one thing I never seem to see around is anybody reviewing or recommending light novels. if you're trying to learn japanese, or even if you're still using English translations, there's loads of people making videos, writing reviews, putting together charts recommending anime, manga, or even visual novels. but light novels? i've barely seen a thingi will admit it's possible that they are out there and i just haven't found them. i haven't tried to look in the wild frontier of the japanese internet yet, for example. i also try not to get too involved in the "japanese learning community" online, say by joining discords, where these things might be found. i have a particularly bad compulsive discord checking issue so i steer well clear of them, because i know they will probably derail me by having "participating in the japanese learning community" replace "actually learning Japanese". maybe you see someone occasionally bring up nisioisin or the wolf one, but other than a handful of others that seems to basically be it.
what's the reason for this deficit? if i had to guess, i would say it's probably just lack of interest. reading books is on the decline, so even english translations are only read by particularly dedicated weebs. if you're trying to read them in japanese, it's extremely intimidating for learners as it's just words words words cute drawing of girl words words words. the cute drawing of girl to word ratio is just too lowsimilar to my site. compare to anime, manga, or even visual novels, where you have the cute girls on screen or on the page nearly all of the time. also, the writing in them is mostly dialogue, which generally tends to be easier once you get used to all of the slang and contractions used in speaking. finally, i think many people have the goal of just understanding animanga, so when that's accomplished, they stay with it and don't continue any further. fair enough, i guess.
as a result of the lack of reviews, starting out with light novels can be quite overwhelming. you can't just hop straight to the well-known stuff like nisioisin if you're not used to reading descriptive sentences, from having only consumed animanga and visual novelsto be fair, nisioisin does do a lot of a dialogue. however his writing is also notorious for its reading difficulty and if you manage to read him in japanese, you've basically "made it". the light novel resources that are out there have very little curation and throw huge lists of basically everything they can find at you. for example, there's this one website that uses some sort of Machine Learning Algorithm (yikes) to rank the difficulty of a bunch of light novels, probably all the ones they could easily rip all the text from to run through the Algorithm, but no word on the actual quality. it'll probably be many years before they invent an algorithm with taste. another one, on neocities in fact, is the well-known itazuraneko site, but they are mostly focused on quantity and distribution over any sort of curation. a leisurely scroll through their "main" mega-list will set you back several hours as it's pretty much a comprehensive journey through the breadth of japanese writing, from self-help productivity books to classics to light novels to depraved, self-published smutthere is of course also plenty of normal, upstanding erotica published by actual companies, which i'm not sure is a thing over here. it really is one of those paradox of choice moments.
i do know, however, that there are people out there who have read tons of light novelsone of them said there are no actually good light novels, which is somewhat concerning. then again, it may have been a larp. maybe one day that'll be me, too. obviously you could always just hunt one of them down in some corner of a relevant discord, like visiting the old sage on the mountaintop. but discord conversations are ephemeral and difficult to dig up again, so the old sages may find that they have to answer the same questions over and over again, eventualy losing the will to keep saging. it's really kind of a regression back to oral traditions, forgetting the quantum leap we made in knowledge and learning when people started writing stuff down. even most of modern coding is built upon the responses to ancient stack overflow questions, carved into the geologic strata of the internet. what will happen when the carvings start to fade, with no one maintaining or adding to them? for every question you will be forced to trudge all the way up the mountain and wait in the ever-lengthening queue with all the other seekers looking to consult with the sage...
anyways, this has all been a long-winded and somewhat fanciful way of justifying my forthcoming attempt here to aid future men of learning, taste, &c by writing english reviews of light novels i read in japanese, essentially documenting the solo expedition into the world of light novels that i have just commenced. what are my qualifications? i have read a bunch of books in english, and now i am dedicated to reading a bunch in japanese. also, the other day i picked up this book "anatomy of criticism" from the library, read the introduction, and then returned it. now let's see if there are any worthwhile light novels.
