Hey! I’ve been learning Japanese for about 5 years now and my level is roughly somewhere in the massive N2/N1 gap. Since I don’t live in Japan anymore, I’ve been trying to read novels to improve my Japanese (really a lot easier now that I have a kindle) and I just finished one that I felt I had to share with the community.
The novel is called 彼岸花が咲く島 and is written by 李 琴美 (り ことみ). One of the things that makes this book great is that within the novel there are 3 different versions of Japanese, and as the reader you are given some rules but you have to figure out how each of the languages works. These different versions are all modified for political reasons that are unclear until the very end of the novel. For example, one of the languages has, among other things, no 漢字 or 漢語, so as the book progresses you start getting some ideas as for why this might be. I won’t give the rules for all of the languages, but because of these modifications the book would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to translate into any other language. So as a language learner I thought it was an awesome experience because reading things like this is one of the reasons I started learning Japanese to begin with!
These various Japanese languages also present a challenge for the general Japanese reader and an especially big challenge for a language learner! But it certainly makes for an interesting puzzle and I think for us language learners it is something we are already used to doing anyways. It is a difficult book to read so I would not recommend it as your first or second Japanese novel, but for those of you approaching N1 and who have an interest in contemporary Japanese literature or Japanese history, it could be a great book for you.
I also wrote a little post aimed at a layperson with no Japanese learning experience where I tried briefly explaining how Japanese works (lol) and why that makes the book hard to translate. Specifically, I try explaining what are 漢語, 和語, and 外来語 and how each of the languages from the book plays with these concepts. I’ll leave that [here](https://medium.com/@gapogapo/why-youll-never-read-this-novel-in-any-language-other-than-japanese-1959042411aa) for those interested in learning a bit more.
[Here](https://bookmeter.com/books/17998673) is the bookmeter link for the book (watch out for the ネタバレ).
For those of you who aren’t quite at this level yet: keep chugging along. There are some great works of literature and media that exist out there, and the better you get the more accessible they will become!
I would also be curious to hear if anyone has run into other works of this kind.
7 comments
>ネタバレ
Thank you for a new vocab word and book recommendation!
Definitely sounds interesting!
Btw., regarding ひのもとことば, the term ひのもと was literally used as a name for Japan/reading of 日本 in the past. So I’m not sure I’d translate this as “original Sun words”.
This is a bookmark, ima buy this lol
Your post make interested in the book and I found [this](https://www.nhk.or.jp/radio/magazine/article/my-asa/RmY32hPdP5.html) review with some comments from the author.
２人の少女、３つの言語, in this section the author explains how she uses 3 kinds of words “languages”. it’s funny cause I see the languages in the same way.
Thanks for letting me know about this book! (￣︶￣*))
I think it’s crazy that there is not one mention here of the fact that the author is not a native Japanese speaker, but is in fact from Taiwan. She’s also very young (in her early 30s) and has been in Japan for less than a decade. I read an interview with her in a translator’s magazine about the time she won the Akutagawa prize and she really is incredible. Goals, goals, goals.
What an interesting post!
I feel like this book (or similar ones – if they exist) would make a good secondary learning goal for me… years down the line, of course, but something to look forward to regardless, I imagine.
My Japanese level is somewhere btw N3-N2. I challenged myself to read the first Japanese novel. This is how I learned.
1. I selected the 映画化 novel, so you can understand the scope or plot by watching the movie first.
2. When I read the book, I also purchased the audiobook from Audible and played it along. This helps me deal with the difficult Kanji.This is the first novel that I have finished, “流浪の月”.Hoping someday I could enjoy more literature and entertainment!