Quotes About Japanese Literature

#1. I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.

Richard Flanagan

#2. 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.

Richard Flanagan

#3. I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

Haruki Murakami

#4. I've been missing Japanese literature so much of late.

Utada Hikaru

#5. There's a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called 'funny animal scrolls' were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.

Stan Sakai

#6. I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

Haruki Murakami

#7. Yes, sir. Certainly, it was I who found the body.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#8. ... In the very simplicity of her desire to punish herself appeared egoism in its purest form. Never before had this woman who seemed to think only of herself experienced an egoism so immaculate.

Yukio Mishima

#9. Die? Then so be it.

Eiji Yoshikawa

#10. A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies.

Stan Sakai

#11. For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.

Yukio Mishima

#12. I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much.

Haruki Murakami

#13. The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition.

Kenzaburo Oe

#14. As much as any contemporary writer, Murakami grasps the bewildering fluidity of commoditized life.

Japan Foundation

#15. When you're a kid, getting lost isn't just an event or a situation, it's like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you've done something that can never be undone.

Ryu Murakami

#16. If you're going to give up so quickly, I don't think you'll last long but you should try telling yourself you won't ever give up. Nobody can say how this will turn out but you should try the hardest you've ever tried in your life so you'll have no regrets

Hitori Nakano

#17. Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities

William T. Vollmann

#18. Call them robbers and cutthroats
were they not amiable enough when they had sufficient to fill their bellies? Something was out of joint in a world that drove these men to steal.

Eiji Yoshikawa

#19. I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.

Chris Abani

#20. As far as I have been able to understand, the Japanese seem to keep things close to the vest. Friendly but remote and polite to the point of being invisible. It is in the music, literature, film and art that the Japanese really seem to express themselves.

Henry Rollins

#21. Isn't there someone kind enough to come strangle me in my sleep?

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#22. Is that so? He who lives in the mountains years for the city, and the city-dweller would rather live in the mountains," the Abbot chuckled, "and nothing is ever to one's liking ...

Eiji Yoshikawa

#23. Great robber though he was, Kandata could only trash about like a dying frog as he choked on the blood of the pond.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#24. ... Her desire was close to that of the person who drowns himself; he does not necessarily covet death so much as what comes after the drowning - something different from what he had before, at least a different world.

Yukio Mishima

#25. He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children's building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building castles on the floor of the train.

Ryu Murakami

#26. Still more horrible was the color of the flames that licked the latticed cabin vents before shooting skyward, as though - might I say? - the sun itself had crashed to earth, spewing its heavenly fire in all directions.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#27. The pale whiteness of her upturned face as she choked on the smoke; the tangled length of her hair as she tried to shake the flames from it; the beauty of her cherry-blossom robe as it burst into flame: it was all so cruel, so terrible!

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#28. People can endure almost anything but there's one thing they can't survive. Man is an animal that can't stand boredom

Koji Suzuki

#29. Here
you warriors
why this moaning and complaining? Have you no more sense than toads and vipers? Our time hasn't come. Have you no patience? Are we not the 'trodden weed' still? The time is not yet here for us to raise our heads. Must you still complain?

Eiji Yoshikawa

#30. I can only bow to the will of the heaven, but not to the will of these men.

Eiji Yoshikawa

#31. Lady #1, Maki, had never once given any thought to what was really right for her in her life, simply believing that if she surrounded herself with super-exclusive things, she'd become a super-exclusive person.

Ryu Murakami

#32. If you hurt her any more than you already have, the wound could be too deep to fix.

Haruki Murakami

#33. Directly beneath the Lotus Pond of Paradise lay the lower depths of Hell, and as He peered through the crystalline waters, He could see the River of Three Crossings and the Mountain of Needles as clearly as if He were viewing pictures in a peep-box.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#34. Don't yield! Keep up your courage! The same sun looks down on all of us!

Eiji Yoshikawa

#35. People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.

Yasunari Kawabata

#36. As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#37. I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

Lafcadio Hearn

#38. I seem to hear thousands of voices
the voices of the common folk in the marketplace
urging me to go forward and do what must be done. More is at stake now than my life. On me turns the future of the warriors. Let's not quibble longer, lest this rare opportunity slip through my fingers.

Eiji Yoshikawa

#39. When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home.

Ryu Murakami

#40. For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.

Yukio Mishima

#41. Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.

Yukio Mishima

#42. Through his mad fancying he remembered Mokunosuke's words: "Whoever you are, you are a man after all. You are no cripple with those fine limbs." Whether he was the son of an emperor or the child of an intrigue, was he not a child of the heavens and the earth?

Eiji Yoshikawa

#43. Just before I fell asleep, I had a moment of panic ...

Ryu Murakami

#44. Should misfortune visit the Court, that can only be the result of its continued abuses. If the palace is attacked, that can only be the result of misgovernment. I can hardly be held responsible for the outcome.

Eiji Yoshikawa

#45. It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.

Lafcadio Hearn

#46. The River Mogami has drowned
Far and deep
Beneath its surging waves
The flaming sun of summer

Matsuo Basho

#47. I could have sworn that the man's eyes were no longer watching his daughter dying in agony, that instead the gorgeous colors of flames and the sight of a woman suffering in them were giving him joy beyond measure.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#48. He was beneath the waves, a creature crawling the ocean bottom.

Doppo Kunikida

#49. I recall the months and years I spent as the intimate of someone whose affections have now faded like cherry blossoms scattering even before a wind blew.

Yoshida Kenko

#50. People used to say that on moonless nights Her Ladyship's broad-skirted scarlet trousers would glide eerily along the outdoor corridor, never touching the floor.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#51. From then on, my thesis hung over me like a curse, and with bloodshot eyes, I worked like a madman.

Soseki Natsume

#52. He was said to have survived starvation by eating human flesh, after which he had the strength to tear out the antlers of a living stag with his bare hands.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#53. Not only must a warrior be strong with his bow, but he must have a heart full of pity for all living creatures.

Eiji Yoshikawa

#54. Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.

Yukio Mishima