Talk:Japanese literature

message: This page seemed in need of some tender loving care, so I did a major edit on it based largely on the Japanese language version of the page.  While still lacking and probably in need of more editing, I hope it can at least provide a new start!  My main changes: 
- Introduction: still not happy with it, but better than what was there I think
- History: added more historical-era divisions that reflect political and cultural changes better, added more detail on specific works and authors
- Links: added the Japanese authors link, deleted a broken link
- Names: there was a mixture of Japanese and Western order, changed all to Japanese order (surname then given name)
I am not a literary expert but I enjoy Japanese literature ... here's hoping we can make this site the equal (or better!) of the other pages on literature out there CES 07:27, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: CES, thanks for the attention.  I also had been meaning to draw from the Japanese page, but have not found the time.  Your historical divisions look good, and I like the selections you've drawn.  About the introduction: I had originally included some (admittedly) sweeping generalizations about the tone and character of Japanese Lit. (heroes usually lose, sense of detachment, etc).  What if we included something like that in a "themes" section? contact me via email if you would like to discuss (see Orkut) Davejenk1ns 14:53, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Page needed help

message: *Um, I didn't mean to step on any toes with my comment that the page is a stylistic and factual mess, because I know a lot of work has gone into it. I'll help expand it, since I know a little bit about the topic. My main sources are Kato Shuichi's 日本文学序説 and a couple of other reference works. I'm also considering writing an overview of Classical Japanese (古文) and an overview of Kanbun, based on American and Japanese textbooks I have as well as my Oubunsha Dictionary of Classical Japanese (旺文社:古語辞典). If anyone wants to help, let me know (by emailing me through the email link on my personal page.) Reldam 18:40, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Oops 

message: Why are comics treated as irrevocably separate from literature? With things like Maus, it should be obvious by now that the style has no bearing on the content. This effect is amplified in Japan simply due to the sheer volumes produced.
*I'd disagree (as would most mangaka) that style has no bearing on content. Just as painting isn't included in the section on literature, manga is a genre completely unto itself. If you're complaining that people don't give manga the respect they do to traditional literature, well, that has nothing to do with the form. Reldam 19:48, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Manga 

message: it seems that pieces of this text al litteraly copied from this website : http://www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-7173.html i don't know if it is done with permission bt just wanted to point it out.--84.193.13.216 16:05, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copied Work 

message: i was browsing through the japanese version of this page, and i came across an interesting notion i hadn't heard of before. says this article( http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/日本の近現代文学史 ): lately, there has been a development of popular literature, dubbed J-literature (J文学), after the music genre J-pop, geared at younger generations and with local variatons, such as Shibuya-style or Shinjuku-style.
apparently, Keiichiro Hirano, one of the J-literature writers was even awarded the Akutagawa prize. this sounds fascinating. does anyone know more about this? can anyone elaborate? 213.172.254.8 22:55, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "J-literature" 

message: The debate between "pure literature"  and "mass media literature"/ "pop fiction"  seems to be mentioned without mentioning the Japanese terms.   This really isn't an area that I know much about and I was wondering if someone could expand on these concepts in the article?  The original Japanese article for junbungaku is here http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/純文学  --Kunzite 00:43, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Pure Lit vs. Pop Lit" in Japan?  

message: I've got a real issue with calling the Edo Period the "early-modern period".  Not only is it not the Japanese term, but it is more accurate to use with respect to Meiji and Taisho.  Before Meiji, Japan was "premodern", not "early modern".  I would furthermore use "modern" for either Showa onward or post WWII onward. MSJapan 16:08, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Terminology 

message: The article says;A new colloquial literature developed centering on the "I novel", with some unusual protagonists such as the cat narrator of Natsume Soseki's Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat). It seems contradictory to what "I novel" is. --LittleTree 00:51, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Good question.  I haven't read the book, but I would assume that maybe the situations are realistic as far as the cat is concerned.  The I novel article had a problem classifying Mishima as an I-novelist, so a similar metaphorical problem may be at work here with Soseki.  Moreover, it's really not a great article.  As it stands, I removed the Mishima reference pending some further source hunting, because there's not enough in the article to base a definition of I novel on that can then be contradicted with exceptions. MSJapan 01:53, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, comparing to what I have learned about Japanese "I Novel", I am a cat cannot be an "I Novel", the cat being far from the author himself, the story describing the cat's life. On the other hand, Shiga did write one. What he did was not only adapting Western literary conventions and techniques. I will try to find what I can do to improve this paragraph. --LittleTree 00:08, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you could call this a variation on the I-Novel. All the cats reflect the personalities and behaviours of their masters. Their society parallels the human society above them. The school teacher seems to be a caricature of the author, so the protagonist can be seen as an indirect representation of the author as well.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Soulpa7ch (talk • contribs) 04:14, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  "I Am a Cat" as "I Novel"? 

message: Somebody standardise the naming conventions of all names in this article, to either English or Japanese, preferably English. Skinnyweed 10:32, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: By English You mean MoS naming? feydey 10:59, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Someone tried (in good faith) to clean it up by listing all the modern authors Japanese-style, but this simply created a lot of new redlinks and even more redirects. I've reverted the edits and added a note about Wikipedia's naming conventions at the start of the section. Aristophanes68 (talk) 18:26, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Naming orders all mixed 

message: This article suffers from too much copy/pasting, it seems.  There are linguistic discussionsa that don't belong here, and the chronology is way off.  I've removed a lot of the extraneous material, though I need to doublecheck the dates I changed.  Some of the information is still not quite right, but I need to source it before I change it.  As a note, the pioneer of "modern weird fiction" would not be Akinari, but more like Tsubouchi Shoyo or Izumi Kyoka, because modern styles and Western influence were used as a backlash against Edo literature like yomihon, which people felt had run their course. MSJapan 04:10, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  What a mess... 

message: In editing the Meiji etc. period, I noticed the following half paragraph has been hidden from view:
A new colloquial literature developed centering on the "I novel", with some unusual protagonists such as the cat narrator of Natsume Sōseki's Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat). Natsume Sōseki also wrote the famous novels Botchan and Kokoro (1914). Shiga Naoya, the so called "god of the novel," and Mori Ogai were instrumental in adopting and adapting Western literary conventions and techniques. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa is known especially for his historical short stories.  Ozaki Koyo, Izumi Kyoka, and Higuchi Ichiyo represent a strain of writers whose style hearkens back to early-Modern Japanese literature.
I see from the discussion here that the "I Novel" statements are disputed. But what about the rest of the passage? Can it be restored?
Aristophanes68 20:43, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  invisible text? 

message: Does anybody else think it's highly inappropriate to claim that "When Japan reopened its ports to Western trading and diplomacy in the 19th century, Western literature had a strong effect on Japanese writers, and this influence is still seen today" right in the introduction?   Japanese culture and literature (and visual art for that matter) immediately influenced the west as well.  Simply another example of flamboyant eurocentricity.
I would change it but people who make such egotistical (even unwittingly so) claims are themselves egotistical, and will be more dogged than I am and change it back. 69.86.245.147 (talk) 17:56, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: western influence in first paragraph

message: The Japanese version of this article has light novels stated on the "modern literature" article. Since manga is there, is it possible to add light novels too? --Koheiman (talk) 03:39, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Light Novels? 

message: Unfortunately, the first section under "modern" lit sounds horrible. Here's how it is currently articulated:
Modern Asian literature has not encapsulated western society, its illuminating origins seemingly foreign to nations such as England, American and Australia. Many of Asia's finest works remain buried under contemporary, generic arts. However, a magnitude of secrets contained within this eloquent Asian literature, are not portrayed through orthodox, western styles. But through more traditional mediums such as on stage and through culturally rich artworks.
The prose here is absolutely terrible and confusing as well as grammatically flawed. Bottre73 (talk) 02:58, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for pointing that out. The problem was incredibly weird: The bad paragraph wasn't even part of the article, but was part of the  box out to the right. To remove the paragraph, I had to edit the template. Which means I've now removed the crappy paragraph from 9 pages at once! Aristophanes68 (talk) 05:26, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Hah, that explains it! I was crawling all over the history trying to figure out where the section had gone. It seemed to vanish from under my nose! Good work. /ninly(talk) 05:36, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Modern lit section needs help

message: Much surprised to see nothing about Haiku, and not much about poetry.    Ptyxs (talk) 13:23, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: We have Japanese poetry. Oda Mari (talk) 15:36, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Haiku 

message: It seems "classical literature" is a standard enough translation of  in Japanese, but in this article it is apparently used as a translation of . If some authors use "classical" to mean chūko, then it is okay for us to use it here, but the problem is that then we have no term to refer to Japanese literature pre-Meiji. "Pre-modern" doesn't work, since we already have Edo literature classified as . Is there any precedent for "early-ancient" and "late-ancient", or even "early-classical" and "late-classical"? Keene almost exclusively uses political era names (Nara, Heian, Kamakura, etc.), and I recently created a page at Heian literature in which I supplied a literal translation "mid-ancient literature". Chūko literature is a partial translation in that article, but in the context of this one I think we need English-language terms, right? Another possibility would be to group Heian and pre-Heian literature together, since while Japanese sources often distinguish  from , we have the single term "modern" here. elvenscout742 (talk) 02:37, 3 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Classification of Heian literature as "classical"? 

message: I have rewritten this section to add more sourced information, and to make a more clear division between trends of each period. There is probably enough information on Kamakura and Muromachi literature to split them into different sections later, but for now I have kept them together.Mineffle (talk) 04:55, 22 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rewrite of Kamakura-Muromachi section 

message: "During the Kamakura period (1185–1333), Japan experienced many civil wars which led to the development of a warrior class, and subsequent war tales, histories, and related stories"
This first claim seems wrong and makes the rest of the sentence sound wrong. The warrior class was already established and had obtained considerable power by the Kamakura period and the source quoted talks about the tumult in the late Heian (the mid 12th century). I think these two statements were misinterpreted:
The warrior class is different from warrior government; warrior government was indeed in its formative stage at this point but the warrior social class was not. 
Gunki monogatari like Hogen and Heike were written in the late Kamakura-Nanbokucho about events before the Kamakura period. I'm not really sure but other than minor issues with akuto in the late 13th, the brief power struggle between Yoritomo and Lord Kiso after the Genpei War, the equally brief Shokyu War/Rebellion/Disturbance in 1221, and then the Genko War which led to the fall of the Kamakura shogunate, was the Kamakura period tumultuous enough to claim it had experienced "many civil wars"? This claim makes sense, but I'd personally argue that the late Heian conflicts should be included in the introduction to this section as they were the subjects of early gunki monogatari. Itsabooknotacourse (talk) 13:40, 25 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gunki monogatari and the source not matching up to this statement?