97 Books Like Three Assassins

From the first chapter, as I read Charlie’s letter to a friend, I wished I could meet the man this teenager would become. The magic of this book is that it is related entirely through journal-like letters. Charlie writes with so much authenticity, curiosity, and vulnerability that I’m glad he has three friends who hold him with love as he faces his demons and comes of age.

I found the ways he makes sense of the world fascinating, humourous, and admirable, and at other times heartbreaking. I sincerely admire Charlie’s strength as he manages to sustain vulnerability and a constant rope of connection to himself, even though it gets very thin at times. 

I read the book originally in college as part of a Jewish Literature course, and I was struck by the love story inside. The title drew me in immediately, and it was one of those beautifully heartbreaking stories with lines that will stick with you for a lifetime.

“Once upon a time, there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.” I will never be over this one.

On the surface, this book is about a person haunted by a single incident from their past but beneath the surface, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is a gorgeous meditation on the moments in life that affect us, big and small.

The novel has a heavy subject but the stunning turns-of-phrase and imaginative world our narrator shares can make even the mundane and lived-in reality feel like the fantastical summed up in my favorite line, "Missing someone, they say, is self-centered. I self-center you more than ever."

The Instructions blew my mind from the moment I read the first page. At the time the novel was released, it took place in a near future recently reached.

We quickly dive into bullies, othering, and also the concept of judging without knowing focused on the lives of pre- and young teens, specifically Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, our main character. The novel is over 1,000 pages but I will never forget diving deep into the story quickly and hungrily, wanting to devour every sentence.

“It is dangerous to exist in the world. To exist is to be threatened. We must live with threats.” The quote exudes Jewish anger, a possible messiah, but also fear, history, and violence making the pages feel magical and shocking, yet grounded firmly in our world. 

This is one of the best books in Eisler’s John Rain series, featuring half-American, half-Japanese assassin and Vietnam veteran John Rain.

Eisler himself was a covert operative with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, and his descriptions of fieldcraft, surveillance, torture, and killing techniques all ring so true, as does his extensive knowledge of modern Japan.

Tokyo is, of course, a fascinating playground for Rain’s adventures. Eisler’s books and unputdownable, and well worth discovering.

This was the first novel I read that had everything I craved: a setting in Japan, both rural and urban, cool ninja training, ancient Japanese mythology, a half-Japanese kid who’s never been to Japan but must go to fulfill her destiny, and a bit of spy intrigue as well. Yes, it’s the classic tale of “kid who was taught fighting skills but was never told what or why.” However, because of the Japanese angle, especially the descriptions of Japan and its culture which is so different than the western world, I thought the story was fresh. I do think the main character took too long to find herself, but my only real complaint is that the authors didn’t continue the series or write more books like this.  

The fascinating tale of Tsuneno’s journey from respectable daughter and sister in a family of Buddhist priests to a hand-to-mouth existence in Edo—now Tokyo—could well have been titled “down and out in the city.” And she chose her fate. A fiery, headstrong woman, she endured three marriages that all ended in divorce, and when confronted with the possibility of a fourth, she ran away from her home in the storied snow country region along the Japan Sea to try her luck working as a maid. She detailed her adventures and her demands for money and clothes in letters to her brother, letters that Stanley has used to wonderful effect in recreating not only Tsuneo as an individual but also the world of people on the margin among whom she lived.  

Tokyo Year Zero follows detective Minami on the hunt for a serial killer in the immediate post-war period. It is a haunting and addictive journey inside the underbelly of Japan’s shattered capital city in the glaring light of defeat. There is crime, gang warfare, desolation, corruption, and decay. But Peace is above all a master of language, and his prose – fragmentary, truncated, hallucinatory – produces an idiosyncratic rhythm that mirrors the mental disintegration of a man and the convulsions of an entire city. A novel that will stick to your skin years after reading it.

Tokyo, Form and Spirit was the catalogue for an exhibition at the Walker Center in 1986 with contributions of the most important Japanese urban writers of the 1990s: Henry Smith, Kenneth Frampton, Donald Richie, Marc Treib, Chris Fawcett to name but a few. While I never saw the exhibition, the perspective of the authors created a mental scaffolding that shaped my understanding of the transition from the feudal to modern Japan. Henry

Smith is reading the city of Edo through a bipartite scheme characterized by the sky and the water, or how the city was viewed differently from above, as incarnated by the gaze of the samurai and other authorities, and from below, typically by the commoners who enjoyed life across the city’s waterways. He then searches for this structure in today’s Tokyo where the city’s skyline is dominated by wirescape and high-rise edifices, and the water has almost evaded.… show more.

This pared-back and intense analysis of female isolation in a modern city breaks all the rules of ‘good writing.’ Telling not showing; unrelievedly inward; arguably solipsistic; it charts the descent of a conscientious copywriter into drunken depression. Could an off-beat relationship with a man who seems to care about her, for what she is, possibly haul her back into a functioning life?

In its totally absorbing dramatization of our hopes, desires, disappointments, and perennial insecurities, this book shows our flawed and fragile human selves in remorseless clarity. At the same time, it gives hope in the value of human affection and the kindness of friends.