/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12432171]

Are Japanese light novels a genre on their own?
I ordered a few recently and the package is on the way, but my brother said the genre is totally different from the "common" novel. Does anyone here knows what is the difference? Care to explain?

[Anonymous No.12432180]

>>>/a/
>>>/jp/

[Anonymous No.12432228]

>>12432171
Made up "genre". Is either good or bad, is either fantasy or science fiction or whatever. Who coined the term anyway?

[Anonymous No.12432411]

>>12432228
>Who coined the term anyway?
I'm curious too. Novels in my country used to be small books with a small number of characters.

[Anonymous No.12432436]

they're written on paper that's equivalent to toilet paper almost. they're called light cause they're small, light, and cheap. the line has really blurred nowadays but they were similar to the plup magazine. they'd come in a big magazine and then later be reprinted in individual cheap copies. there's light novels which are similar to regular novels and then stuff that's written for young children. overall though light novels are young adult fiction rather than trying to be literature. they're heavy on dialogue instead of descriptions

[Anonymous No.12432524]

They're the weeb equivalent to the kinds of books you find in Costco or an airport convenience store. They're honestly not bad if you're grading on a curve. No fancy prose, no really vivid imagery, no deep stories to learn from, just fun flashy things happening in between women fellating a self insert character.

That and you could blow through one really quickly. The slowest readers can get through one in a day, I think.

[Anonymous No.12432547]

The writing is bad to the point where anyone can immediately recognize that it came from a LN if given a single page. It's a style of writing simply meant for young adults, which should be obvious since you see fucking furigana for even jouyou kanji.
It's even worse for VNs and WNs, editing isn't a concept for either.

[Anonymous No.12432586]

Light novels are roughly analogous to Young Adult fiction in the west.

[Anonymous No.12434179]

>>12432171
Yes, they are different. They are basically anime in book form, a few even naming the chapters as episodes. They are aimed at younger audiences, have straight to the point text that is meant to be read more as a script than a book, and contain pictures, usually lewd anime girls to illustrate the corresponding moments in the books. They're also a smaller format and are sometimes printed on cheaper paper.

They have a negative stigma because they usually have piss poor prose and are a genre that is basically the Japanese equivalent of Twilight (though most are aimed at teenage boys). For hardcore anime otaku, they're perfect, but for anyone expecting depth, they're trash.

[Anonymous No.12434279]

They were, they aren't any more, even for full-length novels with complex narratives and obscure kanji are increasingly being classified as light novels.

[Anonymous No.12434478]

>>12434279
If a Japanese reader 30 years ago was reading a book and didn't recognise a kanji, what the fuck would he do? How do kanji dictionaries work? I assume nowadays you'd draw the kanji on a screen and find out but what about before

[Anonymous No.12434526]

>>12434478
If the Kanji has ruby text it'd be easy, almost exactly the same as using a English dictionary, if there isn't any ruby text every kanji has a radical you have search up, which is very time consuming.

[Anonymous No.12434550]

>>12434478
Kanji are divided into radicals and stroke counts. Some radicals make more sense than others, but stroke counts are consistent throughout, so whether online or in a book, you'd look up in the index for items that have a radical that's in the kanji, or you'd count the strokes and look for kanji that have that many.

[Anonymous No.12434896]

>>12432171
It’s pulp with an anime theme, but the genre and the name makes it specifically so that it has to be ‘light-reading’ to qualify for the genre (which is why NHK doesn’t qualify) so unlike some pulp light-novels can never be good even if a miracle happened because the whole point of a light-novel is for it to be shit.

They could have just called it ‘anime-themed’ novel or something

[Anonymous No.12434903]

>>12432171
In search of lost time is my favourite light novel series, gilbertine is my waif

[Anonymous No.12435233]

All Japanese literature and culture is immature. All of it including anime like Akria are garbage. They know how to make things pretty but there's never any substance at all. Japanese should stick to light novels because it is the stuff they're good at

[Anonymous No.12435237]

They're just ultra commercialized YA fiction

Having said that I did kind of like Zaregoto

[Anonymous No.12435250]

>>12434903
It feels like the average Proust sentence has more words than a light novel

[Anonymous No.12435262]

get this ABSOLUTE FUCKING SHIT off THIS board NOW, go to back to /a/ or /jp/, I don't care which one, just leave

[Anonymous No.12435316]

Imagine wasting your limited time on earth reading this shit

[Anonymous No.12435329]

>>12435316
Someone post the recommended order for the Monogatari LNs.

[Anonymous No.12435333]

>>12435329
Just read Lolita instead

[Anonymous No.12435338]

>>12435333
I was asking to show the degree of retardation some people attach to shit books to feel sophisticated .

[Anonymous No.12435377]

>>12435338
Honestly, monogatari is very well written; the author is constantly praised and has won many awards because he's a god of puns and other types of similar japanese wordplay. I can only imagine how terrible the translations are, because I doubt they got some high-tier author and instead hired a sweaty 23 y/o NEET who missed the clever references on each page and just translated the self-aware cliche story.

The anime was enjoyable, but only because of the fanservice. It conveys absolutely none of the book's brilliance.

[Anonymous No.12435387]

>>12435377
puns are the second lowest form of wit

[Anonymous No.12435389]

>>12435377
>Japanese literary awards after the 70s
Yeah, it's a hard pass for me

[Anonymous No.12435391]

>>12435377
I should add that I'm a native speaker and you would need a very strong grasp of Japanese, beyond standard fluency, to understand all the nuances, unlike most LNs which are the easiest things for language learners to start with. And without understanding and appreciating all of those nuances, it's just a standard LN.

>>12435387
list the forms of wit

[Anonymous No.12435410]

"Light Novel" describes a medium, not a genre.

[Anonymous No.12435435]

>>12435391
>puns
Why is it that Nips seem to be crazy about them?
Are these jokes so memorable you may think of an old pun years after reading it and break into laughter?

[Anonymous No.12435444]

>>12435435
Same reason English music is obsessed with rhyming; the language lends itself to it.

[Anonymous No.12435454]

>>12435435
As the anon below you said, it's the language. They have far fewer syllables than English does. If you look at a list of hiragana, it represents - diacritics aside - all the sounds in the Japanese language. Many words are similar or identical because of that.

[Anonymous No.12435471]

>>12432171
slideshows are not /lit/ nigger

[Anonymous No.12435671]

>>12435410
how do light novels differ from novels as a medium

[Anonymous No.12435708]

[Anonymous No.12436925]

[Anonymous No.12437053]

Unironically size, they're usually smaller and lower quality. I wouldn't say that makes them a medium though, still think they're just a genre/demographic of book.

[Anonymous No.12437074]

>>12435708
>who decides what font size is big and what is small?
lmao

[Anonymous No.12437405]

>>12432171
They're a YA novella/web publication serial, but because that sounds gay they redubbed it "light novel" so they can pretend not to be brainlets.
Vacuous power fantasies shat out by some hyper-weeb living in a manga cafe in akihabara writing the entire thing on a flip phone.
The writing is bad, just fucking bad. 90% dialogue and onomatopoeia sound effects. It's manga for people who can't draw.

[Anonymous No.12437471]

Kino's Journey is the only one worth reading.

[Anonymous No.12437505]

>>12437471

I feel like Monogatari is pretty po-mo giving how ironic a lot of the humour is.

[Anonymous No.12438082]

>>12437405
>It's manga for people who can't draw.
That makes me want to write a lite novel.

[Anonymous No.12438873]

>>12434279
So, simplified kanjis are an important trait of japanese light novels? Interesting because I believe this is different from a western book using simple language because our idioms are phonetic.

[Anonymous No.12438899]

>>12437505
I only watched the anime, but I can imagine why the series is so famous in Japan.

[Anonymous No.12438906]

>>12432171
I reported your off topic thread faggot

[Anonymous No.12439217]

>>12438873
Simplified kanji are basically the same as using simplified language. There are thousands of kanji, but many people only know, depending on their education and their experience with reading, 1000-5000 of them. It's very similar to not knowing words in English. If you take an average westerner and hand them something from Nabokov, they won't understand many words he uses in the novel. But if you hand them something by Stephen King, they'll understand almost every word used.

Light Novels are marketed to teens, so the word choice is kept simple. When that anon says more complex works are being considered light novels, they mean marketed as such, in smaller formats and with pictures for a younger audience. (For example, saw pic related the other day. It's Dazai's No Longer Human, but marketed as a light novel)

[Anonymous No.12439263]

>>12432547
But is that because of poor translation? I am fluent in Japanese and read a few back when I was shit but I can't exactly remember the quality of prose.