Selection ranges from the late 19th century to writers born as recently as the 1960s. Unless you are well posted on Oriental literature, few of the names are likely to mean much at first - though they include Tanizaki, Kawabata, Mishima, and Endo Shusaku. In spite of galloping Westernisation over the last hundred years or more, Japan is still a strange land and culture to Europeans and the emotional world of these stories may often seem strange or arbitrary to a non-Japanese. Some of them, almost inevitably, deal with war and its brutalisation of sensibility, but the modern urban jungle is a strong presence in the stories written in the past forty years.