What is this book?

I found this little item in the foreign language section of a local used bookstore.

It was squarely in the middle of the Japanese books, and surprisingly there were around four others.

What confused me is that this thing has no kana, as in literally none, see below

Is this a miscatagorized Chinese book? It looked Japanese. Is that normal in novels? What about all of the grammatical tags, articles, etc.

Thoroughly clueless question here.

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Seems like a Chinese book, since it’s written with simplified hanzi. Probably something to do with Confucius.

Pretty sure it’s a Chinese book about Confucianism.

You would definitely see kana in novels. You might have a long string of unbroken kanji in a formal name for something, but never a wall of them like that.

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There are also some kanji that are clearly the Chinese variant. For example:
Japanese:
Chinese:

Seems like whoever categorized the books has no clue about Japanese or Chinese.

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Thank you.

I assumed it was probably Chinese. But I wanted to be sure.

I just wish I had moved it over to the Chinese books two shelves up.

There do exist old Japanese texts that predate the development of kana, e.g. 古事記(こじき).
image
This isn’t one of them though :slight_smile:

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