Interesting. For me
The Long Price Quartet is superb, something I immediately could relate to...
I also have all of the
Lian Hearn's books. They're very good. The original Tales Of The Otori are probably still the best of them. When I was in Japan on '07 for WorldCon, one of the highlights of my trip was to visit the Nightingale floor the book is based on. Awesome.
Funnily enough I also have Barry Hughart's
Bridge of Birds and its sequels. I have only read Bridge of Birds, a previous winner of the World Fantasy Award, This is a wonderful book part mystery, action adventure & romance, full of poetic prose and somewhat lush descriptions built upon a fairy tale construct. The characters and situations the central duo find themselves in are quite comical at times. Hughart's style may not appeal to everyone though but for me and many others its very deserving of the sometimes overused tag "a modern classic".
Of course we should probably also mention the ancient classic of Chinese Literature Journey Into The West, better known to us as "
Monkey" which the TV series was also based on.
In fact there are several other
classic Asian texts I could suggest but these are more your typical ancient myths and legends rather than a let's say more contemporary interpretation, so maybe not your cup of tea?
Several others inlcude some of Sean Russel. an underrated author's earliest novels as well as Chris Wooding's Braid Path series..even if we want to we can start to list classics like Beckford's Vathek, Thousand and One Arabian Nights etc.
When you look into it there are many, many works either based on or influenced by the orient.
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