Modern Japanese Literature and the Media Industry

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Humanities focuses on the relationships between literature and the media industry, with a particular emphasis on the media ecosystem surrounding Japanese literature. Even in the print industry, texts take on a wide variety of forms upon release. This constitutes one of modern Japanese literature’s distinguishing characteristics. For example, Japanese authors tend to make their living from magazines by serializing their texts. Publishing a complete work of standalone fiction—the norm in Europe and North America—remains relatively minor. Furthermore, writers remain active in newspapers in Japan to this day. Daily novels are serialized in both major national newspapers and smaller, local papers alike.

These novels are then adapted in a variety of media. Of course theater adaptations have a long history, but stories originally published as novels thrived from the 20th century onward as they became the material for films, radio dramas, and television series. This is true not only for “literary films,” like the adaptations of Kawabata’s The Izu Dancer or Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, but also for the surprising breadth of genres that have adapted novels: jidaigeki, yakuza films, action movies, domestic dramas, comedies, and even pornography.

The Internet has also produced its share of literature, including the BBS-born Train Man, the cellphone novels that took the 1990s by storm, Pebbles of Poetry and other Twitter poetry collections, and novels that are submitted to websites dedicated to online contributions. The light novel genre, and similar new media genres, also developed in relation to this “media mix”.

This Special Issue of Humanities, “Modern Japanese Literature and the Media Industry,” aims to analyze literature, not through the originality or uniqueness of the author, but by noticing the media substructures that support literary production, especially the distinctive features we uncover when considering print, performance, and broadcasting.

Prof. Koji Toba
Guest Editor

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