> ... Japanese stories focus on the individual adrift in seas of excessive convenience and information, obsessed with personal not political identities, and questions of the soul.
Or maybe some other Murakami. I can say I enjoyed Norwegian Wood quite a bit more then Hard-boiled Wonderland.
and if you're interested in a japanese Gogol-like author, Kobo Abe is generally alot of fun
Another huge standard in Japanese translated into english in Yukio Mishima. sea of fertility tetralogy is worth reading. like most readers I have kind of mixed and weird impression of the author himself.
Kauzo Ishiguro is really accessible to the western reader, maybe too much so if you're looking for the alien aspect, but I do like his work alot
Hopeful for some pointers here too.
I would highly recommend wind up bird cronicle and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage though. The latter was pretty heavily panned by the critics but the description of sudden complete alienation without reason struck a chord with me, as well as the narrative description of how such vibrant young people ended up with such mostly mundane lives so many years on.. maybe you will feel the same.
Murakami books are sort of like being in a dream where somehow you completely understand this person acting as if you were them, even when the culture and motivations are so different and then it just sort of ends. I find myself thinking about his characters long after finishing books, which is really something few authors can provide at least to me...
* Yukio Mishima. Prose is incredibly dense to the point of being baroque (there are pages of footnotes even in the Japanese originals), but there's nobody else quite like him: heavy focus on themes of sex, death and mysticism. "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" is his most famous work but the "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy is also good.
What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima
* Osamu Dazai. The F. Scott Fitzgerald of Japan in time, themes and popularity, wrote a series of heavily autobiographical novels about his struggles with money, health, family and basically everything. Fairly grim but compelling reading.
The year before last I was expelled from my family and, reduced to poverty overnight, was left to wander the streets, begging help for various quarters, barely managing to stay alive from one day to the next, and just when I'd begun to think I might be able to support myself with my writing, I came down with a serious illness. Thanks to the compassion of others, I was able to rent a small house in Funabashi, Chiba, next to the muddy sea, and spent the summer there alone, convalescing. Though battling an illness that each and every night left my robe literally drenched with sweat, I had no choice but to press ahead with my work. The cold half pint of milk I drank each morning was the only thing that gave me a certain peculiar sense of the joy in life; my mental anguish and exhaustion were such that the oleanders blooming in one corner of the garden appeared to me merely flicking tongues of flame...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Dazai
* Murakami Ryu. Not to be confused with his namesake, Ryu's writing is very opposite of whimsical and "Almost Transparent Blue" is shockingly brutal.
This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.
By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive the Truth. And first we must know that each of the petals has eighty-four thousand veins and that each vein gives eighty-four thousand lights.
From Murakami Ryū I started to read a book (Parasites) about a shut-in turning downright psycho/sociopath/schizophrenic, that hits his mother and is getting involved into an online conspiracy involving symbiotic parasites. Or is there? The way the author describes the protagonist whereabouts around the world and inside his own head in a terribly cold way, and makes you enter the vacillating, deranged mind of that guy through his very point of view and thought process was putting me to such unease I could not finish the book despite being sucked in by the depth and wide array of themes.
As far as other authors, Revenge, by Yoko Ogawa is in my all-time top ten.