Read Real Japanese Fiction: Short Stories by Contemporary Writers (free audio download)

Short stories by Japan’s cutting-edge writers, in vertical text and with vocabulary, notes, and FREE AUDIO DOWNLOAD to make reading Japanese easier than ever.

Long-awaited by teachers and students, Read Real Japanese Fiction presents short works by six of today’s most daring and provocative Japanese writers. The spellbinding world of Hiromi Kawakami; the hair-raising horror of Otsuichi; the haunting, poignant prose of Banana Yoshimoto; even the poetic word-play of Yoko Tawada—whatever their tastes, readers are sure to find something of interest and value in this book, suitable for students at the intermediate level and above.

As in real Japanese novels, the text on each page runs from top to bottom and from right to left. Each double-page spread features translations of all the difficult passages. In the back of the book, moreover, is a built-in Japanese-English learner’s dictionary and a notes section covering issues of nuance, usage, grammar and culture that come up in each story. Best of all, the book comes with a free audio download containing narrations of the stories, performed by a professional voice actress.

MICHAEL EMMERICH teaches Japanese Literature at UCLA. He is the highly acclaimed translator of twenty books, including Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata’s First Snow on Fuji and Dandelions; Banana Yoshimoto’s Asleep, Goodbye Tsugumi and Hardboiled & Hard Luck; Genichiro Takahashi’s Sayonara Gangsters; and Kawakami Hiromi’s Manazuru. His scholarly works include The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature.