Japanese Literature

[LeftEyeNine]

What to look for, what/whom to read ?

[Lemur]

Sheesh, could pick a bigger topic?

Well, you can't go wrong with Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask.

[LeftEyeNine]

Yes I guess I should.

I reckon "Classical Japanese Literature" narrows it down. I mean those old ones.

[aimlesswanderer]

You could watch some historical drama series instead. They are generally very long (50 eps) and are often based on historical novels, and often set during the Meiji Restoration or the Sengoku Jidai period (the civil war which the Tokugawa Shogunate emerged from). They're not for everyone, but they can be interesting. The episodes and the subtitles are available online.

[Subotan]

Haruki Murakami is one of my favourite living authors.

[Beefy187]

Heike monogatari is famous one.
One of Natsume Souseki is another.

My personal favourite is Akutagawa Ryunosuke. That fellow is wicked.

[gollum]

Despite being on the "wild side", Ryu Murakami is also worth a read; and i have heard good words about Oe Kenzaburo.

Many fine names paraded so far...

I second Haruki Murakami which is a personal favorite; his writing style goes well translated in English (unlike other Japanese authors); this is probably because he has lived in the US for many years (in Boston) and as i remember has translated books from and into english.

Try "hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world" or the more recent "kafka on the shore".

Japanese may actually really work in Turkish as the syntax structure is similarly loose/fluid in both languages.

[LeftEyeNine]

Aye aye. Actually I'd really enjoy being able to read in Nihongo. To me, no other language feels understandable as much as Nihongo does, highly like given the fact that both languages are quite similar by their structures.

So what is out there to be read with the genres of mythological/historical novel/fiction-history ?

[Tristuskhan]

For historical novels (and more ) you can pick Inoue Yasushi. Great storyteller.

[gollum]

Originally posted by LeftEyeNine
To me, no other language feels understandable as much as Nihongo does, highly like given the fact that both languages are quite similar by their structures.

Indeed, in fact this seems to have led to speculations from linguists, anthropologists as to common roots between the two languages.

Actually I'd really enjoy being able to read in Nihongo.

A good proposition, but a lot of hard work; japanese has 3 alphabets in effect:

katakana: is a form of simplified kanji (chinese character) that is used to transliterate foreign words into the japanese language. For example, miluku (or miruku as r and l in japanese are used interchangeably = milk) would be written in katakana.

hiragana: is a form if simplified kanji that has a 1:1 correspondence with the japanese phonetic blocks it represents. This is used to render the japanese language excatly.

and finally the

kanji: the well known Chinese alphabet of image-letters, that was introduced and adopted in Japan. While the Chinese and the Japanese use the very same kanji with the exact same meaning they pronounce them differently; phonetically japanese is akin to italian, that is the phonetic blocks maintain a consonant-vowel sequence for example ku, mu etc.

Chinese on the other hand is far more consonant heavy and its sequences frequently incorporate consonant-consonant combinations that make it sound more convoluted.

It follows that Chinese and Japanese can almost read signs or even books in each other's language - but cannot verbally communicate with each other.

The use of kanji in the japanese language produce the somewhat weird effect that the phonetic provenience of word roots is different from the letteral one.

It has been statistically estimated that the knowledge of about 200-300 kanji is the absolute minimum to get by in everyday life, with a well educated person knowing about 1000.

[Azathoth]

There's a buttload of Zatoichi movies about this blind samurai.