Japanese Studies CourseWorks Guide : Literary Studies: Find Books

General guide for locating resources for Japanese Studies.

Getting Japanese Books

To obtain a copy of a book you have located in the catalogs/databases described in the column "Books," try the following steps:

  1. Go to CLIO (Columbia Library Information Online) to see if it is available in one of the Columbia libraries. 
  2. If a book is not at Columbia or the Columbia copy is checked out, try Borrow Direct
  3. If the Borrow Direct libraries do not have an available copy, try ILL to request a copy. 

Note: Columbia is a member of GIF (Global ILL Framework), which allows us to borrow books and get copies of articles from GIF member libraries in Japan.

Books

To find what books have been published in a year:

Columbia's online public catalog was transformed to a discover tool and contains records for almost all materials, including books, periodicals, microforms, and databases, and beyond.  Most of Japanese language materials are cataloged both in Japanese language as well as translitelation of Japanese in romanization in the modified Hepburn System employed by the Library of Congress.  It is more effective to search by romanization rather than Japanese, but pay attention to word divisions.  CLIO search tips, please click here.

This database uses an “associative search function” that uses keywords to extract other words from the bibliographic records from the Edo period to the present that have a high association with them.

E-Books

Institutional Repositories

Indexes to Works in Collections and Series

Early Japanese Books (古典籍)

Kokubungaku kenkyū shomoku kaidai (国文学硏究書目解題)

Provides explanation to 2,400 works on Japanese literature which were published after Meiji. Explanations are objective, yet describe concrete characteristics of each work, and tried to provide complete bibliographic information. With title index.

Translations

Japanese Studies Librarian

Starr East Asian Library