Three Great Japanese Novels by Female Authors

I have always loved reading as far as I can remember. As I kept asking, “What’s written here?” and “What’s written there?”, my grandfather decided to teach me how to read way before I entered elementary school. As a result, I was able to read what I wanted before I was five years old.

It took me 30 years from that point to realize how unbalanced my reading tastes were. Not in terms of genre: from 19th-century French classics to US science fiction, and from science popularization books to philosophy, I have a variety of interests. However, a few exceptions aside, the great majority of my favorite authors were men. That realization happened at the same time I decided to read more in the Japanese language, so I was determined to read modern Japanese female authors and expand my vision of what kind of writing humanity’s other 50% produced.

As a woman, the experience was like a big slap in the face — the kind that wakes you up real hard. I was reading books starring complex and realistic female characters who experienced events that only women do, and thought and felt tortured about a variety of matters from a completely different perspective — a perspective I felt very relatable. I empathized with the characters more than ever, and the reading of each of the following books was punctuated by a lot of nodding of the head.