There was a time when a record label—like Motown, Stax, or Atlantic—represented a certain taste and aesthetic that you couldn’t confuse with anyone else. Records were one major way this sort of thing surfaced, but books, too: an imprint like New Directions or City Lights Books carried with it a far better idea of what they published than more generically corporate monikers like Random House or Basic Books.

The only publisher I’ve come across lately that has some of that same guiding, idiosyncratic taste is Vertical: everything they’ve put their name to has been at the very least interesting, and often downright amazing. They pick titles that hit big at home in Japan, that open doors here in the States by dint of being readable, eye-opening and absorbing, and that are a step beyond the usual genteel “literary” offerings. Vertical’s previous forays into hard-boiled crime fiction from Japan have included works by Kenzo Kitakata (his Winter Sleep made me lose about three hours in a day without blinking), but now they have a new name to add to that roster: Arimasa Osawa and his Shinjuku Shark series.

At first, Asa Nonami’s Now You’re One of Us ambles along like one of Yasujiro Ozu’s movies about Japanese home life, a drama of manners about marriage and extended families. Then it reveals its real subject by degrees—how a cult mind-set works to seduce outsiders and break their resistance—and it goes from Ozu coziness to full-blown Takashi Miike madness. In a good way, that is.

Terms like genius and renaissance man get thrown around so casually these days, it’s a bit of a shock to run into the real thing. I’m hard-pressed to think of a better example offhand than Takeshi Kitano, the Japanese multi-hyphenate—writer, director, author, TV personality, social commentator and stand-up funnyman—introduced most broadly to the West through his quirky remake of the Zatôichi movie franchise. But he’s been around a lot longer than that, and for a long time I lamented the only things we were getting to see of his creative prowess were his films, and sometimes not even that. (Many of his movies are not even in print on DVD in the USA anymore, and many that are exist only in wholly uncomplimentary editions.)

The very first book I remember reading on my own was James and the Giant Peach, and according to my mother, she read me the first few chapters and I simply took it from there on my own. If a kid reads a book enough that it falls to pieces, he probably loves it, and I loved that book and a great many others completely to death in those years. Even at that age, though, I knew—however distantly—that people wrote books; they didn’t just manifest, like leaves from trees­. Somewhere along the way I got it into my head that I, too, would one day write a book. Not just any old book, either, but something that would give other kids (and maybe some bigger people, too) something else to fall in love with.

Masuji Ibuse is not one of Japan’s better known writers in the West, which is another way of saying that a country’s greatest literary treasures often remain too long undiscovered and underappreciated from the outside. He was responsible for one novel which has achieved some modicum of domestic fame, Black Rain—no, not the source for the wretched Michael Douglas thriller, but it did inspire a movie of the same name courtesy of Shohei Imamura—an angry indictment not only of the use of atomic weapons but Japan’s largely unspoken stigmatization of its victims for decades after the fact. I read Black Rain shortly after seeing the film, and what struck me most about it was the same thing that makes the two novellas that comprise Waves stand out: Ibuse’s amazing command of life’s detail and local color. He knew more about Japan in particular than many people would ever forget, and that was something I wanted to catalyze a bit of if I could.

One of the things that always troubled me about the fascination with madness and the intertwined eroticism and death that always pervaded the Romantic and Surrealistic sensibilities was that they were almost always expressed by people who seemed to be celebrating those things without having known their cost in personal suffering. I’m not trying to apply some kind of politically-correct standard to the appreciation of such works, just pointing out that while some were idolizing the dark underbelly of the human psyche, others were helpless to it, and found nothing remotely romantic about the experience.

In the fifteen or so years that I’ve been reading literature from Japan, there are maybe two or three books from that whole oeuvre that I’ve come back to again and again and discovered more in each time. One was Kenzaburo Oe’s The Silent Cry; another, most likely the one I have come back to the most, is Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human. The two books could not be more dissimilar. Oe’s story is epic in detail and unabashedly literary in its language and imagery, while Dazai’s novel is barely two hundred pages and constructed out of language so simple and spare there seems to be no room for further reduction. And yet I’ve come back to that short space again and again, and each time I do, I find something else that simply did not seem to be there before. I know I’m the one that’s changing, of course, and I suspect the day I sit down to read No Longer Human and find nothing in it any longer will be the day I no longer see any of myself in it. I hope that will be a happy day.

How is it that a gigantic hoard of Buddhist literature came to be concealed in the Thousand Buddha Caves near Tun-Huang, in the northwest of China, and remained undiscovered for almost a thousand years? The explanation provided by Tun-Huang is of course fiction, but it’s fiction backed up by a good deal of careful research and thought about its time and place—a corner of the Chinese empire that was in constant conflict and under the perpetual threat of invasion or insurrection. That’s more than enough exotica to draw my attention, but there’s more: the author is Yasushi Inoue, author of The Samurai Banner of Furin Kazan, one of Japan’s most highly-lauded novelists next to Musashi author Eiji Yoshikawa.

When Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring, the basis for whole franchises of movies on both side of the Pacific, was published in English not long ago, I commented to a friend that English-speaking audiences are now finally seeing the literary side of Japan that the Japanese themselves experience and not simply the literature they offer up to the rest of the world. There’s more to this than simply “trying to understand the Japanese psyche”, or some equally stilted pseudo-psychological explanation. The reason people want to read such things and see them translated into English—myself included—is because there’s a lot of really good work to be read there. Dozens of authors, whole genres of work, are as-yet-untapped. Translating all of that into English increases the size of its potential audience by at least an order of magnitude.

Pilgrimage of the Sacred and Profane is the Vampire Hunter D novel I was hoping to read since this series got started. It takes all the best elements of the series as a whole—the otherworldly / futuristic setting, the grotesques and hardscrabble survivors that inhabit it, the menaces that boil up from inside it, and of course D himself—and puts them into a story that has real heart, real weight and real payoff. In the previous books—especially Raiser of Gales and The Stuff of Dreams—we got tantalizing hints about the main character that at most confined themselves to the background of the story. Here, they’re woven into its substance and made essential to how things play out. For most of the book it’s a fun ride (as all the D books are meant to be), and then at the end Kikuchi lobs a bomb of startling emotional impact right into our laps.