Books in Japanese

I have been to Madrid for a week. It was very nice, more pleasant weather then here, a good chance to use/fresh up my Spanish, and very un-Japan-related. So I’m not going to talk more about it here.

Instead I’m going to talk about books.

A while back I finished reading my first novel in Japanese. Woho! Before I have only read manga, student textbooks and children’s books in Japanese. It felt so nice o be able to do that! And it was almost 500 pages long!

Actually, it was the first part of two of one book. The second half is just as long, and I’m about 50 pages into it now. In Japan, they often divide longer books into several volumes, but still call it just one book/work. It’s different from series or stuff like that. For example, The Lord of the Ring are of course only three books, but in Japanese they are divided in three volumes each.

The book I read, too, is only one volume in the English translation. It’s called A boy called H, by Kappa Senoh. In Japanese it’s Shounen H. It’s an autobiographical novel about the author’s childhood in wartime (WWII) Kobe.

There are two main reasons for why I choose this book as my first to read in Japanese, and why I was actually able to understand it.

First, I have read the English translation. This was a few years back, but anyways. I think it helped some. Two, even though it’s a book meant to be read by adults, it’s got a lot of furigana.

Now, I guess that second reason needs some explaining.

First, what is furigana? To explain this you need to know a little about the Japanese writing system. Japanese is written with characters of which there are two kinds and three sets/alphabets. There are kanji, hiragana and katakana. Kanji are the same as (and origin from) Chinese characters, in that they represent a meaning, not a sound. They are often very complex, both concerning how to write them, how you should read them meaning-wise and how to read them sound-wise, as well as there are several thousands of them. Kanji are often the hardest part for foreign students of Japanese to learn, and many don’t even try.

Hiragana and katakana are also kalled kana. Kana are sound-representing characters, and each alphabet consists of 46 (originally 48) characters each. Both alphabets represent the same set of sounds (a little like upper-case and lower-case characters in the roman alphabet).

Kanji are used for lexical words (content-words) and word stems. Hiragana is used for grammatical words (function-words) and word endings and parts of words that chance with inflection. Katakana is used for words of foreign origin (other than Chinese), slang words and sometimes for emphasis, as they are less common in normal text than the other two and stand out a little.

Furigana are small kana characters written above (horizontal writing) or beside (vertical writing) kanji so as to help the reader understand what is written and/or how to read/pronounce it. Usually it’s hiragana, but sometimes katakana is used. Sometimes kanji are written in furigana position, but this is only in very special cases, and the practice is mostly used in manga or “lighter” readings.

In Japan books contain more or less (sometimes none) furigana depending on whom it’s geared to. Books for adults, and especially more “heavy” literature contain less furigana, whereas books for children and especially most manga have furigana for all caracters (except numbers, I have never seen furigana on kanji representing number (except for when they are part of a word that doesn’t mean anything with numbers (I don’t know if you get this, but anyways))).

Books for teenagers or both teenagers and adults usually have furigana on more difficult/uncommon kanji, and/or the first time a kanji appears (in the book/in the chapter/on that page). In Shounen H furigana is used in this way, even though it’s manly a book for adults. The first page of the book (in both volumes) even contains an explanation/apology for this. The author explains that when he was a child (thirties/forties) all books were written this way, something that both enabled him to read a lot of books even before he had learned a lot of kanji, as well helping him memorize the kanji and their different pronunciations, and that he want children/teenagers today to be able to do this to. And this worked for foreign students of Japanese as well! Lucky me!

An interesting point regarding furigana is that books for really young children usually contain no furigana at all. (O.o)! This is because these books are mostly read to them by their parents, who of course know the kanji and pronunciations.

Well, back to Shounen H, I must say I recommend this book to everyone interested in Japan and Japnese culture and/or history. It’s very interesting, and a unique story about how life was in Japan during WWII. Also, the author has a nice style, both detailed, humorous and very “real”.

Go read it.