One of our hoariest stereotypes of Japan is that the national genius is one of adaptation rather than invention—that it is a nation of copycats rather than creators. However, the Japanese have a good claim to having invented the novel. Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), written some 600 years before Don Quixote, is a weirdly fascinating narrative of erotic and court intrigue. For Western readers it can only reinforce the image of Japan as, in Yukio Mishima's words, "a nation of flower arrangers."

Genji was something of a one-off. Modern Japanese fiction begins more or less with Natsume Soseki, born in 1867 shortly after Japan's opening to the West. Twentieth century Japanese literature was often preoccupied—formally and thematically—with the tortured attempts to come to terms with Western influences. Western readers may sometimes feel that they are looking through a telescope—only to see a telescope turned back in their direction.

When I was living in Kyoto in the late '70s, Yasunari Kawabata was the most popular novelist among the American expatriates who were seeking a vision of a Japan untainted by foreign culture. Kawabata's aristocratic aesthetes, tea masters and geishas are the epitome of Flower Arranging Nation and some of his novels, to Western eyes, are more a series of beautiful tableaux than novels—too precious by half. His greatest works like Snow Country and House of Sleeping Beauties are haunting; more than any other Japanese author, Kawabata satisfies our appetite for strangeness and exoticism. Kawabata himself created a striking metaphor of cross-cultural fascination in the protagonist of Snow Country, who was devoted to the study of Western ballet although he'd never once attended a performance.

No artist embodied the tortured contradictions of contemporary Japan as completely as Mishima, the homosexual who worried about Japan's effeminate image, the sickly aesthete who turned himself into a modern-day samurai and in 1970 finally committed seppuku, the ancient samurai ritual suicide, after failing to inspire a coup d'Etat. Mishima was thoroughly steeped in the traditions of Western literature—his early work shows the imprint of Oscar Wilde and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is wholly Dostoyevskian—but he was obsessed with the notion of purifying the national character and returning Japan to its pre-Meiji era values. What is perhaps most surprising about Mishima is that his increasing political fanaticism barely tainted his artistic vision and judgment. The final novel in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, for my money his greatest work, was finished the week before he sliced open his belly with a sword. Mishima is among the most cosmopolitan of Japanese novelists, although his suicide tended to reinforce our stereotypes about exoticism, fanaticism and general weirdness.

As a Christian, Shusako Endo was literally a man caught between Japanese and Western values. His early novels tended to be overly symbolic—volcanoes were always poised to rain down judgment on the unrighteous, but later works like Silence and The Samurai are superb accounts of East failing to meet West. Because of his Christian preoccupations, Endo has become one of Japan's best-known writers overseas. The most underrated of the great Japanese modernists in the West is Junichiro Tanizaki, whose portrait of a prewar Osaka family, The Makioka Sisters, is one of the landmarks of 20th century literature. He is undervalued in the West, I think, in part because his work, which stretches over half a century, is not easy to characterize, ranging as it does from fantasy to domestic realism.

What may strike us as most remarkable about contemporary authors Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami is the relative familiarity of the world they write about—the fact that they don't seem tortured by the question of Japan's position relative to the rest of the world. When the heroine of Yoshimoto's Kitchen mixes Japanese and French dishes in her menus, she's not making a point about cultural miscegenation. The deadpan Yoshimoto seems to be merely reporting how people eat in Tokyo.

Even when he is writing about relatively fantastic subjects, like spirit possession in sheep, Murakami's sensibility is that of the skeptical realist. His narrator is inevitably everyman, contemporary Tokyo edition—a thirtyish urban male in a low-key, white-collar job, a somewhat passive fellow who doesn't expect much out of life and takes what comes with jaded equanimity. Like the narrators of Raymond Carver's stories—Murakami is Carver's translator—they are unremarkable men, less driven by the ethic to succeed and less enmeshed in the powerful webs of family and business and community than most Japanese, living like college students well beyond their college days. In this, I suspect, may lie some of the popular appeal of Murakami's novels for Japanese and Western readers.

Murakami's protagonists stand just a little bit apart and aside in a society that has traditionally commanded full participation of its members. But they don't think of themselves as rebels, either. Mishima would hate these guys. Connoisseurs of the exotic will find little to savor here. American and European readers would be mistaken if they imagined these characters to be entirely familiar, but in their own quiet way they seem emblematic of creeping globalization in one of the world's most insular and traditional societies.

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