It's about the same price as the current Picquier PD edition, a bit cheaper I think.




And some of the older ones, already (unless you include the 40ish ones in the "younger" category, that is). Of course, that excludes most writers whose influence are more strictly literary (even the ones who claim Japanese influence, that's not pop influences they have in mind at all).

I didn't pay much attention to that either, before reading about manga/anime/videogames influences in western genre literature (horror, detective, SF, Fantasy, mostly) in an essay that looked into that, and into growing influences from genre lit. in mainstream literarure. Direct or indirect influences from manga is most perceptible in novels that multiply the POV and use devices like vignettes, or mass media excerpts and so as storytelling devices. That sort of thing appeared much earlier in manga before it showed up in novels. It was one of many influences mentionned, I wouldn't say it's necessarily a dominant one, especially if we narrow it down to direct influence only. There's also the fact manga itself feeds on western culture too.

We often don't realize it anymore, even less because a lot of the influence is indirect, not from Japanese works themselves, but from western works/creators that have been influenced more or less heavily by Japanese pop culture style or forms/language. The whole manga style has been absorbed into western culture without that many western people actually reading mangas. I guess the most glaring recent example that comes to mind is The Matrix trilogy. A lot of creators were influenced by those movies, not as many realize their asian (especially Japanese) influence goes way, way deeper than the martial arts sequences. The whole thing is manga translated to movie (and now making its way back in literature). What people know less is that very "modern" cinematic scenes have shown up quite early in Japanese literature. You can fight Mistborn-like combat scenes in "classics" of Japanese genre literature, like Yamada's the Ninja Scrolls (a series of novels from the 50s) - much better known to US audiences via Manga/Anime like the Yagyu Ninja Scrolls - that are now finding their way into American genre literature.

A lot of older westerners have little or no direct experience of Japanese works, (or so we think, if you stop to look at it, the truth is often different. We're a bit oblivious to the fact that the culture that exports itself the most worldwide since WWII, right after American mass culture, is Japan's, And who stop to think twice that the "American" CD they buy or the movie they watch is actually from Sony?). People of our generations for instance grew up on Japanese anime without often realizing they were even Japanese as they had none of the more traditional japanese stuff in them, like martial arts and such (but still we have been absorbing manga style of storytelling, manga-style visual action, manga-style plots, manga-style pacing and structure, manga-style characters without even knowing), or we've escaped direct exposure only to watch American productions made by huge fans of Japanese animation (from the modern Disney people to Pixar, they all worship and are very influenced by directors like Miyazaki). Even a movie as iconic and influential and American as Star Wars was very Japanese-influenced in both its visual style, references and content (beside the visuals and basic plot, the narrative structure itself and the cinematographic language were heavily influenced by Kurosawa). We've reached the point where japanese mass culture and American mass culture have fed and continue to feed off each other a lot, and it's no longer obvious to draw lines. TV shows like Heroes, Lost, 24 are very typical of current American TV, yet they have assimilated many elements from manga (Heroes was far more readily associated to the superheroes comics, but it borrowed a great deal more from manga than comics. It even went down the drain in manga style!). Let's not even get into how much modern techs and mass media and its toys are influencing modern literature (let's just mention what's perhaps the most influential of them: videogames) and how much of those gizmos (and many of the "modern way of life" trends attached to them) originate from Japan.

It's a bit sad, though, that not much of the better, more literary japanese output doesn't get much or any exposure abroad. It's worse than for American higher culture, which if not always exactly dominant (nowhere as its mass market cultural products), is still usually accessible and known abroad.


And if you wonder, no I'm not a big fan or big reader of manga. I've read quite a few over the years, but I'm rather picky, and even though the offering is greater in French (and I can complete that with the occasional title only available in English.), most of the mangas I might be interested in (like the more original or literary types) do not often get translated. It's starting to change in the French market, though (and the same trend is there in the US one, but it's a bit behind as the genre became popular in France/Belgium about a decade earlier than it did in the US). The European market for "comics" for this aimed at an adult audience is stronger too (it's even reflected in the vocabulary - the French words for cartoons and comics are far more neutral and descriptive), there was a tradition for those long before manga appeared. So more literary/mature titles are beginning to show up and do well. A trait particular to Europe is that the more literary mangas that appear aren't published by the manga publishers but by the big literature publishers, or by the most solid bédé publishers like Casterman (one such title has also appeared recently in English, incidentally. Not exactly what you'd normally expect from "comics". It's a manga that explores the late Meiji era and the social changes, through the story of the great writer Natsume Soseki in the years when he wrote his novel Botchan. So basically it's a social and literary history in manga form.

I mentionned Sanderson as an example in particular, because in his case it's in part direct influence. Even the concept artworks he commissionned to help him visualize and develop the world building for Way of Kings (what I saw of it at a book signings) was all in the manga/anime style. The action sequences in Mistborn are done very much in manga-style too.

He was even toying with the idea of having a friend of his (the one who does the concept art for him) develop a manga-like graphic novel series he would contribute to (and based off concepts/world/characters/story Sanderson had created but thought he didn't have time to turn into a novel) - something involving magic drawn with chalk. Not sure what happened of that though, I think I saw it mentionned somewhere lately as a novel project again.





Definitely. It's also too bad we almost never see Asian fans of the genre around, despite the major Fantasy works being quite popular there.




Japanese would be a huge challenge. It's not all that difficult to learn to understand it, or to speak it, but learning to read it is something else. It involves a much more sustained (and tedious) effort than learning most other languages. You can't just pick a Murakami novel to develop your vocabulary or increase your skills with the syntax/grammar. Literature is way out of reach for beginners because of the writing system, and it stays that way for a long time.

It would be really different (and cool) if some Japanese literature was available in the syllabaries or in romanji and one could develop reading skills and absord the kanji little by little over the years, but except for texts aimed at specific age groups it's not the case. To practice the basics, you need to stick to children books a while, and move up slowly from there - to kids' manga for instance. Learn like Asian children do, basically. Not only there's a load of kanji (over a 1000 just to be able to read the average newspaper article or novel) but most have several meanings and pronunciations depending on words. There's definitely a logic to the madness, the more complex kanji being built out of simpler root kanji, but without constant practice that looks pretty difficult (and so the few Ĵapanese I know told me, it more that just looks!)

I'm surprised Dogra Magra isn't translated in English (though that it's out of print, and perhaps has been for long, would be far less surprising). I'm pretty sure an English translation does exist, Ive seen too many references to the novel on English language websites. Yumeno died in 1936, so the japanese text itself could be in the public domain, I guess.

It would probably be out of print in French too, if not for the fact it's from a specialized publisher with a huge asian catalogue (and anything from non fiction to popular literature to great literature) that keeps even its low demand titles like this in print. As I try to do most of my book shopping locally (in a hopeless effort the bookstores won't vanish), it took me a long while to happen upon a copy, almost two years after a friend of my parents who's a specialist of Kurosawa and Japanese literature recommended it to me (though now I know one of the bigger stores of the chain in town keeps a lot of the Picquier catalogue in stock).



You have one big advantage in that you're used to this type of literature (and in a few languages, at that), so it might not be as difficult a read for you as I think. Like I said, the French of the translation itself is fairly easy.

At this point in it (about a third into it) I must say I quite fail to see what exactly is to be considered highly influential to (mostly Japanese) SF and spec fic. But what I've read of the prologue suggested the novel spins into a completely different direction around the half mark. I stopped reading it when it started to analyze the plot and its mechanisms (that felt too much like reading an analysis of a Gene Wolfe novel before the novel itself, when he worked really so hard to manipulate your perceptions). I'll get back to it after reading the book.