Japanese authors

Natsume Soseki: Grass by the Wayside. A "shit happens" novel. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, a master of short stories. Showa period had lots of great authors like Kawabata ("The Old Capital") and Yukio Mishima ("The Golden Pavillion"). Ibuse's Black Rain (no connection to a Michael Douglas film with the same name) is a great, unemotional book about an emotional subject.

Apparently, the literary themes of the current Heisei period are, if possible, even more diverse than those of the previous ones. Haruki Murakami ("Sputnik Sweetheart", "After the Quake", "Hard boiled Wonderland") is almost too fluent.