Jazz, Coffee, Cats, and Feminism: Why Japanese Literature Has the West in its Thrall
By David McElhinney
I have a friend who runs an independent bookshop in the sleepy half of Tokyo’s Asakusa neighborhood. The shop is life as an imitation of art, animated by the prerogatives of its own subject. Antique cabinets in glorious decline and forgotten corners cocooned by dusty old books. An unruly cast of regulars turning up to talk literature, tell stories, drink beer, and join the weekly jam sessions. There’s a resident ghost – thus far magnanimous – and there’s talk of getting cats. Aware of the irony, my friend concedes he’s one Miles Davis record away from becoming a Japanese novella.
In years gone by, this might have read like a cliquey inside joke. But contemporary Japanese literature and its recurring themes – jazz, books, coffee, cats, surrealism, cozy settings, and lonely outcasts searching for meaning – are no longer the preserve of Japanophiles in-the-know. Gone are the days when foreign readers would struggle to name Japanese authors beyond Haruki Murakami or Kazuo Ishiguro. Because right now the West can’t get enough of Japan. I’ve even argued we’re experiencing a reprisal of the japonisme movement of the late-19th century, and the thirst for (and influence of) Japanese literature abroad is one of the most ironclad pieces of evidence I could brandish.
In 2024, nearly half of all bestselling titles in translation in the UK were Japanese. In the two years prior, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a moving novel about a Tokyo café that allows customers to travel back to a moment in time, was the top-selling work of translated fiction across all genres. If you’ve stepped foot in a British bookshop recently, be it one of the big chains or an indie store with meticulously curated stock, you probably won’t find this surprising. Japanese novels take pride of place on literature-in-translation shelves and "What We're Reading" displays, while manga dominates the graphic novels sections. Books like The Memory Police (Yoko Ogawa), Tokyo Ueno Station (Yu Miri), Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata), Butter (Asako Yuzuki), and Breasts and Eggs (Mieko Kawakami), all highly praised in international literary circles and listed for prestigious awards, have become staples in the British reader’s diet.
Publications as wide-ranging as NBC, Forbes, Quartz, The Japan Times, and The New York Times have covered the surge of Japanese literature in the US and North America. Forbes discussed the pre-eminence of light novels in the Japanese market and how they were influencing American literary tastes, while The New York Times recently suggested the rise in “healing fiction” suited a readership who perceive themselves to be living in troubled times. Not only do a lot of popular Japanese novels fall into this category – think Hiromi Kawakami’s The Nakano Thrift Shop or Durian Sukegawa’s Sweet Bean Paste, both literary equivalents of a Sunday evening spent drinking tea and warming your feet by the fire – but they often deliver compelling, heartwarming, even quietly provocative stories in around 200 pages.
Brevity is an obvious boon, for both publisher and reader, when competing with shortened attention spans and a digital world suffocated by content. I can’t be the only one who’s thrilled – relieved, really – when someone suggests a book and I discover it’s only 150 pages, the form and thrust of a short story protracted into a lazy afternoon’s entertainment. That may also be one of the fundamental considerations of healing fiction: books that you can, perhaps even are meant to, read in a single sitting.
These works are sometimes broadly described as iyashikei in Japan, literally “healing category”. Low-stakes, slice-of-life stories that are sensitive, relatable, and tender, with likable characters milling around in peaceful settings. The plots will be prosaic and are often reflected in the titles, a la Sosuke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved Books or Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. In terms of momentum and tone, they’re stories you can essentially predict before you’ve bothered to read the blurbs. But just as one doesn’t forgo a warm hug even though one knows what it feels like, the spike of dopamine and emotions these stories elicit only serve as incentives to dive right in.
The Invention of Ambient Art
If you were introduced to Japanese storytelling through mid-20th century novels, the work of Shusaku Endo (Silence, The Sea and Poison) or Yukio Mishima (The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), say, you may find this tendency towards light reading bizarre. Un-Japanese even. But the concept of “healing” has been around in Japanese art since the 1970s and ‘80s.
In Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self, author Paul Roquet described such works as tools of “atmospheric mood regulation” that provide “compelling material for open-ended reflection.” In the postwar years, when the nation and its people were at a loss for meaning, calming moods were a balm for metaphorical wounds that would take decades to heal. “The self,” continued Roquet, “now tasked more than ever with creating a life from scratch, needed an ambience appearing to hand the techniques of atmospheric mood regulation over to the individual, to use as they saw fit.”
During this period, authors like Haruki Murakami rose to prominence, drawing inspiration from Western writers and the foreign fad for postmodernism with its emphasis on the dreamlike, the absurd, the playful, the stylistic over the substantive, and the obfuscation of clear meaning. Murakami was still capable of writing “depressionist” pieces, like 1987’s Norwegian Wood, that spoke more to postwar anomie and existential despair than anything one could describe as “healing.” But books like Hear the Wind Sing (1979), A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), or South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992), though bound up in melancholy, introspection, and memory, are colored with the kinds of atmospheres that would reach an apotheosis in the new century.
Conventional wisdom states that healing fiction boomed in the late ‘90s and early noughties in response to national tragedies: the Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe and the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack in Tokyo, both 1995, and the decade of stagnation caused by the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble. This is when iyashikei emerged as a distinct genre of manga and anime, typified by the films of Studio Ghibli and series like Mushishi and Aria the Animation. The term "light novel" (raito noberu) also gained traction, referring to stories aimed at younger readers that blended simple prose with manga-style illustrations.
Meanwhile, Murakami was well on his way to becoming Japan’s bestselling author of all time and contemporaries like Banana Yoshimoto and Hiromi Kawakami were earning reputations for writing stories that mixed identity, dreams, and human relationships with social commentary and emotional realness. Granted, their novels didn’t always fit neatly into the category of “healing fiction,” but then again, it’s a category whose parameters are loosely defined. Their success was significant, though, as both authors, along with the likes of Sayaka Murata, Mieko Kawakami, Yoko Ogawa, Yoko Tawada, and Natsuo Kirino, formed the vanguard of another wave sweeping through Japanese literature: the woman’s voice.
The Strange Paradox of Women and Healing Fiction
The fact that many successful Japanese books in translation are written by women is no coincidence. It reflects the increasing popularity of such authors in Japan in the 21st century as well as Western publishing trends towards amplifying female voices. Interestingly, it also reveals one of the quirks of modern Japanese literature: a preponderance of books that sit on the nexus where comfort reading and subversive feminism meet. Often, it’s a story of a woman living a life of habit, solitude, or independence, amounting to her effective emancipation from the decrees of Japanese society.
In Convenience Store Women by Sayaka Murata, social critiques are filtered through Keiko, the book’s protagonist, and set against the backdrop of a convenience store called – tellingly – the Hiiromachi Smile Mart. Keiko laments the word “normal” and excoriates a society that “always quietly eliminates foreign objects,” but she also embodies the convenience store, that most dependable and approachable facet of modern Japanese life. Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, an enthralling whydunit crime romp and a paean to the sensuality of food, employs a similar dynamic. When not contending with the harsh reality faced by women who don’t meet the Japanese ideal of beauty, readers are swathed in sumptuous food-related prose: the “creamy smoothness” of sea urchin in a beurre blanc sauce, a buttery ramen that “staked its territory, with a kind of violence,” and a taste that was “one of freedom – the kind of freedom that could only be savoured alone.”
Both books are art as a form of protest, challenging a society where women are expected to be homemakers, pregnancy is a form of career suicide, and the physical and psychosocial images they present to the world are assessed with critical eyes. But herein lies their paradox: They are subversive yet archetypal, oppositional yet strangely comforting. It is this celebration of paradox that binds many of the most successful works of Japanese literature in translation, where Western ideas meet Japanese thought, the real and the surreal have no defined boundaries, and pessimistic meditations on society are cushioned with the belief that a positive attitude can shape the world around you.
A new Haruki Murakami book still generates a lot of media real estate in the West — as we saw with the 2024 English-language release of The City and Its Uncertain Walls — but he's no longer the lone flag-bearer of Japanese literature abroad. Modern readers want stories of cats on neighborhood walks and time-traveling coffee shops, of coming-of-age love in quotidian settings and people talking to barmen in smoky jazz clubs, of dreamlike quests into one’s own past and women taking a stand against a society they feel has betrayed them. Most of all, they want access to a kaleidoscope of weird and wonderful worlds that keep Japan tantalizingly within their reach.
About the Author: David is a Northern Irish freelance journalist, writer and occasional editor based in Tokyo and the UK. Fusing reporting and social commentary with extensive experience traveling throughout the country, he has published stories on travel, arts and culture, politics and current affairs, and sports in Japan. His work has appeared in a range of national and international publications online and in print. You can find links to his work at www.davidmcelhinney.com.
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