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This was great. I aspire to one day read these in the original Japanese but I’m a long way from there. Would you have any recommendations for someone who is starting to get comfortable reading in Japanese? Maybe not for kids but something with a straightforward and simple language?

Off Topic: I scored another book today: "Days at the Morisaki Bookshop", (森崎書店の日々) by Satoshi Yagisawa (八木沢 里志). Have you read it or heard of it?

Going back to words needed in ones everyday life- I *would* want to know the color hues and gradations, as an artist! "ROY G BIV" would not be sufficient. 😄 But any words to do with football (soccer) would be useless to me. 🤪😆

Yes- your handwriting *is* good. The character radicals have good proportions.

A Chinese boyfriend, decades ago, taught me about writing kanji. Top and/or left was often the starting point but also creating a frame. And, of course, stroke order and number of strokes (after determining which is the key radical) was important when looking characters up in the dictionary. I had a dictionary where I could look a character up by number of strokes or else phonetically. When I learned to write he had me use an ink stone and a brush-pen and I had to hold an egg inside my palm at the same time, in order to learn how to hold the brush correctly. Having first learned to write that way actually helped my writing, once I moved on to writing using a ballpoint pen.I guess it helped with making the strokes more graceful, or something. Also, having studied sumi-e (in the Chinese manner and style) helped with my character formation, I think, when writing with brush-pen.

You have VERY neat handwriting!

hello, thank you for this video. I have a question if you don't mind answering it. you mentioned that there is certain words where you don't need to learn the kanji for how can I know which words to learn the kanji for and which words to learn in their hiragana form. I am very new to learning japanese so I am sorry if this is a basic question.

話の内容は分からないけど、美人だってことは分かる

This made me miss reading and studying Japanese so much... I've been living in Korea now for about 3.5 years, and I still listen to Japanese through UA-cam and podcasts, and read bits of things online or through conversations on SNS, but I remember when I was living there spending hours and hours and hours doing this sort of stuff. What you said about the sheer joy of learning kanji for foreign learners of Japanese is so true. It's such an endlessly fascinating and enjoyable facet of the language. I might pick up a book, notebook, and pen this weekend thanks to this :)

Wow...! You are so charming that you actually like the book "Dream of Red Mansions". I will listen carefully to your English explanation and improve my English.

Wanted to let you know: I was out shopping with my daughter and granddaughter (the one who gave me "Middlemarch") and we went into a bookstore. I was only browsing as I cannot afford new books but my daughter insisted on me getting myself something. I found "Mysterious Setting" by Kazushige Abe (trans. by Michael Emmerich). Do you know of it?

Decades ago I tried to read Romance of the Three Kingdoms but it just didn't hold my interest. Maybe now is the time to try again...

Speaking of John Wyndham, have you tried 'The Chrysalids'? I found it extremely thrilling. Arguably one of the best dystopian pieces on my list. 💯 I also have problems reading anything related to finance, but I'm trying to resolve that with some readable non-fiction on economic history. 😅

How do you decide what language you read in? Since you also read some Manga in translation is is just what version you have on hand? Since I'm also learning Japanese i find myself prioritizing Japanese Books, and my English/German reading has gone down to only a couple of books here and there, i also sometimes read Japanese translations to get more Japanese practice in. How do you feel about this? And since you read mostly physical how to you approach looking up words in Japanese? Do you look up everything or skip some things when it gets too tiresome to look up?

in re War and Peace, as someone who's read the Maude translation as well as the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, I have to ask: which translation are you reading? I wonder how it would read in French, considering there is so much French in the book.

Love hearing you speak in French. It's like a thread gently tickling my ears 👂Second-hand books, thanks to you in part, are getting their due. Tell us about War and Peace

Video is great 🏆

The name "dream of the red chamber" references the part of the family mansion BaoYu lives in, Yihongyuan, which has the character "red" in it. It's probably the most opulent part of the mansion and also where most of BaoYu's story takes place. [Spoilers!] After the Jia family falls and BaoYu is rendered homeless at the end of the book, he said that it felt like his early life was but a dream that he's awaken from. The book title makes sense to me in this way. (Or on a meta level, the lavish lifestyle and complicated interpersonal relationship in Yihongyuan is so far removed from the daily reality of the average reader that it almost only exists in a fantasy dream world. What's fiction if not a dream we get to experience when we read?) Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I grew up with this book but never put much thought into analysing it as a whole, but it peaked my interest again recently. I enjoyed your perspectives on the book :)

Please tell us how you feel about the bell jar lol i find Plath’s prose so precisely chosen and I love her sentence level mastery

This is not about this video but I was just wondering if you like Nabokov and if so have you ever talked about his works in your videos? I’d love to hear your opinions

I was just thinking yesterday “I wonder when they’ll translate that sayaka murata that tokyochemist talked about recently” bc I’ve been thinking about this topic (man and woman in the modern/near future world) a lot lately! I’m so excited.

That's quite an accomplishment. I recommend you The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Pin Mei). It's the spin-off of Water Maegin. It's about sex and corruption. It's very explicit and some consider it pornographic.

Shingeki No Kyojin = Attack on Titan 😅 Pardon my curiosity, but did you manage to get shelves for all the manga eventually? Hope your apartment has ample space!

Thank you for your thorough guide on The 171st Akutagawa prize. I was too busy to follow all the candidate titles this year, so I very much appreciate your insights, which made me want to read all of them ! 😃

OMG 🎉

I always look forward to the Akutagawa Prize videos. I saved this video to watch it today on my day off with a cup of coffee in the morning to properly enjoy the video.😁😁☺️

Was pretty much on a diet of sci-fi/fantasy right up to university. Also tried writing some short stories, but gradually realised I'm better writing about fiction than fiction itself. 😅 Majoring in media studies in graduate school sort of set me on a highly abstract 'non-fiction' path of philosophy and critical theory, which I still can't quite shake off... Currently trying to keep my fiction to non-fiction ratio at 1:1, though in practice it's still 1:1.5 or 1:3, if/when I'm preparing an undergraduate course or writing a paper. That aside, I'm trying to increase the variety of fiction, with more titles in Chinese literature (e.g. Lu Xun, Eileen Chang, Su Tong) which I usually read in the original language and translated stuff from Europe (e.g. Julian Barnes, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Kazuo Ishiguro, Iris Murdoch) and Japan. Some of my manga and light novels are also translated to Chinese, because they seem to retain more of the Japanese nuances and sensibilities than their English counterparts. Hoping my fiction count catches up to yours one day!

I just came from つかっちゃん's video! Excited to hear your take now in English :)

Puzzled you're working as a chemist, and not a college professor of Japanese literature. This list is gold, and I'll definitely get some of them (esp Abe)!

Hmm...as iconic as DB is, I've always preferred Toriyama's earlier and pithier Dr. Slump. It's still the manga that made me laugh the most!

Do you note down excerpts/quotes that impress you? Writing/typing them down helps me remember the experience! 🔍📖

Thanks for this showcase! Really looking forward to Murata's. Will share this vid on my FB 👍🏻👍🏻

I love French novels. The count of Monte Cristo, pere goriot and the phantom of the opera, not to mention Les miserables. Life would be better if a blue eyed woman came with such cultural merchandise to lift me out of my Irish gloom during the winter 🤣🥶 🇫🇷 🇮🇪. I became fascinated with the indigenous Americans after reading Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’. Great channel 👍

I just have to give a thumb up to someone who's read Machado de Assis 's Quincas Borba.

I just put "Shirobamba" on my Amazon gift list. Hopefully it shows up under the Christmas tree! 🥰

Like you, I had had no idea that "Planet of the Apes" was originally a book and written by a French person, initially in French! I will be interested in hearing you talk about it- how it may compare to the screenplay that grew out of it.

I had better get on the ball! I am 71 and have not yet read any Dumas! 😯😲😳

I read Wild Swans. I really enjoyed it as it tied into my interest in 20th century Chinese history. It echoed much of what my (then) Chinese husband shared about his life and his parents' life in China before fleeing to Taiwan, as well as I what I heard from his friends who had taken a similar path. They were all born in the mid- and late 1940s (a bit older than me) and grew up during much turmoil.

"Bell Jar" was required reading for an honors English class I took in college, decades ago. I remember nothing about it! The only thing I recall about Plath is her clinical depression and subsequent suicide at age 30. I don't recall if all of her books were"dark". I do remember some of her poetry. I'll be interested in your review of "Bell Jar", when you finally do read it. Meanwhile I am still reading Middlemarch but also found a decent audio recording of it and I have been listening to that at night.

I used to own a copy of "Bury My Heat at Wounded Knee" as Native history was always a strong interest of mine. I never got completely through the book and it ended up being a "victim of a divorce", unfortunately. I had to seriously downsize to fit into a studio apartment, could not afford a storage rental unit and I donated any and all books that I knew I could one day replace. I had to jettison much of my music collection as well, of those albums that could be replaced. Bibliophiles and melophiles who collect will understand the pain... 🤪

One of my favorite novels!

Omg you have to read Bell Jar!! It's so good! I think you will really enjoy it given your taste.

Bonne nuit! Bonne nuit! Suddenly I'm tempted to travel to France just to spend a day in a bookstore like the one you visited. It will be like a journey of discovery🚀

Amazing video. Thank you 👌🏻👌🏻

こんにちは！ちょうど今翻訳文学、比較文学についての本を読んでいるんですが、それがめちゃくちゃ面白い本だったのでおすすめしたい一冊があります！　 『日本の小説の翻訳にまつわる特異な問題-文化の架橋者たちがみた「あいだ」』（片岡真伊　著、2024年初版）と言う本です。この本では、戦後に川端、三島、谷崎などの小説が英訳されていったときに、どのように翻訳され、改変されて受容されていったのかを詳細に追っていき、日本語と英語の言語構造の違いからくる翻訳の難しさ、当時の編集者や翻訳者の苦労などを知ることができる本です。日本文学や英文学、翻訳文学を読まれる方ならば絶対に面白く読めると思ったので紹介しました。読みごたえがあってスラスラ読み流せる本ではなく、私自身もまだ読み終わっていないのですが、ここまでおすすめしたい本はなかなかないほど面白いです。もし読みたい本があまり見つからなくなってきたら、是非！

Just letting you know that your channel is the most reliable channel for Japanese literature. No hate on other UA-camrs, but your recommendations are genuine based on a true reader and not someone who is on Booktube for the fad.

I’m half way through ‘Tokyo Express’ and so engrossed. Thanks for this special video! This type of stuff broadens my scope beyond Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Cormac McCarthy and Joyce - the Japs are no doubts a unique civilisation and people

I've always seen that Sayaka Murata had many novels published in Japan but we only had two in translation. I've always been craving to read these books! Very excited for Mishima's short story collection too.

very excited for the new mishima