He’s a regular member of middle-class Tokyo, and is a fussy sort of person who gets annoyed when the neighbourhood children keep hitting a ball into his garden with a wooden stick (baseball had newly arrived in Japan at this time). Sōseki’s inaugural novel satirises Japan’s Meiji era (1868-1912), and its uneasy adoption of western ideas, through the life of a schoolteacher - his stupidity, his circle of friends, and what he does with his time. Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami Met with jeers, he committed seppuku (ritual suicide with a sword). In real life, Mishima grew disillusioned with Japan’s postwar situation, and in 1970 he – along with other members of a right-wing militia that he founded called Tatenokai – stormed a military base in Tokyo and attempted to inspire a coup, delivering a speech to soldiers stationed there. Though sex is alluded to throughout – Noboru discovers a peephole into his mother’s bedroom, for one thing – it’s the extreme disappointment Noburo feels in Fusako’s new lover, a sailor named Ryuji, whom he once admired, that sets the wheels in motion for an altogether brutal plan to restore glory.

He also happens to be in a nihilistic gang with his schoolmates who are superficially “good” students. Actor, model, director and author Mishima’s protagonist, Noburo, is an adolescent boy living with his single mother, Fusako, in Yokohama. Part Lord of the Flies, part Oedipus complex, this book is a postwar howl of anguish. Soon transplanting themselves to “Toxitown”, a fictional area of mayhem in Tokyo – home, it seems, to all that is swept under the rug in Japan, from foreigners and homeless people to drug dealers and other criminals – what follows is a surreal coming-of-age horror story that runs wildly through the heights of love and superstardom, and the lows of insanity and murder. They grow up against a background of urban and rural decay. Both “coin locker babies” – children abandoned in one of Japan’s coin lockers (an issue arising in the 1970s) – the boys find themselves adopted by a childless couple living on an island off Kyushu, the south-westernmost of Japan’s main islands. In this 1980 novel that beam is amplified as it follows the entire lives of protagonists Kiku and Hashi, and all the ghastly goings-on they encounter. Ryū Murakami’s stories never shy away from shining a light on the darkest corners of society.

Suizenji Jojuen Garden, Kumamoto Prefecture, Kyushu.

Books like no longer human