“In a magisterial study of Japanese history, culture and psyche, Mirror, Sword and Jewel, Kurt Singer wrote: ‘The Japanese language is rich in ambiguities, a tool more for withholding and eluding than expressing or stating.’ Where does this leave the translator, given the task of bridging the language gap?”

Nonetheless, Lee Langley recommends two novels by Yasushi Inoue, a Japanese master novelist: The Hunting Gun and Bullfight. Of course, your mileage may vary. Here’s a snippet:

“I longed to devote my life to something valuable with a fervor that would consume my being. Young people today probably think the same way. But in our time we were not left to ourselves as they are. All of us believed in some kind of god. We believed in a scholar or in scholarship itself; we believed that right actually exists. All that kind of thing has been swept away, and philosophy, religion and morality must be created anew, from the ground up.”(via Prufrock)