Books like The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

Twelve-year‑old Nao in Tokyo wrestles with loneliness and bullying and, before she ends it all, writes a diary about her great‑grandmother, a Buddhist nun who has lived a century. Across the Pacific a novelist on a remote island discovers objects from Nao’s life and is drawn into her mystery.

A timeless tale of a ship captain's misunderstanding in 18th-century South America, exploring themes of slavery, power dynamics, and moral ambiguity.

Christine de Pisan’s 14th‑century work uses imagined dialogues to champion women’s virtue, challenge sexist attitudes, and defend female moral superiority, offering early feminist critique with contemporary relevance.

A young boy in 16th-century Japan helps a samurai escape from warlord captivity to find a peaceful future.

Murasaki Shikibu, a modest daughter of a court poet in 11th‑century Japan, weaves tales of Prince Genji that captivate a Regency court and sow intrigue, inspiring her masterpiece, The Tale of Genji.

The Red Chamber's captivating tale of friendship and intrigue in the heart of 18th-century Beijing, weaving through layers of Chinese history and societal norms.

A father's struggle for independence clashes with a daughter's determination to live on her own in a harsh Icelandic landscape.

A gripping account of a young Jewish girl who struggled to survive in Philadelphia during the early 20th century and later became a prostitute and morphine addict.

The Tale of Murasaki: A Tale of the Japanese Court and a Woman of Genius

A retelling of Gilgamesh's adventures and wanderings in ancient Mesopotamia, based on seventh-century B.C. Assyrian clay tablets.

Tanka, a classical Japanese verse form like haiku, has experienced a resurgence of interest among twentieth-century poets and readers. Arguably the central genre of Japanese literature, the 31-syllable lyric made up the great majority of Japanese poetry from the ninth to the nineteenth century and was the inspiration for such poetry as haiku and renga. Tanka has begun to attract considerable attention in North America in recent years. Modern Japanese Tanka is the first comprehensive collection available in English. Tanka retains the aesthetic sensibilities that circumscribe Japanese culture, but just as Japan has changed during this tumultuous century, tanka has undergone equally radical shifts. Responding to artistic and social movements of the West, tanka has incorporated influences ranging from Marxism to Avant-Garde. Modern Japanese Tanka includes four hundred poems by twenty of Japan's most renowned poets who have made major contributions to the history of tanka in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With his graceful, eloquent translations, Makoto Ueda captures the distinct voices of these individual poets, providing biographical sketches of each as well as transliterating Japanese text below each poem. His introduction gives an excellent overview of the development of tanka in the last one hundred years.

Series of fairy tales about a young girl (Kaguya-hime) found inside a hollow bamboo stem