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.

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:

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 … amp;sr=8-4

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)

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/c … mp;AREA=02
(I could read 95% of the kanji in the description of the book)

Last edited by ta12121 (2010 February 19, 1:00 am)

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.youtube.com/watch?v=jt-rgUSCul8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t00R-GnWcZ4
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.

Last edited by nest0r (2010 February 19, 1:25 am)

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 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

Last edited by nest0r (2010 February 19, 2:38 am)

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.

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?

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/c … mp;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.

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.