Four Books for Japanese Reading Practice

 By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble

Are you looking to improve your Japanese reading skills but don’t feel confident enough to jump headfirst into that volume of manga you bought from eBay or that novel you scoured Amazon for? Then this is the list for you. 

Japanese Stories for Language Learners (2018)

As probably the easiest of the four books, Japanese Stories for Language Learners is one in a series of Asian-language study books published by Tuttle. The others being Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese. The book contains numerous extras to help you with your studies. Every story has not just an English translation but translation notes, a vocabulary list and reading comprehension and discussion questions. As an added bonus, it also comes with a CD containing audio versions of all five stories. This means that, if you want to practice both your reading and listening comprehension together, you are able to try a sort of audio-assisted reading using the CD. If you have an interest in Japanese mythology, it is worth noting that this is the only book to contain stories written before the 20th century. The introduction contains a brief overview and analysis of each story. 

This book contains five stories:

• Urashima Taro (Unknown, c. 8th century)
• Snow Woman (Unknown c. 14th century)
• The Spider's Thread (Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, 1918)
• The Siblings Who Almost Drowned (Takeo Arishima, 1921)
• Gauche the Cellist (Kenji Miyazawa, 1934)

Breaking into Japanese Literature (2012)

The first of the two Giles Murray books on this list, Breaking into Japanese Literature contains four stories in seven chapters. One of the stories, Natsume Sōseki's Ten Nights of Dreams is in four parts. Each of the seven chapters contains an introductory page explaining the story and its relation to the rest of the author's work. Both writers, Natsume Sōseki and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, receive their own biographies, containing information about both their professional lives as writers and their personal lives. In terms of educational value, it does not contain any comprehension questions, but every chapter is followed by a vocabulary table, allowing you to revise the words you've just practiced. It also uses furigana in a way that forces the reader to memorise the readings of kanji by showing every reading only once.  

This book contains four stories, one of which is in four parts:

• 1st, 3rd, 5th & 7th nights of Ten Nights of Dreams (Natsume Sōseki, 1908)
• In a Grove (Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, 1922)
• The Nose (Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, 1916)
• Rashōmon (Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, 1915)

Exploring Japanese Literature (2013)

The second of the two Giles Murry books is almost identical to its predecessor in every way other than its different selection of stories. Exploring contains works from Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata, a change from the same late-Meiji/early-Taisho era seen in the previous two books. Like Breaking, it contains the same biographies and vocabulary lists. 

This books contains three stories:

• Snow Country (Yasunari Kawabata, 1948)
• Patriotism (Yukio Mishima, 1960)
• The Secret (Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, 1911)

New Penguin Parallel Texts; Short Stories in Japanese (2011)

As what is probably the most challenging of the four, this book is a part of a much larger series of parallel texts by Penguin that includes Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, French and Soviet/Russian. Short Stories in Japanese does not contain any of the more education aspects of the other three, other than an English translation; there are no reading comprehension questions, discussion questions or vocabulary lists. The book, however, does contain a very interesting introductory chapter discussing how the book was put together as well as an overview of each of the stories and their position with modern Japanese literature. Given the highly complex and philosophical nature of some of the stories selected, this is almost certainly the most difficult of the four. Yet, for for the same reasons, it is also possibly the most rewarding. 

This book contains eight stories:

• On the Efficacy of Fiction (Haruki Murakami, 1995)
• A Little Darkness (Banana Yoshimoto, 2000)
• Genjitsu House (Masayo Koike, 2004)
• The Silent Traders (Yūko Tsushima, 1982)
• Mogera Wogura (Hiromi Kawakami, 2001)
• The Maiden in the Manager (Kazushige Abe, 2004)
• Where the Bowling Pins Stand (Shinji Ishii, 2005)
• Love Suicide at Kamaara (Sueko Yoshida, 1984)

Amazon Links

• Japanese Stories for Language Learners (2018): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Japanese-Stories-Language-Learners-Bilingual/dp/4805314680
• Breaking into Japanese Literature (2012): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Breaking-Into-Japanese-Literature-Classics/dp/1568365896
• Exploring Japanese Literature (2013): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Exploring-Japanese-Literature-Tanizaki-Kawabata/dp/477003041X
• New Penguin Parallel Texts; Short Stories in Japanese (2011): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Short-Stories-Japanese-Penguin-Parallel/dp/0143118331/