Recommendations
Books Like The Sound of Waves
Best books to read after The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima
The Sound of Waves is Mishima's most simple and most beautiful novel — the unclouded love story of a fisherman and a merchant's daughter on a remote Japanese island, modeled on Daphnis and Chloe. If the novel's sunlit beauty and its affirmative vision of romantic love moved you, these books offer both more Mishima in his darker and more characteristic mode, and companions in the tradition of the pure love story.
- 1Buy
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
by Yukio Mishima
The essential companion in Mishima's characteristic mode — the stuttering acolyte who burns the famous Kinkaku-ji; where The Sound of Waves is organized around simple, beautiful love, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is organized around the relationship between beauty and destruction; essential for readers who want the full Mishima after the accessible beauty of The Sound of Waves
- 2Buy
Confessions of a Mask
by Yukio Mishima
Mishima's debut novel — the most autobiographical of his works; where The Sound of Waves avoids the personal material beneath Mishima's aesthetic surface, Confessions of a Mask faces it directly: the narrator's homosexuality and his incapacity for the kind of love The Sound of Waves celebrates; essential for understanding what Mishima was doing throughout his career
- 3Buy
Snow Country
by Yasunari Kawabata
The essential companion in Japanese literary fiction about impossible love — Shimamura and Komako in the mountain snow; where Mishima's love story is simple and consummated, Kawabata's is complex and impossible; reading both gives the range of what postwar Japanese literature made of romantic love
- 4Buy
Daphnis and Chloe
by Longus
The ancient Greek romance that The Sound of Waves is explicitly modeled on — two young shepherds' discovery of love on the island of Lesbos; Mishima transplanted the story to a Japanese fishing island and the comparison between the two works shows what he kept and what he changed; very short and completely charming
- 5Buy
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
by Yukio Mishima
The dark companion — a group of boys who plan to destroy a sailor who has compromised their romantic idealism; where The Sound of Waves is organized around romantic idealism fulfilled, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is organized around romantic idealism betrayed and its violent consequences; together they show Mishima's two visions of the relationship between romance and the world
- 6Buy
Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami
Murakami's most direct love story — the essential modern Japanese parallel to The Sound of Waves in the tradition of the simple, realistic Japanese love novel; where Mishima's novel is set on a remote island and organized around the restoration of paradise, Murakami's is set in Tokyo and organized around grief and alternative attachments
- 7Buy
Kokoro
by Natsume Sōseki
The essential companion in the tradition of the Japanese novel about the relationship between love and death — the young man and Sensei; where Mishima's The Sound of Waves is organized around the love that overcomes all obstacles, Sōseki's Kokoro is organized around the love that destroys its object; together they show the range of what the Japanese novel made of the relationship between love and loss
- 8Buy
The Makioka Sisters
by Junichiro Tanizaki
Tanizaki's novel about four sisters in Osaka in the 1930s — the essential companion in the tradition of the Japanese novel organized around beauty and the traditional Japanese world; where Mishima uses a simple love story to celebrate the unclouded world, Tanizaki uses a portrait of four sisters to preserve the Osaka tradition he loved before the war destroyed it
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