Out of curiosity, would comprise the Japanese canon? By canon, I'm talking about the general canon that would be required for cultural literacy i.e. things that would have been read by the time people would have finished college, rather than the literary canon which is significantly broader.


So far, I've come up with
A few volumes of ドラえもん
奥の細道
雪国(which despite my love for it is iffy as in my experience not too many people have actually read it)
a few chapters/condensed version of 源氏物語
a few chapters/condensed version of 平家物語
The origin story and a few middle chapters of ゲゲゲのきたろ
蜘蛛の糸
吾輩は猫である
a handful of ドラゴンボール
枕草子
藪の中
斜陽
ノルウェイの森
キッチン

Anything else you can think of? Any suggestions from picture books to manga to belles lettres is good as long as it's likely the majority of people are likely to have read it.

桃太郎　is something I hear a lot of references to. I'm not well read so I can't give any over examples but children's classics generally seem to get a lot references.

It seems like just about every Japanese person I know has read こころ & 坊っちゃん, also by 夏目漱石, probably in high school. Actually, it would be interesting to see which works of Japanese literature are on a Japanese high school reading list...

Quite a lot of the stories on Hukumusume must be well known, e.g. 一寸法師.

文福茶釜 was implied to be well known in the To Love Ru manga so I guess it must be.

i think most people will be familiar with something written by Ki no Tsurayuki, probably The Tosa Diary.

走れメロス is another one everyone seems to have read in school

Some works that I've seen mentioned a lot in various media & books:
耳なし芳一
雨ニモマケズ
銀河鉄道の夜
泣いた赤鬼

If anyone is interested I found a a few required reading lists

小-http://www.katsushika.ed.jp/eaoto/pdf/d2014-60.pdf
中-http://cms.nahaken-okn.ed.jp/uenoy-jh/?action=common_download_main&upload_id=156
高-http://www.pref.kanagawa.jp/uploaded/attachment/612440.pdf

And a bunch of other high schools from kanagawa here:http://www.pref.kanagawa.jp/cnt/f360812/p832932.html

雪女 is the only one that comes to mind that hasn't already been mentioned. Also, what was the story from 笑の大学 where the playwright inserted Japanese characters for Romeo and Juliet? There is even a statue of it, with a man kicking a woman away from him. I think the story of those characters is pretty well known but I can't remember their names.

edit- found it!

金色夜叉 Wiki

And the statue

RandomQuotes Wrote:If anyone is interested I found a a few required reading lists

小-http://www.katsushika.ed.jp/eaoto/pdf/d2014-60.pdf
中-http://cms.nahaken-okn.ed.jp/uenoy-jh/?action=common_download_main&upload_id=156
高-http://www.pref.kanagawa.jp/uploaded/attachment/612440.pdf

And a bunch of other high schools from kanagawa here:http://www.pref.kanagawa.jp/cnt/f360812/p832932.html

Wow, these are awesome! Thanks!
I'm surprised to see light novels included. Somehow I thought they would be more likely to be snuck into class by students than assigned by the teachers XD