/lit/ - Literature

>>6416360
Look no further.

Actually, do look further.
Consult the /lit/ wiki.

>>6416388
Hmm, is it just me or has the image failed to upload? Anyway, here's Wonderwall.

>>6416360
We have a LOT of Japanese literature guides on the wiki. It's linked in the sticky at the top of the board.

>>6416408

>>6416415

>>6416421

>>6416415
Has anyone here read the entire Sea of Fertility tetralogy? Not sure If I wanna read the entire thing or just read Spring Snow

Is Botchan for younger audiences?

>>6416452
Yeah!
It kind of reminded me to "the catcher in the rye"
tho I read it some time ago

I see a lot of people talking shit about Murakami on this board for some reason.

Instead of making a new thread I figured i'd ask here. What are the best translations available for Soseki? Are there any particularly terrible translations i should avoid?

>>6416488
I've noticed it a lot more in the past week or two.

read some ihara saikaku and ueda akinari for dat edo period dickpunch

>>6416432
Wondering the same. The Amazon reviews for each book speak highly of all four.

>>6416502
Also Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Shiga Naoya for some top-shelf short stories. Some of Naoya's stories especially are wonderfully deft even in translation.

>>6416432
Spring Snow stands on its own quite well. I recommend reading the whole thing, though. It's uneven in quality, and it is said that he was pretty distracted during the writing of the last book planning the events leading to his suicide. But it's fascinating as a whole and I'm pretty sure there's nothing else like it. I'd recommend not reading anything about it beforehand and just jump into it, because the way the four books progress caught me completely off guard.

Is there any chart (like the ones for Murakami and Mishima) for Banana Yoshimoto?

>>6416569
No. She's not really an author that appeals to the people into Japanese literature here.

>>6416587

Damn. She's good but she has too many books and I have no Idea where to go after "Kitchen".

>>6416625
Just from the few others I've read by her, I'd suggest Goodbye Tsugumi next.

>>6416630

I just bought N.P. is it any good?

>>6416655
No clue. I've read Kitchen, Tsugumi, Asleep and Hardboiled & Hard Luck. I thought all were okay. More of the same kind of style as Kitchen, so I imagine you'll continue to like all those, if you read them.

>>6416655
I read N.P. it's good, has some mistery elements that are worked out nicely.
But still haven't read that much from her.

>>6416569
I don't really care for Yoshimoto's style. Very bare prose (inb4 "lost in translation huehue hue") and a lot of sitting and talking scenes broken up by sitting and talking scenes. There's some social commentary sprinkled in and out but often it feels like the author is beating you over the head with it rather than letting the reader naturally reach the conclusion. In The Lake there was a passage more or less moralizing about hypercapitalism.

I've heard her style is "manga-like", but in that case just have her write manga and hook her up with an artist that does the same sort of thing like Inio Asano and you'll probably have a decent story.

I will give her credit for writing young-ish female protagonists, which is a breath of fresh air from all the Dazai knockoff depressed 30-something artist types that crop up more often than I'd like.

Which is the easiest Japanese book to read with literary merit? Particularly from >>6416408 and >>6416425 .

>>6416799
Yoshimoto and Inio Asano would be just amazing. I mean Pun Pun meets (Insert any female character from Yoshimoto's antology). I'd buy that.

>>6416807
easiest? Maybe Soseki's work like Botchan and I am a Cat

>>6416848
>>6416807
I'd suggest soseki's sanshiro actually

>>6416799
They're not Dazai knock-offs. They're to do with the shosetsu genre.

>>6416807
A collection of Kenji Miyazawa's children stories would be the easiest to read. They are literary.

>>6416360
>Also I like first-person narrative books.

Ibuse's Black Rain is a first-person narrative of the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombings. It's in journal form. Depressing but pretty amazing.

>>6416874
Shousetsu literally just means "novel". I assume you mean "watakushi-shousetsu", in which case, while part of a longer prewar tradition, Dazai was one of the more prolific writers in the genre, and many other novels subsequent to him and other early postwar novelists read very similarly to each other. I like Dazai but I wish so much of modern Japanese literature wasn't based on the same archetypal narrator.

>>6416904
You know what I'm talking about. Shosetsu has colloquially meant the I-novel genre for a while. Minae Mizumura just published a novel about I-novels which referred to the genre as shosetsu, and nearly all scholarly articles refer to it as such.

How do you qualify Dazai as being one the more prolific? Who are you comparing him against?

I don't care for his style other than his otogizoshi, but I don't care about postwar Jlit very much anyway.

So I decided to look up the Tale of Genji and I keep seeing people call it "the world's first novel" and I'm not quite sure what they mean by that.

So /lit/ in your opinion who's the biggest representative of the I-Novel. (Watashikushi-Shousetsu)?

>>6416931
Ningen Shikkaku is the second best selling novel in Japan. I'd say that's pretty influential. I believe that and Shayou are also required reading in high schools nowadays. There are a lot of early postwar writers who touched on the same or similar themes (see the Three Generations of Postwar Writers), but Dazai was the one that wrote the more enduring books. He was quite popular at the time and upon publishing Shayou he was on par with Akutagawa at the height of his popularity. His really weird life and almost comically multiple attempts at killing himself also built up this mythos around him, which still persists.

He is pretty much THE early postwar writer in the Japanese canon.

Personally I thought Shayou was meandering and kind of dull. Ningen Shikkaku is a masterpiece though, even if it is pretty much the Japanese equivalent of the Bell-Jar.

>>6417016
It's a long narrative story in prose that focuses on the internal feelings of characters/whatever your professor defined a novel as in lit 101.

Yumeno Kyusaku is great
A shame most of his stuff remains untranslated

>>6417861
Do you have something translated from him?

Wow, this post grew bigger than expected.

>>6418916
that's what she said xDDDDD

>>6418916
Like a penis ;-)

>>6418916
Is this your first time on the front page? Are you going to thank us for our U P B O A T S ??xdddddddddddddddd

>>6416432
>>6416507
I have read the first two, starting the third soon
Sprig snow is great, if you like it just keep going. maybe you will get bored maybe you will love it, I cant tell you

>>6418916
EDIT: Wow, thanks for the gold, kind stranger!

Any recommened Women authors?

I've only got Banana Yoshimoto.

Kokoro
No Longer Human
Snow Country
The Woman in Dunes
The Sailor who fell from Grace with the Sea
A Personal Matter

I have this lined up and ready to read. Anything to add?

>>6416858
Seconding Sanshiro, that broke me into Soseki and has been one of my favorites of him since. Also check out Kokoro and And Then.

>>6421007
Ayako Sono.

>>6421057
Night on the Galactic Railroad

>>6421007
Some better ones are Ichiyo Higuchi, Akiko Yosano, Fumiko Enchi, Sawako Ariyoshi and Yoko Ogawa

>best Japanese literature

The menu at my job

Silence by Endo

Scorsese is adapting it so better read it before the shit movie-tie book covers.

>>6421295
>>6421327
Thanks friends.