Introducing Japanese Women Authors: 28 Writers and the Best Books to Start With

After her grandmother dies, Mikage, a young woman who feels most at home in kitchens, is taken in by a kind young man and his mother. A short, tender story about grief and the comfort of cooking for someone, published with the novella “Moonlight Shadow.”

My notesThis novel will make you desperate for katsudon! If you’re about to travel to Japan, read it, and then be sure to eat katsudon while you’re here. The story is about loss, and a loneliness that doesn’t go away even when you’re with someone — and yet it never feels lonely. Maybe it’s the prose, but it’s a gentle story, and the ending is the best. Mikage sleeps next to the refrigerator, comforted by its hum. When you live alone, don’t you sometimes notice the fridge’s hum, as if it were alive? I related to that so much.

Keiko has worked part-time at the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years. She’s never had a boyfriend and is perfectly content — but everyone around her keeps insisting she isn’t normal.

My notesThis is the novel that made Sayaka Murata famous almost overnight, and it won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s best-known literary award. I often wonder how it’s read outside Japan. For me, watching a person turn into a kind of machine gave me chills, and it made me painfully aware that I, too, am just one cog in society. Murata has written many other books that accept women’s struggles just as they are, and I’m a huge fan of them. Shiroiro no Machi no, Sono Hone no Taion no (しろいろの街の、その骨の体温の) and Marunouchi Mahō Shōjo Miracleena (丸の内魔法少女ミラクリーナ) haven’t been translated yet, but they’re books I truly hope people all over the world will read someday. Stay tuned! In the meantime, her Earthlings and the story collection Life Ceremony are available in English.

Fuyuko, a freelance proofreader in Tokyo, has lived alone with her shyness so long that loneliness feels normal. Her one small pleasure: a walk alone through the city on the night of her birthday.

Why read itFrom the first page, the beauty of the night washes over you in words. Fuyuko is so extremely introverted that not every reader will relate to her, but there’s an addictive pleasure in eavesdropping on her inner monologue. It’s a love story told from a woman’s point of view that captivates men too. Few novels suit a city night sky like this one. Kawakami is also the author of the international bestseller Breasts and Eggs.

On an island, things quietly disappear — and once they’re gone, people forget they ever existed. Words vanish, and people forget even what they’ve lost. A novelist hides her editor, who cannot forget, from the Memory Police.

My notesEven for Japanese readers reading in their mother tongue, Ogawa’s prose is breathtaking — like chasing words that glide like ice, so delicate and fleeting they might melt. A line about tears being proof that the heart is desperately resisting has stayed caught in my mind ever since. It was a finalist for the International Booker Prize in 2020. Her The Housekeeper and the Professor is wonderful too. If she wins the Nobel Prize, I think Japanese literature will open up to so many more readers.

ALSO BY YOKO OGAWAThe Housekeeper and the Professor — a gentler place to start. See it in our Japanese healing fiction list.

A young journalist tries to land an interview with a woman in prison, accused of killing lonely men she seduced with her cooking. The prisoner agrees to talk — but only about food, and the journalist starts cooking her way into the woman’s world.

My notesAsako Yuzuki is one of my all-time favorite women writers. She portrays women’s strength and vulnerability with everything she has, and so many of her books carry a real sense of sisterhood. In Japan, where I still often feel frustrated by how male-dominated society is, her presence is like a light. Butter is based on a real case. At first, with the line between reality and fiction blurring, I felt I’d read something terrifying. But when I read it again, as a novel that simply takes its inspiration from reality, I sank completely into its world. Elaborate French dishes like boeuf bourguignon appear, and you will get very hungry, so be warned. Then go straight on to Yuzuki’s Hooked, just below.

Eriko is a beautiful, high-flying office worker. Shoko is a housewife who writes a blog Eriko secretly loves. The one thing they have in common is that neither of them has a single friend. After one late-night meeting at a family restaurant, both their lives start to unravel.

Why read itIf you’ve ever said or heard “women’s friendships are so complicated,” this is the book. Whatever the truth, you’ll finish it thinking: wow, they really are. The characters’ need for approval goes completely off the rails, and yet you can’t laugh it off as comedy. Honestly, I was a little dazed when I finished. It was shortlisted for the Naoki Prize. If you loved Yuzuki’s Butter, this is the next one to read.

Hiruko, studying abroad in Europe, learns that her home country has vanished. She invents a language of her own to get by, and sets off with new friends across Europe in search of anyone left who speaks her mother tongue.

My notesTawada is a true Japanese-language geek, always chasing how deep and how playful words can be. There’s something deeply alluring about her wit, and she’s exactly how I’d like to grow older. What if no one in the world spoke your language anymore? The idea sounds heavy, but the book is full of wordplay: a sushi whose name sounds like “how much,” a second-generation immigrant Princess Kaguya. For me, it’s her masterpiece. Tawada writes in both Japanese and German, and won the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2018 for The Emissary.

A socially awkward young man with a gift for words is recruited to a publisher’s dictionary department, where a small team spends years upon years making a single new dictionary.

Why read itMaking a dictionary is about as unglamorous as work gets, and that’s the point. You’ll nod at how much of any job is quiet, steady effort, feel encouraged by the hero’s stamina, and be warmed by a very pure love story along the way. It won the Japan Booksellers’ Award in 2012 and was made into a film. Because the hero says so little, the novel lets you inside his head in a way the film can’t.

In a small stationery shop in Kamakura, a young woman writes letters on behalf of others — choosing the paper, the pen and the handwriting for every one.

Why read itLike watching a play set on one small street. Many readers in Japan visit the real Kamakura shops that appear in it.

People stuck in work and life drop by a small community library in Tokyo, where a brusque but brilliant librarian recommends each of them an unexpected book.

Why read itThis novel is everything that’s good about having someone choose a book for you. If you already love books, you’ll love them more.

A beautiful university student is arrested for stabbing her father to death. As a clinical psychologist interviews her for a book, the young woman’s past and the cracks in her family slowly come to light. Why did she kill him?

Why read itI read it in one sitting and came away truly glad I had. The subject is anything but light, but the story is told by the psychologist, a woman whose intelligence and persistence are a pleasure to follow, so the painful scenes keep a little distance. Toward the end, the emotion speeds up until something quietly bursts, and I couldn’t catch my breath for a while afterward. It won the Naoki Prize in 2018. (Not to be confused with the Netflix series of the same name.)

Burned out by her last job, a woman asks the job center for work as undemanding as watching collagen being extracted — and drifts through a series of Japan’s quietest, strangest jobs.

Why read itTsumura is one of Japan’s best-loved writers of novels about work, and this book is wonderfully, addictively low-key. If you’re tired, this book will cheer you on without asking anything of you.

A high school girl who has been raised by three fathers and two mothers grows up, against all odds, cheerful, healthy and pleasantly ordinary.

Why read itHer calm toughness in the face of hardship is something every reader takes something from. Winner of the 2019 Japan Booksellers’ Award.

Strangers’ lives brush past each other, one station at a time, on a short local train line in Kansai.

Why read itSmall kindnesses, like being offered a seat, fill every page. Arikawa is also the author of The Travelling Cat Chronicles. Perfect for a commute.