Hello, this thread is for innocently asking you what books you like by Japanese authors? It could be anything, from light novels to scifi novels, classics, mystery novels, etc.

Well, that's all for now, going to check out the complete works of HP Lovecraft translated into Japanese, maybe some Seirei no Moribito, perhaps some of those Ikebukuro West Gate Park books... I just bought those recently with real money.

Edit: http://ja-dark.tumblr.com/post/138827446872/re-uploads

I'm (obviously) just getting into it, but I'm looking forward to reading a bunch of light novels that are either based off my favorite anime, or my fave anime are based off them. Especially:

Dennou Coil
Read Or Die
Scryed
Strike Witches

I'm also looking forward to reading Harry Potter and some other native JP books that I bought because they looked like they'd be easy and enjoyable both.

Harry Potter = Not easy!

Just a warning.

The best books I've read recently are:

少女七竈と七人の可愛そうな大人　by 桜庭一樹：
Nanakamado hates boys, except for her childhood best friend Yukikaze.
Everyone says that they look alike. Everyone suspects that Nanakamado's promiscuous mother slept with Yukikaze's father.
Nanakamado deals with all the pains of growing up, her mother's emotional abandonment, and the worry that she may be falling in love with her own half-brother. A short and delicate and lovely book.

風に舞い上がるビニールシート by 森絵都：
Short stories about womanhood, about what it means to be a woman whose life doesn't necessarily revolve around men or childcare. I love the first story, which is about a woman whose Devil-Wears-Prada boss has sent her out on Christmas Eve to find a perfect bowl for a photo shoot – even though her boyfriend was going to propose. I love the last story, about a worker at an international aid agency who's dealing with the emotional fallout from her ex-husband's death in Afghanistan. They have an emotional depth and richness to them.

Anyone know of any good light novels? That are interesting. Something simple if possible. My reading level isn't high (yet).

I've actually read very few actual books in Japanese; mostly manga and RPGs, although I suppose I did read half of the visual novel ひぐらしの鳴く頃に. I read two Soseki novels and some Akutagawa short stories, but other than that it's all academic papers and Genji...

nest0r Wrote:the complete works of HP Lovecraft translated into Japanese

HHHHHHHHNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG. You are officially my savior.

Have some unfathomable horror.

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm6202181
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm6210010

Slightly off topic, but Junji Ito's manga are heavily Lovecraft inspired, and totally awesome, as well. One of his most notorious (the source of more than one minor Internet meme!) is The Enigma of Amigara Fault, a short horror story with an incredibly claustrophobic twist. DRR... DRR... DRR...

nest0r Wrote:Hello, this thread is for innocently asking you what books you like by Japanese authors? It could be anything, from light novels to scifi novels, classics, mystery novels, etc.

By the way, what are some good URL shorteners? TinyURL is one I like, because it allows you to customize the URL! What's funny is that you can make it look random even though you customized it. For example, I could copy/paste a combination of numbers and letters from another site's URL--kind of like the URL of a site like 'sega pup toad' (I forget the actual name, but I know it rhymes with those words), even though the tinyurl link doesn't go to that site, like so: http://tinyurl.com/KC9GSLIF

Well, that's all for now, going to check out the complete works of HP Lovecraft translated into Japanese, maybe some Seirei no Moribito, perhaps some of those Ikebukuro West Gate Park books... I just bought those recently with real money.

Have you tried "Kino no tabi"?
It's a very popular series of light novels.

http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%82%AD%E3%83%...879&sr=8-4

Burritolingus Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:the complete works of HP Lovecraft translated into Japanese

HHHHHHHHNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG. You are officially my savior.

ZOMG seconded. I was working my way through Lovecraft when I started AJATing. Looking forward to being able to continue- but in Japanese.

IWGP books sound tasty too

Amazon.jp has some REALLY expensive shipping. Know of any other places that ship international for cheap?(if possible so i can get a load of books within a certain price range)

If you live in america, I would suggest ordering from Kinokuniya online.

Their retail prices are the highest among japanese bookstores, but shipping
is surprisingly cheap. So I like to order from them online.

The last couple of times I ordered books from them I paid a $7-$8 flat shipping fee.

Here are their shipping rates within the US:

PURCHASE AMOUNT(BEFORE SALES TAX) 48STATES HI/AK CANADA

-$19.99 $6.00 $19.00 $8.00
$20.00 - $39.99 $7.00 $20.00 $10.00
$40.00 - $59.99 $8.00 $21.00 $12.00
$60.00 - $79.99 $9.00 $22.00 $14.00
$80.00 - $99.99 $10.00 $23.00 $18.00
-$100.00 FREE $13.00 $20.00

The first column is purchase price (before sales tax).
The second column is shipping to the 48 states (excluding Hawaii and Alaska).
The third column is shipping to Hawaii or Alaska.
The fourth column is shipping to Canada.

So if you spend over $100 online (before sales tax), shipping is FREE to all 48 states in the US. If you live in the 48 states, the most shipping you will ever pay is $10!

And they have nearly all the books you'll find on Amazon.jp (or will special order it from Japan if they don't have it in stock).

Kinokuniya also has stores in Singapore,Malaysia,Thailand,Australia,Taiwan, and Japan.

Kino no Tabi:
https://bookweb.kinokuniya.co.jp/guest/c...=02&LANG=J

sweet. Book prices aren't that expensive. Do you know of any novels that are easy in context? I know that novels tend to use difficult kanji and even rare ones. Want to start with something easy, then build my way up.
Hm this book looks interesting, although i don't think it;'s simple
http://bookweb.kinokuniya.co.jp/guest/cg...61&AREA=02
(I could read 95% of the kanji in the description of the book)

I've never read any real novels, but the "Kino no Tabi" series of light novels seems famous for being easy to read (even for people who don't read novels). At least, that's what many of the reviews on Amazon Japan seem to say.

Other famous light novels are "Haruhi Suzumiya"(涼宮ハルヒ) and "Spice and Wolf" (狼と香辛料). Both series started as light novels. But IMHO, they look harder to read (compared to Kino no Tabi).

Burritolingus Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:the complete works of HP Lovecraft translated into Japanese

HHHHHHHHNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG. You are officially my savior.

Have some unfathomable horror.

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm6202181
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm6210010

Slightly off topic, but Junji Ito's manga are heavily Lovecraft inspired, and totally awesome, as well. One of his most notorious (the source of more than one minor Internet meme!) is The Enigma of Amigara Fault, a short horror story with an incredibly claustrophobic twist. DRR... DRR... DRR...

No problem. No idea how I came across your twitter posts on the topic (or half the stuff I come across ;p), but I figured we Lovecraftian folks must stick together. Yes I'm also a fan of Junji Ito--well, back from before I studied Japanese. As I mentioned to alyks ages ago in another thread, I also have copies of English-translated works by K. Asamatsu which are in the Cthulhu mythos but haven't been able to find in .jp form. Edit: Oops, I did that unfair thing again and focused on the editor rather than the authors of the short stories. Must revise searches...

You might also check out Thomas Ligotti's works when you're on a break from Japanese. Teatro Grottesco is 'around' (some place with torr--streams of demono(i)c power).

@blackmacros I only recently learned that Akihabara @ Deep (in the same area of the fifth batch as IWGP) was by the same author.

If we were to assume that someone had stumbled upon a batch of raw txt files just lying around online, what would explain their inability to view the files?

They're (theoretically) all appearing as ???? and symbols, but this person has not previously had any problems reading txt files- for example when they didn't download Harry Potter. Seems like it could be an encoding problem for this hypothetical person, who is using TextEdit on a Mac to open the files.

What could this person be doing wrong?

TextEdit on a Mac is definitely the program they would want to be using!
However, they wouldn't DARE try Open, and then select UTF-8 (or play around) as the "Plain Text Encoding."
That would result in a whole lot of trouble.

Of course, if there were HTML files bundled together with the raw text file, then I don't know what they would be doing with the raw text file anyway.

Although, I have heard hearsay of another text editor by the name of "TextWrangler," which some legends say may be able to be stumbled upon on the internet for free, which is better than TextEdit.

I'd say this person could use firefox as it should hypothetically be able to detect the character encoding. If you.. uh sorry, I mean this person needs to be able to edit the files the free Japanese word processor JWPce also supports all sorts of encoding and should be able to convert. (EDIT and off course, JWPce is not available on the Mac so that won't work

I have heard tales of people who had this problem. If one were using MS Word, for example, then a window would pop up that automatically selected an encoding (or allowed a person to select one)--for example, Japanese (Shift-JIS). I don't know if OpenOffice or other Mac programs work the same, but: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ - Hypothetically one might go there.

Oh, and I guess Firefox works too. ;p

Asriel Wrote:Of course, if there were HTML files bundled together with the raw text file, then I don't know what they would be doing with the raw text file anyway.

I'm sure this imaginary person is using a nonexistent series of packs that in fact are not bundled with .html files. Perhaps a similarly minded person should go up and look more closely at my informative link to that article on digital book piracy--I suggest this just in case they missed something before.

If only this hypothetical person actually existed. If that were the case he would be extremely grateful for the multitude of advice which he just received.

nest0r Wrote:I'm sure this imaginary person is using a nonexistent series of packs that in fact are not bundled with .html files. Perhaps a similarly minded person should go up and look more closely at my informative link to that article on digital book piracy--I suggest this just in case they missed something before.

Ah yes indeed, it is a very informative link about digital book piracy that you have shared with us. I am glad that you kindly gave us all a clearer idea of what is going on.
I went through and read it again (albeit this time much more in depth), and it surely is a wonderful work.

So, now that this hypothetical person has figured out how to view the files properly, which ones come highly recommended?

IWGP and HP Lovecraft sound very interesting, as well as Rental Magica (the title sounds interesting). Any other recommendations from this hypothetical batch of files?

blackmacros Wrote:So, now that this hypothetical person has figured out how to view the files properly, which ones come highly recommended?

IWGP and HP Lovecraft sound very interesting, as well as Rental Magica (the title sounds interesting). Any other recommendations from this hypothetical batch of files?

My plans for this stuff are centered around 'condensed reading', cloze deletion and a form, now that I think of it, of 'negative capability', notions related to determining information value in texts, and my plans based on extemporaneity and the way jdoramas are often subbed now. Point being, I intend to go through a lot of texts. However, I think I'll start with the single shot scifi stuff. There's something minimal and stylish that grabs me about this: All You Need Is Kill

If you note the 'related' books here, I included the original .jp versions of all that group... I mean uh, I included them in my Amazon shopping cart. Excluding Battle Royale near the end of page 1, but including Brave Story at the beginning of page 2 (of that revolving list of related books on the Amazon page for All You Need Is Kill).

Related posts to my current strategic plans:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...5#pid89325 - Vocab+Sentence decks as general/specialised monitor/reference corpora
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...2#pid89552 - condensed reading, grammar intuitions, mental corpus
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...8#pid66848 - figuring out the most valuable swaths of text
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...5#pid82235 - extemporaneity and dramas
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...5#pid89995 - cloze deletion and negative capability
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=4612 - redefining literacy to be less phonocentric

Edit: Corrected initial Amazon link.

ta12121 Wrote:sweet. Book prices aren't that expensive. Do you know of any novels that are easy in context? I know that novels tend to use difficult kanji and even rare ones. Want to start with something easy, then build my way up.
Hm this book looks interesting, although i don't think it;'s simple
http://bookweb.kinokuniya.co.jp/guest/cg...61&AREA=02
(I could read 95% of the kanji in the description of the book)

Kirino Natsuo is not overly hard. I think she writes in a relatively conversational style. But although I haven't read more than a few pages of any of her books, I feel like mystery and suspense can be hard to read, as they tend to use some more specialized vocabulary.

If you want to read a light novel, I suggest staying away from historical, fantasy, and science fiction, just because they tend to have a lot of words that aren't connected to everyday life. And you get more of the culture in a book that takes place in modern Japan than one that takes place in medieval-Europe-with-magic, too. "Maria-sama ga miteru" is fairly easy. "Suzumiya Haruhi" has some surprisingly hard vocabulary in it, and the narrative voice feels a little odd to me. "Wolf and Spice" uses some kanji that are really weird and not even in the level-1 and level-2 JIS standard. This is not a problem if you should magically happen to stumble over a text file, but if you're reading the actual print book, it might be a problem.

Light novels aside, I think the easiest book I've read is "Kitchen" by Yoshimoto Banana, which is very short in addition to being easy to read.

私がこの世でいちばん好きな場所は台所だと思う。
どこのでも、どんなのでも、それが台所であれば食事を作る場所であれば私はつらくない。
できれば機能的でよく使い込んであるといいと思う。乾いた清潔なふきんが何枚もあって白いタイルがぴかぴか輝く。
ものすごく汚い台所だって、たまらなく好きだ。

Besides that, I'd recommend "Keritai Senaka" by Wataya Risa.

And I've only read a bit of Kawakami Mieko, but what I've read by her was pretty easy to read.

thanks for the book recommendations.

ta12121 Wrote:thanks for the book recommendations.

Aye. That 'All You Need Is Kill', I just ordered the English version because I doubt I can stand to wait until I can read the Japanese well enough. Hehe. It should make it easier to understand the Japanese one when I read it, anyhow, so that'll be nice.