Why is Japanese literature so bad?

[Anonymous No.20782293]

Only Shusaku Endo was good out of the ones I read (Murakami, Kawabata, Mishima, Yoshimoto, Yoshikawa and Soseki).

[Anonymous No.20782327]

there is that japanese chick that made a remake of the crime and the punishment. can't remember her japanese name but the name of the novel was confessions. i really liked it.

[Carloncho-sama No.20782342]

I remind you that manga is serious literature too.

[Anonymous No.20782352]

>>20782327
I watched the movie. It's awful.

[Anonymous No.20782366]

>>20782293
I thought Shusaku and Soseki were really good. Haven't read enough of the others to give an opinion on them.

[Anonymous No.20782376]

>>20782293
Osamu Dazai? If you're an edgy teen it should scratch your itch.

[Anonymous No.20782383]

Banana Yoshimoto is ok.

[Anonymous No.20782395]

They caught the wave pretty late on, unfortunately. Most literature we recognize as great was written before the 20th century, but in the case of Japan, it's all really after the Meiji Restoration. They didn't have much time. That, or like cinema and film, literature is just not their thing. To me, Japan still appears as the one big non-Western exception.

[Anonymous No.20782420]

>>20782293
Did you read Mishima's short stories? There are a couple translated collections. I've heard he was better with those than novels but people on this board only seem to talk about novels. I'm gonna read those next year.

[Anonymous No.20782429]

>>20782395
>one big non-Western exception
What are the Western exceptions?

[Anonymous No.20782432]

>>20782395
Japan has a fantastic poetry tradition, though. As you said, the novel form is just relatively new there

[Anonymous No.20782435]

>>20782420
Why next year? Bussy-san.

[Anonymous No.20782440]

Murakami is especially awful. I will never understand how he's rated so highly by the critics and the public.

[Anonymous No.20782456]

It doesn't get translated that much, but it has a higher production than the US because pure literature is sustained crappy pulp LNs. Their police procedurals are pretty huge and revolutionary for the genre.
The main issue is that their editorials tend to push artistic prose authors, which are as aproachable as getting Nabokov, chopping offf his sentences and google translating that half a dozen times.

[Anonymous No.20782470]

why is japanese literature so hilariously bad?
the most recognizable literary technique of nipponland is 3 lines consisting of 17 syllables
their "art" is mostly confined to one period or era.
kanji is just an inferior version of the Chinese Script.
katakana and hiragana are both redundant and not from japan (Western China originally)

why could the nips not make a satisfactory literature?

[Anonymous No.20782475]

>>20782435
>work full-time
>reading a book a week on average including novels, short story collections one day at a time
>write full-time also when I get home
I will get to it I am just trying to make ends meet right now.

[Anonymous No.20782481]

I'm a cat desu~

[Anonymous No.20782524]

>>20782293
>>20782395
Holy shit lmfao what is the entire Heian period? The Manyoshu? The Kokinshu? The Tale of Genji? The Pillow Book? The Tale of Heike? Zen literature like the Hojoki? Japan has one of the most brilliant traditions of classical literature in the world.

If you're a braindead normie who only reads realist 19th and 20th century novels then I could expect saying this dumb shit.

[Anonymous No.20782531]

>>20782524
Don't spit near me, you will spot my Orlando Furioso and my Eaneidas, fag.

[Anonymous No.20782537]

they're a nation of soulless subservient cattle
the only worthwhile art from that island is their cinema from 50s-70s

[Anonymous No.20782538]

>>20782475
Next year you will be dead.

[Anonymous No.20782542]

>>20782531
Yes, there are some people on /lit/ who only read post-19th century realist novels and before that narrative epics which they consume in a novelistic manner, true.

[Anonymous No.20782544]

Because Japanese is just a clunky language. It doesn't really adhere to any of the aesthetic ideals commonly shared between romance and general Western languages, which wouldn't be bad on its own, but it also has no real aesthetic qualities of its own to make up for them. Japanese is a language centered on understatement and context dependency to point of being detrimental to its own development and aesthetic.
For this same reason, Japanese audiences consume literary output from other cultures at a much higher rate than they do their own; the preferred cultural product of the Japanese consumed by the Japanese is sequential art (i.e. manga) which focuses heavily on emotional expression to counteract the stiffness and unapproachable nature of their literature.

[Anonymous No.20782561]

>>20782538
No it's okay I've got lots of things backed up, doomer-kun. Mishima short stories come after O.Henry, Maupassant, Borges and Bierce.

[Anonymous No.20782576]

>>20782561
>Maupassant, Borges and Bierce.
Those are basic, you must to already read them. What a faggot, what next? Huxley and Mann?

[Anonymous No.20782633]

>>20782429
What I mean is that there are few non-Western countries that are comparable to Western countries at all. Japan more or less stands alone in that regard.

>>20782524
All underwhelming compared to the depth and breadth of pre-modern Western literature.

[Anonymous No.20782663]

You guys do know they publish and sell more novels than the US, right? Are you done coping with not having a respectable industry with well known authors for over 50 years?

[Anonymous No.20782682]

>>20782663
source?

[Anonymous No.20782683]

>>20782544
How well do you know Japanese?

[Anonymous No.20782695]

>>20782633
>All underwhelming compared to the depth and breadth of pre-modern Western literature.
Nah, there's nothing so pure, so gemlike, so understated, elegant and full of subtle meaning like Japanese waka. And even in prose Europe had nothing like the Tale of Genji, or even the impressionistic poise of zuihitsu literature, until 600 years later.

[Anonymous No.20782705]

>>20782695
>implying Finnegans Wake is nothing

[Anonymous No.20782724]

>>20782544
Great post.

[Anonymous No.20782735]

>>20782695
Tale of Genji is just fanfic for sheltered palace girls. It was the 50 Shades of Grey of Old Japan.

[Anonymous No.20782749]

>>20782705
Oh yeah, the book everyone talks about but no one even got past the first page due to how boring and non-sensical it is.

[Anonymous No.20782764]

>>20782749
>no one even got past the first page
not everyone's as dumb as you

[Anonymous No.20782780]

>>20782764
Yeah, you for instance is dumber.

[Anonymous No.20782793]

>>20782780
>you
>is
lol learn english you stupid moronic idiot

[Anonymous No.20782812]

>>20782793
You don't even capitalize words or end your sentences with a period, dumbfuck.

[Anonymous No.20782837]

>>20782705
>comparing a 600-page novel to a form of poetry of 5 lines

This world of ours
To what should I compare it?
The white wake behind
A boat that is rowed away
In the first light of morning.

[Anonymous No.20782839]

>>20782812
only retards like you hate e e cummings

[Anonymous No.20782841]

>>20782837
>This world of ours
>To what should I compare it?
>The white wake behind
>A boat that is rowed away
>In the first light of morning.
is this japanese poetry or did you write that crap? lmaoooo

[Anonymous No.20782851]

Because light novels are simple reading, that’s why they’re ‘light’. The Japanese are working too much to have energy for anything else.

Although sometimes you get something like Youjo Senki trying to do deal with deeper concepts, but that’s a rare exception.

[Anonymous No.20782878]

>>20782837
Where's the sauce for this poem?

[Anonymous No.20782885]

>>20782878
his retarded ass

[Anonymous No.20782888]

>>20782841
I'm also deeply fond of Issa's verse on the death of his daughter:

This dewdrop world—
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet - and yet

[Anonymous No.20782902]

>>20782839
I don't give a rat's ass about this Cummings fuckwad.

[Anonymous No.20782907]

>>20782749
I've read it, anon. I can even quote full pages. It's a gorgeous book full of a ton of great prose and wordplay. There's a ton of secondary material out there to help with understanding it, and the online version has mouseover annotations

[Anonymous No.20782921]

>>20782293
>Kawabata
What?
Palm-of-the-Hand Stories is great. It's a diary of the small beauties and events of life. I consider it a 10/10.
Have you read Akutagawa?

[Anonymous No.20782922]

>>20782907
I don't doubt you read it, but I'm sure as hell you didn't understand shit and only read it to boast online like the good pseud you are.

[Anonymous No.20782925]

春と修羅 is still the best poem I've read.

[Anonymous No.20782936]

>>20782663
is that supposed to be good? the fact that they produce so much literature yet none of it stands out proves OP's point even further

[Anonymous No.20782945]

>>20782293
Creative energy was mostly directed toward manga for 400 years. They were making comics before there were comics and reduced historical figures into capeshit while they were still alive.

[Anonymous No.20782960]

>>20782395
>That, or like cinema and film, literature is just not their thing.
Japan has the richest body of cinema relative to their size of any country and the Japanese New Wave is still the high water mark of the medium.

[Anonymous No.20782966]

>>20782878
It's a poem by Mansei from the Manyoshu, translated in Donald Keene's Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century

Another one by one of my favourite poets Ono no Komachi, immortalised in the Hyakunin Isshu:

the colors of the
blossoms have faded and passed,
as, heedlessly, I
squandered my days in pensive
gazing, and the long rains fell...

[Anonymous No.20782969]

>>20782966
Are the lowercase letters part of the translation?

[Anonymous No.20782989]

>>20782960
retard.

[Anonymous No.20783021]

>>20782969
Yes, from Rodd's translation of the Kokinshu, one of my desert island books.

"The Urin-in Temple north of Kyoto in Murasakino was famous for cherry blossoms. Ryōzen had come to view the blossoms at the Urin-in only to find they had all fallen except for those on a few branches on one side:
.
I came to visit
the blossoms, but they, like me
have begun to waste
away - I cannot make a
promise for springs yet to come..."

[Anonymous No.20783034]

>>20783021
Is there any particular reason for the lowercase letters?

[Anonymous No.20783043]

>>20782888
I really like that

[Anonymous No.20783049]

>>20782888
>>20783043
you niggas are fucking stupid

[Anonymous No.20783062]

>>20783034
NTA is there any particular reason you're so hung up on that?

[Anonymous No.20783067]

>>20783049
and you're an uncultured sack of shit, what's your point?

[Anonymous No.20783080]

>>20783062
I've been doing some amateur translations of Chinese poetry and I've been using no-caps with my translations too. I think it gives the poem a softer mood more aligned with the Oriental minimalist aesthetics.

[Anonymous No.20783094]

>>20783080
I agree. I really recommend Rodd's translations of Japanese waka, by the way.

[Anonymous No.20783098]

>>20782922
Where in my post was I boasting about it, or even giving that impression? I rarely talk about it and just genuinely like the book. I've read multiple secondary texts on it, so saying that I don't understand anything is pure projection on your part

[Anonymous No.20783175]

>>20783080
huh. I wasn't expecting that. I thought you were just being belligerent. Now that you mention it, I think you're right. I never put that much thought into it, though it's been something that I had issues with while I wrote my own poetry.

[Anonymous No.20783176]

>>20782989
no u

[Anonymous No.20783220]

>>20782293
What's sure is that the japanese make some god-like sci-fi. I really like it.

[Anonymous No.20783236]

>>20783220
Which ones?

[Anonymous No.20783254]

>>20783236
Gurren Lagann.

[Anonymous No.20783277]

>>20782293
The culture that birthed japanese "literature" is the same culture that created these autistic coomer anime girl images.

[Anonymous No.20783319]

>>20783277
What's autistic and coomer about that image?

[Anonymous No.20783357]

every fucking jrpg has trash goddamn writing
every goddamn eastern mmo too, all intolerable

[Anonymous No.20783420]

>>20783236
I'm reading this book about a giant Buddha mech that uses those mummified monks as a power source.

[Anonymous No.20783447]

>>20783420
Holy fucking what a based premise

[Anonymous No.20783488]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AilzwyyNB3M&
松尾芭蕉の全部の作品を読め

[Anonymous No.20783646]

>>20782544
>t. didnt pass n1

[Anonymous No.20783718]

>>20782544
Entirely untrue from beginning to end. You do not know Japanese.

[Anonymous No.20783806]

>>20782524
>ching chong ching chong
no one cares

[Anonymous No.20783838]

>>20783357
are there any video games with good writing

[Anonymous No.20783857]

>>20783838
The Last of Us.

[Anonymous No.20783867]

>>20782293
>filtered by Kawabata
You need to have at least fifth grade reading comprehension to post on this board.

[Anonymous No.20783900]

>>20782293
Picked up Murakami after Mishima recently, he's brainlet asf. Dropped it after I read how he had sex.

Norwegian Wood is just a Japanese baby boomer describing how he got to smash

[Anonymous No.20783932]

>>20782395
Novels are a pretty new concept in of themselves. The first novel in English was in the 14th century and they didn't catch up until the 18th. They're a pretty new form of art and most (western) countries usually have verse as their national literary heritage, not prose. Prose was reserved for serious things like treatises, not some reddit-tier existential psychology

[Anonymous No.20783982]

>>20782544
>clunky language
>Japanese
lol holy fucking shit. primo bait. I didn't read anything past that.

[Anonymous No.20783990]

>>20783098
He found your ability to read better than him threatening and now he is lashing out because he got filtered.
I'm working towards it, I'm reading a lot of Irish literature and working my way around history and literature in the mean time. In fact, I'm even learning Irish. :)

[Anonymous No.20784008]

>>20782960
True facts anon, Japanese New Wave is top tier. Even earlier, Ozu, Mizoguchi and Naruse are some of the all time greats.
As for OP, I've enjoyed what little of Mishima, Dazai, Tanizaki, Kawabata and Soseki I've read, even if it wasn't spectacular.

[Anonymous No.20784059]

>>20782293
>Haruki Murakami
Make the switch.

[Anonymous No.20784070]

>>20782293
Snow Country is kino
>>20782342
Kys

[Anonymous No.20784114]

>>20782293
Should I commit suicide for liking No Longer Human?
Sure, I couldn't relate with all the sex he was having but the alienation resonated with me.

[Anonymous No.20784149]

>>20784070
>国境の長いトンネルを抜けると雪国であった。
For how simple it is, it's an incredibly memorable opening line.

[Anonymous No.20784187]

I recently bought these. I like their detective fiction, I hope they are good.

[Anonymous No.20784191]

>>20784187
I fucked it up.

[Anonymous No.20784332]

Light novels like Reincarnated as a Slime is better than the crap /lit/ recommends from Japan

[Anonymous No.20784335]

>>20784332
They're not brave enough to admit it.

[Anonymous No.20784336]

>>20783838
Dragon Quest

[Anonymous No.20784528]

>>20782544
Japanese is so poetic. One word can mean so many things, and the hononyms elicit deep layers of meaning. Plus, everything rhymes

[Anonymous No.20784569]

>>20782293
Why are anime women so beautiful?

[Anonymous No.20784608]

>>20784569
Stylized cartoons. Trying to bring them into the real world results in a freakshow. The allure is the alternate reality

[Anonymous No.20784627]

>>20782544
Anata no chinpo wa chicchai desu~

[Anonymous No.20784803]

Read Haniya Yutaka's Death Spirits, Yapoo, Dogura Magura, Oe's Game of Contemporaneity, and Kyojin Onishi's Divine Comedy, before you have the right to post in this thread

[Anonymous No.20784894]

>>20782395
I like to meme on Japan being culturally fucked as much as the next guy but to say they have no quality cinematic tradition is just delusional. Unless you’re talking about their new shit, then I wouldn’t really know.

[Anonymous No.20785099]

>>20784336
Lol.

[Anonymous No.20785171]

>>20782293
The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea is one of the greatest novels ever written

[Anonymous No.20785208]

>>20784608
>Trying to bring them into the real world
?

[Anonymous No.20785241]

>>20782293
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki is good

[Anonymous No.20785248]

>>20784569
Anime girls are more beautiful than real women because they are far closer to the Platonic form of ‘female’ than real women. They take all of the appealing features of women and take them to the highest possible degree. If anime girls were real, 3DPD would go extinct. 3DPD is a cheap imitation of the divine ideal of the anime girl.

[Anonymous No.20785324]

>>20782544
>based and thoughtful effortpost
>also make weeabos strokepost with seething rage
Excellent quality post on several metrics anon, thank you.

[Anonymous No.20785885]

Is it possible that some writing styles just don't translate well across races of humans that did not evolve geographically close to each other? No /pol/ talk.

[Anonymous No.20785928]

>>20782395
>>20782633
Why JAPAN of all countries? Persian, Indian, Chinese, Arabic literature all seem much better to me.

[Anonymous No.20785946]

>>20785885
But there are lots of good works from other asian countries. Why not Japan?

[Anonymous No.20786062]

>>20782293
I think you forgot s and e in bad. You probably meant based.

[Anonymous No.20786173]

>>20782663
Does this include light novels

[Anonymous No.20786211]

>>20782936
This is a horrible argument considering that most of it never gets translated, regardless of its quality. Even then, it's so far away from the languages most people speak, that the few novels that do get translated have poor translations. More than almost any other language, Japanese suffers from translation the most, so if the translator isn't a good writer themselves (and that is barely ever the case), then you're only going to get some amateur's rendition of an otherwise incredible book.

[Anonymous No.20786353]

>>20785248
I request the picture of a bunch of otakus taking pictures of an anime figurine and ignoring a woman cosplaying the same character.

[Anonymous No.20786373]

>>20782293
Murakami is not japanese literature. He often thinks of the stories in english and translates them to japanese on paper.

[Anonymous No.20786543]

>>20785248
99% of the people who say that would drop their "anime girls" as soon as some hot chick offered sex to them.

[Anonymous No.20786611]

>>20786543
Exactly the sort of short-sighted dualistic thinking I've come to expect from the posters on this board. Who says one must drop their anime girl in order to engage in recreational copulation with the 3DPD? A real woman is simply a fleshlight that comes pre-warmed. Do you truly believe that a man who practices onanism with an ona-hole goes on to abandon his 2D wife? Surely not. And so, why must a man who practices that same onanism with a real woman do anything dissimilar to what the ona-hole man does? For what is 3DPD but a premium ona-hole?

[Anonymous No.20786844]

>>20786611
Dude... you're just a degenerate...

[Anonymous No.20786986]

>>20783838

[Anonymous No.20786996]

>>20786986
>Boy of Sword Penis Action!

[Anonymous No.20787200]

>>20782293
Do the Japanese have a national novel?

[Anonymous No.20787213]

>reads shitty "localization" of japanese novel that doesn't accurately translate the prose, the implied meaning and inference of japanese expressions and vocabulary, mistranslation of kanji, etc
>"wOoW JapAnEsE LiT Is BaD??!!"

[Anonymous No.20787249]

>>20787213
People seem to understand this concept when it comes to French, Russian, German, and so on, but when it comes to languages that are even more divorced from their native language like Japanese and Chinese, they just default to saying their literature is bad.
These people most likely don't even know that Japanese and Chinese are unrelated, so their opinions don't matter much in the first place

[Anonymous No.20787332]

>>20782960
Nope, that's Portugal (Oliveira, Monteiro, Paulo Rocha, Pedro Costa, Rita Azevedo Gomes, etc)
Though you're still quite right in saying the Japanese are kinomasters.

[Anonymous No.20787523]

>>20787200
The Tale of Genji.

[Anonymous No.20787648]

>>20783357
Why do they like to write about killing God so much?

[Anonymous No.20787910]

whats the great japanese cinema outside of Ozu, Kurosawa, Itami and Okamoto? Already seen Kobayashi and Mizoguchi also

[fuck this board No.20787946]

>>20787910
shunji iwai

[Anonymous No.20787947]

Kitano, Iwai

[Anonymous No.20788165]

>>20787946
hes not very good imo but thanks

[Anonymous No.20788173]

>>20787947
ill check out kitano thanks

[Anonymous No.20788201]

>>20787910
teshigahara
naruse
aoyama
terayama
matsumoto
hara
obayashi
shindo
ichikawa
koreeda
tsukamoto
oshima
yoshida
jissoji
kinoshita
suzuki
imamura
fukasaku
ishii
yamanaka

[Anonymous No.20788409]

>>20782293
I geniunely think they're wired differently creatively. The Japanese used to be awful artists, if you look back at the entirety of the medieval period, Europe was starting to show remarkable mastery over illustration and paintings alike, while Japanese artwork at the time was basically cave-man drawings. At the time their written philosophy was alright, but they had yet to produce any notable visual or written art that was worthwhile.

I think after they were nuked in WWII they started to take an interest in the arts and humanities, but their brains were wired for visual art, not words, which is why they can craete manga with great characters and stories but not literature. They're just visual people,and I suspect that will always be the case.

[Anonymous No.20788510]

>>20782633
India produced better literature than Japan ever did, both in Ancient times (I mean Greece, India, China are really big 3 here) and in pre-modern times due to the English influence catching on. Tagore was the first non-European to win a Noble Prize and he won it for Literature only.

[Anonymous No.20788538]

>>20788409
How ignorant must you be to write such horribly incorrect hogwash? I hope you're not one of those people who wrongly conflate realism with skill. Your first task should be to actually look at a Japanese painting, and not a woodblock print, because it seems that most of the people who devalue Japanese art haven't even seen a Japanese painting before.

[Anonymous No.20789069]

>>20782960
>Japanese New Wave is still the high water mark of the medium

[Anonymous No.20789070]

>>20787200
Evangelion

[Anonymous No.20789795]

>>20786844
Go back

[Anonymous No.20789834]

>>20788409
> The Japanese used to be awful artists, if you look back at the entirety of the medieval period, Europe was starting to show remarkable mastery over illustration and paintings alike, while Japanese artwork at the time was basically cave-man drawings.
AHAHAHHAHAHAHA

Japanese bird and flower paintings shits over 90% of European art

[Anonymous No.20789846]

>>20788510
>India produced better literature than Japan ever did
Well I’d hope so given India is 10x the size of Japan. But even there it’s not that clear cut: India wins in epic and philosophy, poetry is arguable, and the novel and prose belles letters Japan wins.
> Tagore was the first non-European to win a Noble Prize and he won it for Literature only.
Tagore won it because he was friends with weirdo orientalist theosophists like Yeats who patronised him to the European public because they thought he had secret Eastern wisdom. The stilted translations that got him the prize are unreadable nowadays.

I just got baited, didn’t I?

[Anonymous No.20789863]

>>20786611
>a man who practices onanism

i'm still laughing. Ahhahaha jesus christ! Sorry don't have reaction images on this computer but this is comedy gold.

[Anonymous No.20790043]

>>20782395
>>20782293
if you have not liked Kawabata and Mishima, I cannot help you. Akutagawa is god tier and some of his stories are on par with Kafka and Gogol.
Also, Japanese courtesans were writing novels before we even knew what they were in the west, and they are stunningly beautiful.

I just wanted to also briefly say that, after briefly falling in love with this place, I now shun this board for /a/ and /m/ because I honestly think that a One Piece thread on /a/ and any Gundam thread on /m/ have more people who know what they are talking about than the average thread on /lit/, so at least there I can talk on the same level as the others, although only about trash cartoons.

The thing that I find disgusting about this place is that it takes everything I love and twists it into its wikipedia version regurgitated by ignorant undergrads. Honestly, no one in here reads, and yet the average anon feels no embarassment in making a thread where he judges a whole literary tradition, in this case the japanese, basing his judgment on literally six authors. Even more than being ignorant, the definitive proof that no one in here ever fucking reads is the complete lack of self-doubt you guys have when posting about things you clearly know nothing about. Any bookclub, on any book, by people of any age and gender is better than this place, because the people in those book clubs read at least one book.

[Anonymous No.20790066]

>>20787910
Sion Sono.

[Anonymous No.20790069]

>>20789846
India is only 6 times the size of Japan though

[Anonymous No.20790093]

why is everyone obsessed with japan?
its a mental illness at this point

[Anonymous No.20790140]

>>20782376
learn to read you dolt.

[Anonymous No.20790143]

>>20782537
we are discussing about japan here and not the amerifats.

[Anonymous No.20790152]

>>20790093
next to usa, japan is the only relevant exporter of culture. but nobody ever asks why is everyone obsessed with burgershit. don't be so precious.

[Anonymous No.20790167]

>>20790152
not a burger, it was a genuine question, I see lots of people who want to learn japanese/move to japan just because they like a certain anime
it's fine and normal to like japanese media, but do you have to make it your entire personality?

[Anonymous No.20790178]

>>20782293
i'm generally not into japanese literature either but i don't mind kawabata, in fact i thought "thousand cranes" was a remarkable work
which ones of his did you read?

[Anonymous No.20790190]

>>20782395
>>20783932
didn't the japanese literally invent the novel? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji))

[Anonymous No.20790197]

>>20790167
Japan is the closest Other. In the Western imagination it is an Oriental Europe, a Europe stranger than Europe itself. Southeast Asia is too underdeveloped and strange. Singapore is technocratic and boring. Korea is too new, capitalistic and forbidding, though that may change over time. China is too hostile (though Hong Kong, for a time, was fruitful in the Western Imagination: see the writings of William Gibson). Where else is Exotic but also Familiar? Of course, the real Japan is none of these things, but an actual place with actual problems. Yet the mythology of Japan is strong.

[Anonymous No.20790258]

>>20782293
>Only Shusaku Endo is good
>Shusaku Endo is a Japanese catholic
there you have it

[Anonymous No.20790268]

>>20782342
Yeah sure, and my dick is 4 inches

[Anonymous No.20790286]

>>20782342
it can be

[Anonymous No.20790294]

>>20782293
it's culturally different, they used to live in a cultural bubble for a long time and only had any real influence from the neighboring countries (much like europe and middle-east), the direction of their culture doesn't speak to you so you find it shit, even after westernization they still retain a distinct way of being when it comes to thinking, though they also had chivalry stuff with samurais which are very close to knights

[Anonymous No.20790361]

>>20782327
Kanae Minato

[Anonymous No.20790368]

>>20787200
real answer to this is 忠臣蔵 which is their most popular work of classic fiction but it's a play

[Anonymous No.20790469]

>>20790190
Nah, China invented the novel with The Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong

[Anonymous No.20791567]

>>20790469
That’s a romance, not a novel. And was written centuries after Genji anyway.

[Anonymous No.20792073]

>>20791567
That's one of the earliest examples of historical novels, whilst Genji was originally a series of short stories that bored aristocratic women expanded and rearranged to reach that absurd word count it has now

No matter how weeb I can be, I think that it's just giving to Caesar what is Caesar's