Japanese Literature discussion

I wonder if a Recently Purchased topic can spawn discussions. People always like to talk about what they've just bought! Perhaps it can lead to more buddy reads, too, as people find they have the same books gathering dust on their to-read piles.

I just purchased Lake of Heaven and Volcano . Definitely not recent books, but I was spurred to do it because I hadn't heard of Ishimure before.

I recently also acquired Volcano (but free), and I just bought Endo's The Samurai.

I am on a Haruki Murakami reading binge, i think.
I bought a hardcopy of Hear the Wind Sing so that I would have both the Birnbaum and Rubins translations.

Also a stack of other books... I think I have the librarians dream of being reincarnated after their pile of tbrs falls on them.

In the last few weeks, I picked up

1. a hardback version of Ashes by Kenzo Kitakata which looked like this, the color is provided by a slip jacket that's approximately 1/3 of the length of the book:


and 2. Mistress Oriku: Stories from a Tokyo Teahouse by Matsutaro Kawaguchi

and 3. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories by Japanese-American author, Hisaye Yamamoto.

Ashes makes the 3rd Kitakata novel I own that I haven't read. So if anyone has advice on which of Ashes, The Cage, or Winter Sleep is the best to read first, please share.

I read Ashes first and found it compelling. I read Winter Sleep next, which was just as good, though very different.

My meh opinion of The Cage can be discounted, because it's more of a standard detective story, which isn't my thing.

A recent purchase is Japanese Gardens of the Modern Era by Haruzo Ohashi, I am looking for inspiration as I redo parts of my gardens.

Yay! Found a copy of The Quilt by Tayama Katai. I loved his Country Teacher, but unfortunately both are way out of print.