23 Books in 23 Days: Everything Jeremy O. Harris Read While Imprisoned in Japan

If you’re like me and the world has been overwhelming you with emails and countless deadlines, getting arrested in Japan for accidentally having MDMA in your toiletry bag, resulting in a 23-day confinement, will be your chance to turn off the world if you so choose. (Read more about all that here.) In the quiet of my cell, I read 23 books and turned in an outline for a movie at a major studio, all while realizing how loud my normal life had become.

Here is a list of the books I read, in the order that I read them…

The Rise of Modern Japan by William G. Beasley
Inferno by Dan Brown

These were the first two books I read. There was a library cart in the jail that allowed each of us to check out two books at a time. The options for Japanese speakers were very rich. There was a slew of manga and a bunch of books that looked like actual fun. For the English speakers, there was a mix of airport slop, self-help books, and multiple Bibles. Luckily, there was this odd book about Japanese history, written by a British guy in the ’80s, that was honestly one of the best history books I’ve ever read. A true deep dive into a very specific arc of Japanese history, basically from the moment the West demanded it open up until the ’80s. It was a book that helped acclimate me to my new reality there and also taught me things I didn’t know at all, like that the reason I was subject to Japanese laws as a foreigner was the unequal treaty and the backlash that came because of it. I also learned about what happened to the Japanese during the signing of the Treaty of Versailles…and if you want to read a villain origin story, google it. The jail also had a Dan Brown book. I chose Dan Brown because I respect him more than James Patterson, whom they had a lot of. I had also just spoken to someone about Robert Langdon in Poland and felt nostalgic. This book really unlocked something for me because I forgot just how much Dan Brown is THAT GIRL. This book is an amazing read. I recommend it for people even if they aren’t in jail. I’d also say that if Dan Brown or his publisher reads this, I really, really want to adapt this book now and think it’s incredibly timely.

3. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

4. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

5. Love Is a Dog From Hell by Charles Bukowski

These were three of the first books my friends delivered when they visited me. I was in Okinawa to make a film, and thankfully my friends took time away from the film to visit me regularly and make sure I felt like a human by bringing me books. I had already read Kafka on the Shore, and it was amazing to read a book I loved as a kid and realize that I hated it as an adult. So much about the character’s psychology doesn’t work for me anymore. I read the book for the first time when I was in Miho Matsugu’s Japanese Literature in Translation class in college, and it really opened a portal for me. With maturity, that portal closed, I think, but Ishiguro opened another one with Klara and the Sun, which I adored. I can’t speak highly enough of this book. It was a genre I didn’t think would enrapture me the way it did, and I’m so grateful I finally was forced to read it. The same is true of Charles Bukowski, whom I unfairly judged when I was a young, pretentious poetry minor in undergrad. I didn’t like any poet whom the straight white boys idolized because there seemed to be something wrong with any writer whom boys like that loved. I want to formally apologize to Bukowski because I didn’t realize that I too would one day be a desperately horny and depressed writer reading him and saying “YASSSS” to every other poem.

6. Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith

7. Oreo by Fran Ross

8. What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

9. Cleanness by Garth Greenwell

This is the section of books I’ll call “Read for Work.” My business partner smartly sent PDFs of all of these for me to read so that I wouldn’t fall behind on my reading for work, and it was a gift from heaven. Grasshopper Jungle was such a surprising and fun nostalgic read. Oreo is one of my favorite books of all time. And nothing is better when you’re a horny nerd than Greenwell, because he’s one of the greatest writers on earth and also very good at writing very erotic literary fiction. This is a godsend when you’re not allowed intimacy for 23 days.

10. The Book of Margery Kempe by Margery Kempe

11. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)

12. The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (c. 1592) by Christopher Marlowe

13. Epigrams and the Forest by Ben Jonson

14. Oroonoko by Aphra Behn

15. Othello by William Shakespeare

Shout-out to The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1, another gift from my friends in Okinawa from the vintage English-language bookstore up the street. This book was a game changer. So many essays. So much classic literature. I definitely read more than just these, but these were the selections I read to completion and also the ones that just stuck with me the most. The Book of Margery Kempe is the first autobiography in English ever? I don’t know why I was only just reading it. It’s a really psychedelic book written by an illiterate Catholic mystic who dictated the entirety of her “spiritual autobiography” for transcription. It’s just about her journey with God and the spirits. She walked so that The Testament of Ann Lee could run. Marlowe and Shakespeare were just refreshers for me and also gave me a chance to act out monologues for my cellmates, much to their delight and confusion. Aphra Behn’s and Olaudah Equiano’s books should be read in tandem. They are both books credited with promoting the necessity of slavery’s abolition; one from the point of view of a white woman who was making shit up, but as an ally, and the other from the point of view of an actual Black man who was enslaved and learned to write. They are both amazing. Behn’s is a bit more fun, though, because she’s legit just lying and being a Karen for good. Ben Jonson just sort of tore with Epigrams, and he was hot, so he made a big impression.

16. A Handful of Stars by Dana Stabenow

17. Starseed by Spider and Jeanne Robinson

These were the two books that the embassy gave me. Both are about people who go into zero G for different reasons. I think they are from the same publisher. Starseed is about a space dancer. It’s truly insane and has some WILD racial politics. A Handful of Stars I remember being more chill…just about colonizing other planets. A bit slow.

18. Gifted by by Suzumi Suzuki

19. Intimate Distance: Twenty-Five Years of Photographs, a Chronological Album by Todd Hido

More gifts from my friends. Obsessed with these two. Not only did I get introduced to one of my favorite photographers in Todd Hido, but the essays about his work over decades were uniformly spectacular. A 10/10 photo book. Reading a photo book in jail truly felt like the closest thing I got to watching a movie. And the film he was making through those pages was so Lynchian that it changed my dreams. Suzuki’s Gifted is a very special novella about a young sex worker taking care of her dying mother. A poem of a book. Similarly to Ocean Vuong, she has a poet’s sensibility for accumulation. The book does a trick, and in the last page it built in such a way that a dam I didn’t know had been built burst at the final line, and I cried for 10 minutes.

20. Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburō Ōe

21. Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima

22. A collection of news and short fiction published from November into December

More work reading, but also things I wanted to revisit from my Japanese literature class. Mishima and Ōe are two of my favorite writers. Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness had one short story I desperately needed to read, “Prize Stock,” so my business partner sent it to me and I reread the whole collection. Mishima’s Forbidden Colors really is one of the greatest novels about queerness ever written. In all its forms. Please read it if you can find it. An absolutely demented novel. I also asked for a roundup of all the news I was missing—that was helpful because every day they gave us the newspaper, but it was in kanji, so I had to just look at the pictures and guess or ask Tomo to translate for me. Which he liked because it allowed him to practice English. I did need to actually read the news, though, so this was a real gift near the end.

23. Fun & Easy by Nihongo

During my last week in jail, I finally got a Japanese vocabulary book, and my Japanese got so good really fast. This is probably the best language model book I’ve encountered and I highly recommend it.

Book covers: courtesy of the publishers.