There are plenty of novels and travel books written about Japan by foreigners and plenty more Japanese writers writing about their own country. But take a closer look and you will find fewer books that give real insight into what it really means to have lived in Japan in our current century or the last century or so since the Meiji restoration.

This list is intended to fill that gap by putting together a selection of works - fiction and non-fiction - that help understand what it is like to live in Japan now, which highlight the social, political, economic or other issues that Japan faces in the twenty first century and which explain its recent history or illustrate how the attitudes and institutions of the Japanese people developed.

With this objective in mind you won't find any James Clavell on this list nor many Memoires of A Geisha (which is not to say it is not a very entertaining book). You will find travelogues and histories of Japan's experiences in WWII and books about the country's post war history. You will certainly find some fiction about Japan, but only fiction which helps understand the real lives of the current or recent generations of Japanese people. This would include some of the works of Haruki Murakami, but by no means all given the often fantastical elements of some of his works. Hopefully you get the idea.

This list will be curated with the above objective in mind so that it can stay useful for people who want to understand life in modern Japan. If you add a book to the list and it gets deleted this doesn't mean that it wasn't a good book or your contribution wasn't welcome but rather that there are alternative lists of books about Japan that could better do with its inclusion.