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/lit/ - Literature

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21250460 No.21250460 [Reply] [Original]

So why did Japan never really get into writing fantasy/SF in proper novel form, but Light Novels caught on? It feels like an entirely untapped region of the world as far as genre literature goes.

>> No.21250488

>>21250460
>So why did Japan never really get into writing fantasy/SF in proper novel form,
They did, holy shit, stop getting all your info from anime. Christ.

>> No.21250492

>>21250488
OP is literally an expert on Japan.
you retard fuck

>> No.21250493

i think its a false dichotomy, i used to read one sci fi book a week and also one jap light novel a week and enjoyed both
text or illustration, both are perfectly fine

japan does have a lot of sci fi too, especially mecha, maybe the just have a bigger/more competitive animation/illustration market/industry and the novel quickly gets illustrated and released as a ln too

>> No.21250524

>>21250492
>OP is literally an expert on Japan.
No, he fucking isn't.

>> No.21250877

>>21250460
Idk much about Japan because smelly degenerate westerners have soured the culture to me, but I'd imagine it has something to do with the Japanese writing system being a little too dense to write long text + Asians in general being historically more reliant on drawings or visual mediums for their storytelling.

I'm kinda talking out of my ass tho.

>> No.21251463

Because they don't have time for reading, what with working 28 hours per day and then jumping to their death.

>> No.21251519

The premise is not correct. They did have many fantasy and sci-fi novels.

>> No.21251540

>>21250524

>> No.21251558

>>21250460
Most fantasy/SF is YA.

>> No.21251771

>>21250460
Are you serious

>> No.21251781

The Japanese understand that genre fiction should be written as pulp in short novellas. Light novels are fun

>> No.21251836

>>21251781
I think this is correct. Sci-fi was elevated to the status of literature in the west due to the Space Race. It's Japan that hasn't changed.
There also are some serious books that get written off as light novels due to being given anime covers. For example All You Need Is Kill (Adapted into the Tom Cruise movie Edge of Tomorrow) and Shinsekai Yori(It is a real novel despite the characters being 12 for half the book)

>> No.21251853

Because writing feature-length novels with hard use of sci-fi and fantasy terminology that arises from a bounty of syncretic western language sources is really, really goddamn hard to do in Japanese. Its also insanely hard to read, and insanely hard to accurately translate (and wouldn't sound good anyways; well received translations into Western languages from the Japanese are always the products of intense editorializing). So there's no market where writing them makes sense.
Instead, you have anime/manga adaptations which bridge the lexical struggles with imagery and/or Light Novels which use extremely simplified language and assume you're very familiar with storytelling tropes from the former media to speedrun having to establish narrative verisimilitude.

>> No.21252018
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21252018

>>21251853
>Japan would have more sci-fi novels if their language didn't suck so badly

>> No.21253693
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21253693

Legend of the Galactic Heroes, by Yoshiki Tanaka has been translated to English.