisation that the everyday world around us might turn against us. 

Uzumaki is a story about incomprehensible obsession and how it can take over a society to the point of destruction. One by one, the people of a small Japanese town become obsessed with spirals. Not a monster or a ghost, but a shape, until the power behind it destroys everything. 

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.

For me, it's hard to find stories that are so willing to dive into the feel of a bygone era, especially one that is potentially as obscure to some audiences as the Heian period of Japan. Set in a period of slow change, this short story collection combines the tensions of the period (a rising warrior class, Shinto vs Buddhist religious tensions, factions in the imperial court) in combination with the rich variety of strange beings in the folklore of Japan. I love how it paints a picture of a world that is simultaneously grounded in human motivations and populated by the esoteric and supernatural.

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.