Having just finished it, I can say that if you want to learn to speak like a super-educated university graduate who peppers their speech with allusions to the Western, Japanese and Chinese literary traditions, or like a super-stuck-up pompous cat, it will be ideal Also good if you want to give yourself a vocabulary workout, because the cat never uses a common word if there is an obscure synonym available. It is also pretty funny if you like that kind of humour. I recommend getting a version with footnotes/endnotes that explain the literary and other references.
The other Soseki I have read is 三四郎, which is a much easier text to read, largely because the narrator is not being super-stuck-up and because only some of the dialogue is bored university grads showing off to each other. It’s basically a coming-of-age story where 三四郎 arrives in Tokyo in the early 1900s to study at university and finds city life a massive culture shock compared to rural Kyuushuu. I liked it because I find that period of history interesting and because the book (like 吾輩は猫である) includes various musings on modernity and the East-vs-West clash that had been playing out in Japan since the start of the Meiji era.
Tanizaki: I have read 細雪 – if you’re aiming for “speak like an educated wealthy pre-WW2 Osaka lady” go for this one. I would classify this as “if you enjoy classic literature you might like this”, i.e. if you pick your reading for action-packed plot or humour there’s not a lot of either on offer. I also definitely liked a volume of his non-fiction essays collected in a book under the title 陰翳礼讃 (which is the title of the famous “In Praise of Shadows” essay). Get a collection which includes 厠のいろいろ, where Tanizaki muses about toilets through history and nominates his favourite loo experience ever.
Lol. My impression is that Konosuba, for instance, is fairly well known in Japan, and she didn’t even know that the LN was the source work for the anime and all the manga spin-offs, so yeah, most likely she hasn’t read much of that stuff. But I mean, I think most of us learners are further into the otaku-verse on average than Japanese people on average.
‘Those seem like the kind of things…’. ‘Those’ being these sorts of novels? But yeah, she’s a native. Not sure when she moved to France, but she definitely did everything up to her uni education and first job in Japan.
Based on the little I’ve read of 吾輩は猫である and what I remember of French and English classics/famous novels… famous writers of full-length novels (as opposed to LNs) tend to write with a much bigger lexicon than the average. I can handle most texts with ease in French, but when I open novels, I tend to run into words I don’t know every few pages, at least at the beginning. That’s true even in English, albeit it happens less often, and usually only with culture-specific references (e.g. I don’t know many expressions specifically used to describe apartments in the US). That much is what makes novels good for learning, I guess? Light novels don’t necessarily stick to simple language either though: I know my first ‘lesson’ on compound sentences with embedded relative clauses was reading Volume 18 of Shield Hero.
Youjitsu is Classroom of the Elite in English, is it?
I can see what you mean, but it’s what my teacher said, not so much what I’m expecting. Of course more recent writing will be closer to how people speak and write now, but frankly, when I hear that even modern TV dramas have women using わ at the end of sentences, whereas only a minority of Japanese women still do so IRL, I’ve kinda decided that fiction isn’t ever really going to line up with real life. Maybe this is a specifically Japanese problem seeing as speakers are rarely indicated in dialogue, but then again, dialogue in English IRL doesn’t really line up with, say, Harry Potter either.
I’m expecting that the collocations and use of nuance in novels will be natural, so I’ll learn those. Social conventions will probably be outdated, and some of the expressions used will be less common today, but I’m fine with that and I’ll just keep it in mind. I’m definitely not expecting everything in novels to be perfectly natural today, and that goes (though to a much smaller extent) even for novels written within the past 20 years. We don’t always write exactly how we speak or would express ourselves normally.
I mean, if you guys have recommendations for modern novels that I should try, I might give them a look, but I just want to point out that I’m only taking a look at the writers my teacher recommended because I’m hoping to learn something, particularly about how to put words together, express myself more fluidly, and sound more eloquent. ‘Erudite’ writing and speech tends to be more old-fashioned anyway. I’m not really reading these for enjoyment, though I’m hoping whatever I pick up won’t bore me to death. The stuff I intend to read for fun is just LNs, and they’re sitting in a cupboard back home 10000km away from me. The main difference here is that I’m familiar with the stories of those LNs, and I know I enjoy them. Novels? I’ve never tried Japanese ones, but it’s been years since I’ve read any, even in English. That’s why I’m just going with the work of a well-established author as a taster. I intend to decide afterwards if I feel like seeking out more Japanese novels.
I guess I should ask though… have any of you read something by Murakami? How was it, and what did you enjoy or dislike?
I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but that university graduate image? That’s kinda me IRL. That’s what I aim to be able to do, though I tone down the allusions when I’m with people I know won’t appreciate them. I also enjoy taking mental note of references to old literature that I enjoy (e.g. Shakespeare, Ancient Chinese poems) and one of the first things I did when I got exposed to Classical Japanese was to check if my favourite quotes from Classical Chinese literature had well-known translations in Japanese. So yeah, in that sense, it sounds like 吾輩は猫である is right up my alley.
Being exposed to more obscure words also sounds like something I would appreciate, and from the Sōseki quotes I’ve seen in another book (it’s about differentiating near-synonyms that often overlap in Japanese), it seems like he chooses both his words and kanji carefully to convey specific ideas.
I’m currently working with a PDF and an EPUB of the Aozora Bunko edition (so there’s furigana to save me time on checking readings, thank goodness), but thanks for the tip! I might look for an annotated version then.
The premise of the story sounds intriguing, and yeah, I am rather curious about how people closer to the Meiji era felt about the arrival of Western ideas and how Japanese society treated those ideas.
I remember some of the English classics I picked up as a child that weren’t plot-driven boring me, so I might give this one a pass for now. For that matter, I actually couldn’t get myself to finish the prologue of Lord of the Rings because it felt like Tolkien was providing too much detail too early on and expecting me to remember it all in order to understand the rest of the story. If it’s anything like that, I think I’ll have a hard time.
That was unexpected, but an amusing surprise. I might give those essays a look.
It’s true that you have to be able to separate realistic dialogue from “TV” dialogue. I just imagine that would be easier if you read more modern works.
I mostly read fantasy and sci-fi, and haven’t read anything particularly “profound” in terms of writing style or quality. I’m usually happy with the writing as long as it’s simple and clean (i.e. non-flowery). My typical recommendations are 獣の奏者, コンビニ人間, かがみの孤城, and most recently 僕が愛したすべての君へ, but again none of them is terribly complex in terms of writing style. (So these probably won’t work for OP’s request either.)
I have read スプートニクの恋人, ノルウェイの森 and ねじまき鳥クロニクル. I think Murakami has a distinct writing style (apparently influenced by English – he’s done translations into Japanese) and also some characteristic themes (eg magical realism). They have more “stuff happens” type plot than some more character-portrait focused literature, although the stuff that happens doesn’t always make too much sense. I liked what I read OK, but am not particularly in a hurry to read more of it – from what I’ve read about his other books I feel like it’ll be a bit “more of the same”.
I feel like “Japanese novel” covers so much ground that one book can’t possibly be representative of it. I’m not even sure you could consider 吾輩は猫である as representative of “classic Japanese literature” (notably, it has no plot, and is just a sequence of standalone scenes and conversations, and is not particularly attempting deep characterisation or depiction of emotional states) and you could make an argument for it not being very representative of “novels by Soseki”!
Other “literature” I have read:
雪国 by Kawabata. Genuine Nobel-prize-approved capital-L literature. Has the benefit of being short if you don’t get on with it. I found it the kind of dense text that benefited from careful slow reading. Oh, and I’ve read 名人, which is his novelized account of a real-life game of Go between two top-level players (which I recommend to the sort of people who think “novel of a single game of Go” sounds interesting :-))
キッチン by Banana Yoshimoto (and a few others by her). Easy to read, modern setting, some critics don’t think this counts as real lit.
A book of short stories by Mori Ōgai. I picked this up in a book-off by mistake somehow, read it years ago and can now remember almost nothing about it…
That’s actually an interesting observation. I suppose people (me, I am people) are inclined to make assumptions about the language learning process based on their current spot in the learning curve, and someone that is farther along on the curve can see those assumptions and approximate that person’s place on the curve based on the assumptions they make, which to me is a little amazing. I should feel blessed that I’ve come far enough at least that I don’t make the mistake of undervaluing vocabulary.
It’s also interesting to me that the journey of learning Japanese has also become a journey of expanding self-awareness.
True, but I mean, my teacher gave me that advice (‘read novels’), and then gave me those author names, so… I will definitely be getting round to modern LNs soon enough at any rate (the ones waiting for me back home), but seeing as I didn’t know any Japanese novels aside from LNs and 吾輩は猫である, that’s what I went with.
Well, thanks for the recommendations anyway! Most of the anime I watch and enjoy is fantasy or isekai, or contains sci-fi elements, so I might enjoy some of what you’ve read.
I definitely like ‘stuff happens’ literature, but I tend to prefer it when I understand why it happens, or when there’s at least a hint at the reason. (That’s also why I had a hard time watching 俺ガイル at some points, because while it’s really interesting, sometimes you just don’t get why the characters do certain things. It was probably easier to follow in the LN, but while watching the anime, I just kept going, ‘Wait, so what exactly are their world views like? Why did they think that was a good way of dealing with all this?’)
The most famous Murakami novel in the English-speaking world is probably 1Q84, in my opinion, but I’ve never read it. The Wikipedia page suggests that international reviewers didn’t like it. I mean, I don’t know, but even if he writes well, my impression continues to be that his books might not be for me, and I’m OK with that.
Of course, of course. I mean, the description I’ve read of 吾輩は猫である essentially suggests that it’s a pompous cat’s human observation log. Hardly a typical novel idea. But I just want to experience what exists in the world of Japanese writing outside LNs, and see, for example, how events are described. I’m not expecting everything else to be similar; I just want to try pulling a ballot out of the box, as it were.
I never thought to check the Nobel Prize list, actually. I keep forgetting that it doesn’t just reward works in English because it’s so international and news about it is always available in English. Might be worth a dive.
Also, the Go novel sounds interesting since I grew up playing and studying international chess and Go. Granted, I’m more used to analysis books than, say, The Queen’s Gambit, but I did own a book on Kasparov vs Deep Blue whose commentary wasn’t just technical assessments. It seems it’s still under copyright, but I’ll see what the most convenient options for getting it are. (Maybe an ebook, but I’m not sure what sites/apps to use. I’m an Apple device user living outside Japan, if that helps with making any recs.)
There have only been three Japanese-born winners of the Nobel for literature, and one of those writes in English, so it might be a bit of a shallow dive unless you extend it to also look at authors hyped as potential prizewinners
I have had some luck in the SF/fantasy genre finding books by looking at the winners of the Seiun and Taisho awards for ones which look like they might be my thing – the same strategy might also work for a “literary fiction” prize.
Meijin covers the progress of the Go match in sufficient detail that my copy includes diagrams of the board state at the back so you can follow along with what’s going on when the text says “then black played move 83”, though its focus is on the two players, their mental states and the surrounding circumstances of the match. It’s only 170 pages or so.
I mean if you are looking for like “real” literature, there is The Akutagawa Prize Reading Challenge, if you are looking for books that were liked by the committee with the focus on entertainment rather than literary quality, there is The Naoki Prize Reading Challenge, and if you are up for books that are popular among the bookstores (but otherwise no qualification is required so the result is a pretty mixed bag), then The Honya Taishou 本屋大賞 Reading Challenge is for you!
Haha that’s an interesting stat! So far I’ve only read two winners and loved them both; but to be fair I also dropped one winner because I didn’t get into it at all.
Ok so I pulled 70% out of just ‘feels like’ but I went and checked and I’m at about 50/50! 6 disliked or meh about (including 2 I disliked enough I didn’t finish them and don’t intend to) and 5 I liked. I have several more in my 積読 pile so I guess we’ll see how they shake out
Well yes, Tanizaki Junichirou, but also when exactly did he write
I still have 瘋癲老人日記 (Diary of a Mad Old Man) on a far off super slow backburner, but that’s not a book I would recommend to anyone.
I would even up it to 1990s. I’ve tried reading at least 1 book from the 80s which well, didn’t exactly age well. It’s absolutely readable, but some of the concepts are outdated. However, translations of English books from that period are fine.
@Chocobits to your original question, I would say you can get away with 1500+ kanji and a very good grasp of something like 10+k words or less assuming the theme is daily life, school life, etc. Fantasy books or anything about ghosts or mythology would require more. I’m basing it off what I’ve read so far, of course and I’m pretty sure I don’t know more than 1800 kanji. Definitely less than that.
Looking at the list, of the 6 winners/nominees I’ve read, one was at least OK, 4 were pretty good, and one my favourite book of everything I’ve read in Japanese (that last is 新世界より). On the other hand I wasn’t choosing them because they were on the award lists, so the hit rate is unlikely to be representative…
I never chose them because they were on the list, but the ones I disliked were mostly (though not all) books I read because I was curious about their popularity either on here, in YouTube book reviews, by ranking lists, etc.
I’ve come to the conclusion that “popular book” means next to nothing for me and I’m more selective now about which sources I take recommendations from.
I know it gets brought up here but learnnatively.com is a great resource to find books for the level you are at or aiming for. N1 is level 34-40. There is a breakdown of their leveling system on the site. I also recommend bookmeter.com to see what is popular in Japan and you can even crossreference and see what the book’s level is on Natively.
Also good if you want to give yourself a vocabulary workout, because the cat never uses a common word if there is an obscure synonym available. It is also pretty funny if you like that kind of humour. I recommend getting a version with footnotes/endnotes that explain the literary and other references.
I mean, I don’t know, but even if he writes well, my impression continues to be that his books might not be for me, and I’m OK with that.
it is a really mixed bag.