> Compare those stories to most (not all) modern mainstream western fiction, and you'll find that a lot of it tends to take place within our existing world instead

When people draw conclusions like this it often seems like they're making apples to oranges comparisons. Most "isekai" stuff is light novels. The appropriate comparison with stuff published in the US would might be YA books which also have lots of stuff that does not "take place within our existing world".

I think there might be some confusion about how common different types of fiction are in Japan because people are comparing US literary fiction with Japanese genre fiction because Japanese "pure literature" fiction doesn't tend to receive attention in the US, but in reality I'm not sure the US and Japanese fiction markets are that different overall.

You're right that if we are comparing the wider body, there isn't really a distinction between "Western" or "Japanese", at least for enthusiasts, what matters alot more are the individual authors.

No it isn't, did you even read it? It mentions animes as well, not all of the works mentioned are books.

Makato Shinkai’s She and Her Cat is an anime, not a book, for example.

Edit: They adapted that anime to a book, but a book adapted from an anime is hardly "pure literature", it is definitely pop literature.

When you create that much content some of them do become hits, and it also encourages more authors to create more content, while western studios only invests in franchises they can control themselves to create another marvel, while Japan just churns out content while the authors retain the rights.

Edit: Many western authors writes about other worlds etc, they just don't get anything animated since it is so hard to get anyone to invest in your story.

The biggest tragedy is that even incredibly popular authors like Brandon Sanderson don't get a chance of having their own animated series. Mistborn would work perfectly as an anime adaptation.

Marvel and DC historically created way too much consolidation which really limited creative output. And by this point people seem pretty fed up with 'capeshit'. Western comics are also incredibly hostile towards new readers, especially when compared to managa where you can just pick up the story and binge read the whole thing without having to pick up a million other things.

I agree with this if we are talking American superhero comics, but the European scene is decidedly different. Franco-Belgian comics are usually very pick-up-and-go, as are a great many of the homegrown UK ones. I think we're coming off a decade-ish where the massive investment in Marvel/DC 'verses have been eating up all the oxygen in the room for large comic book adaptions. Or just for general public consciousness attention for comics.

I am pretty confident that it's gonna turn around, but it might take a while on the large scale projects.

In my experience, it is easy to just pick up a trade paperback, one shot, subscribe to a limited series, etc. Even if you want to just jump in to an ongoing series, the writing and storylines are simple enough that you can usually pick it up in a few issues or just wait for a new arc.

Wages in Japan for animators are much lower, if not exploitative.

America is not the whole West, HN readers often forget it. Ditto with thinking on "Dragon Ball in the West" ended in the 00's when we the Europead finished it on mid 90's and began to watch Dragon Ball GT in 1999.

The Sandman (Netflix show), The Best We Could Do, Pride of Baghdad, Superman American Alien, Superman Red Son (animated), I Hate Fairyland, Bone, Epileptic, Paper Girls (turned into an live action show), Monstress, Saga, The Watchmen (turned into a terrible movie, an adaptation show, and an animated show), Stumptown (also got a show I believe), Daytripper, Maus, Berlin…

Edit: Anyway, the culture of celebrating authors in general rather than trying to create franchises helps a lot for all sorts of books.

Geographical distinctions don't really make sense in deciding preference, you start with genre elements and pick from there, regardless if it's Western or Japanese. Ignoring a work because it comes from X country would just be bizarre. As a sci-fi or fantasy fan I don't make distinctions between Japanese or Korean or Western works, nor do I see other fans doing so. For example, I wouldn't be comparing Satoshi Hase's Beatless in the context of "Japanese" works, I'd be comparing it to other AI works. The only limiting factor is translation.

But cross-genre pollination doesn't really happen nowadays, most shounen readers will never go or even avoid mecha, and so forth. Otaku culture especially is much more fragmented today than in the early 2010s.

You realize Umeniko got an anime? Yes, some of the people who watched that anime probably went to read the books, is that really so hard to believe? Authors who got their works animated see a lot more book sales as well. Then as they read those books they might want more so they look for adjacent books, fueling the entire industry.

Contemporary Literary Fiction as in the article is separated by far more cultural layers, there is virtually no cross pollination with the otaku subculture. You are far more likely to get someone who reads Westen literature to expand to Japanese works than an otaku to do so.

This is wrong btw, I looked up one and "Makato Shinkai’s She and Her Cat" was an anime. This is about animes as well, not just books.

churn animated stories? WTF has that do do with an article about fiction books - NOT manga? or even anime?

Apothecary Diaries started as a light novel, but JJK, AoT and many others start as Manga

> No, not all start as light novels

Many are though, many of the animes that came out for a few years I had already read the LN for. That so many novels becomes animes is likely a big reason why there are so many novels being written along those styles.

If you go on Royal Road there's tons of great fantasy stories. The West is just missing the Japanaese pipeline of web serials -> light novel -> manga -> anime -> live action movie. Although there's companies like WebToons that seem to be trying to get such a pipeline going by making comics based on popular western web serials.

I've read my fair share of both Western and Japanese light novels, and you can definitely find quality content everywhere. In Japan they just do a better job at capitalizing on success by giving every slightly popular light novel series a try with an anime season or two. As someone who usually checks out 1 or 2 episodes of most seasonal anime, I can tell you that most of it ends up being barely memorable slop though.

It's worth noting that the West seems to be catching up, a few popular series are getting animated series. Two big ones that come to mind are Cradle by Will Wight, and Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman.

So authors seem to be getting paid more, and that leads to an obvious question of how. One possible answer to that is maybe Japanese media contents - be it images or anime or light novel or classical novel - are still heavily subsidized by its strong and isolate domestic consumption. Average household expenditure on reading is about $120 per year in US and $325 in Japan[1], which IMO roughly coincide with this hypothesis.

If there actually is such a situation... maybe what's missing in Western media is just accelerated consumption. It's weird to think that Americans and Europeans might not be consuming enough media, but that could be it.

1: at current rate of 150 yen/dollar; raw value is 50k yen or ~1% average yearly income

90s kids grew up watching Dragon Ball & playing Metal Gear Solid and Super Mario 64.

It was kinda hard to even get anime in that time period, if it wasn't one of the few played on TV. Hell, even US TV shows had only recently started coming out as complete DVD sets, most still weren't available that way, and publishers were all over the place on what they thought a season was worth. You pretty much had to be into Internet piracy to be a fan, or know someone who was and would get stuff for you.

The entirety of western entertainment seems to have forgotten that the whole fucking point of leisure activities is to escape from the hellscape that is life and reality. Japanese entertainment by and large is precisely that escape, the pressure valve to let loose and be just happy for a while.

A lot of people here take offense when western entertainment is called "woke", with a common rebuttal being that "woke" isn't well defined. Well tell you what, I'll help define it: "Woke" entertainment is entertainment that incorporates or outright is real life and particularly specific facets of real life, often with no reason for that incorporation or nature insofar as leisure is concerned. The obligatory black man or the obligatory powerful(?) woman to check the boxes, for some examples.

Japanese entertainment has none of that bullshit, even if it otherwise is rife with tropes. Entertainment that constantly shouts at you about real life is shitty entertainment.

Conversely, Japanese entertainment would die overnight if literally anyone else produces decent and simply enjoyable entertainment. Japanese entertainment is devoid of innovation now, a lot of it is rehashes upon rehashes and the isekai genre being as long-lived as it is is a huge symptom.

I suspect for the Japanese women who are putting in perspective the extreme conservatism on gender roles prevalent in their country, most Japanese fiction shouts at them about real life too.

They were just examples, I'm deeply annoyed at anything concerning acute political/social activism in entertainment because it's simply not what I wanted to spend my leisure time on.

Because it is.

I'm not trying to gaslight you, insofar as reason itself agrees with my proposition.

There's a good way and a bad way to have elements in entertainment. Using the "black man" example again, a good example are the Redguards in The Elder Scrolls games. I wasn't annoyed, the Redguards were a natural and very good part of the world building and lore and served to better entertain me.

A bad example on the other hand is literally any of the "obligatory black man" now seen everywhere. He doesn't serve any purpose other than to say that there's a black man.

I want more Redguards in my entertainment, not obligatory black men.

But! If I am like a techno-angel sent from the Heavens above, then what I can do is suggest to you that exit, as opposed to voice, is a sociopolitical act that you should consider. Exit from the mainstream culture is your best bet.

This also only means that any sociopolitical exit from the zombie invasion must at least be as high as considering a departure from common epistemology.

This would be exhausting, and people would rightly start to roll their eyes at it. And it would be fine for readers to object to it, even as short people are a component of reality. It wouldn't mean the complainant finds short people objectionable in themselves, but simply that they don't think height is a defining part of reality that all of literature is obligated to address.

Smart of you to have picked one of the few human characteristics that hasn't been used to justify discriminations and very unfortunate historical events... In our world it's not just literature that is very preoccupied with skin colour and gender.

> It wouldn't mean the complainant finds short people objectionable in themselves, but simply that they don't think height is a defining part of reality that all of literature is obligated to address.

You have it reversed, if it's not a defining part of someone's reality, why would one even care whether it's addressed in fiction or not? The person I was answering to does care, a lot, to the point that swinging one way or another can ruin their experience.

You'd find it exhausting. People similarly find the race and gender preoccupation exhausting. Your justification for the different treatment seems to be "for these categories, people are obligated to not find them exhausting, but not for other categories." But that's not well-motivated.

In a height-preoccupied literary world, can you imagine objecting to the height preoccupation? If you did, how could you justify it, if it's not a defining part of your existence?

Of course it has. That notions like “Napoleon complex” circulate in pop culture, suggests that society broadly considers short-statured people to be somehow disadvantaged and, moreover, it can be funny when the short-statured kick against the pricks. The demand that a suitable male partner ought to be over six feet tall, is absolutely widespread, both in match-seeking profiles on online-dating platforms and in dating fora where women give advice to each other. (Or, if you want to reverse the sexes, Truffaut’s gag in Baisers volés about dating a tall girl, wouldn’t work if people broadly didn’t feel that there was something weird about this.)

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-19674306

The 15th of each month is a big day for 36-year-old Yoshihiro Nozawa: it is the day he gets paid.

But every month, he hands over his entire salary to his wife Masami.

She controls the household budget and gives him a monthly pocket money of 30,000 yen ($381; £243). Despite being the breadwinner, that is all the money he can spend on himself over the next 30 days.

"The last five days from the 10th of each month are usually the toughest," says Yoshihiro.

[...]

47-year-old Taisaku Kubo has been getting 50,000 yen a month from his wife Yuriko for the past 15 years.

He has tried to negotiate a pay rise each year but his wife makes a presentation to explain why it cannot be done.

"She draws a pie chart of our household budget to explain why I cannot get more pocket money," says Taisaku.

[...]

So why don't men start controlling the household budgets themselves?

"I don't think many men hand over their entire salaries happily," says career consultant Takao Maekawa of FeelWorks.

"But they feel it's their obligation to earn money for the family even if it means they have to suffer themselves."

I get that you don’t like woke, but that is too blanket a claim. There has just too much popular literature across America and Europe that has directly dealt with dire social and political trends of the day. Even when it comes to the issue of American race relations and the impact of slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of the bestselling books of the 19th century, so fiction readers clearly weren’t interested only in escape.

Keep in mind "isekai" as a genre also exists in western entertainment; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Chronicles of Narnia are some prominent and famous examples. Are those specifically for shut-ins and nerds too?

The thing about "old" isekai is that they exist more as fantasy stories with specific messages and themes, where Narou-Isekai can be specifically placed in the context of the latest evolution of the Otaku after the failure of sekai-kei and the increasing self-indulgence from CGCDT, Battle-Harems all the way to Isekai.

To claim that escapism is the sole purpose of art is certainly a bold statement. Why bother reflecting on human society when we can just do our best to jam our fingers in our ears and ignore it?

Japanese entertainment isn't In Your Dumb Face about things unlike western entertainment, it respects your intelligence and sheer common sense. You're not being talked down to, your ability to just pick another (better) product to be entertained with and walk away is respected; and it's an escape from the rest of the world shouting at you about something.

I wouldn't make the pedestal too high. There's plenty of very disturbing, low-brow stuff published in Japan.

And I don't know if Japanese entertainment would fall over that easy. Media has a way of sticking around in our heads.

As an American, British period pieces[0][1][2] obviously present a different world. I imagine they are more palatable to someone in my demographic because we are relatively disconnected from British culture, society, and history. Recently I became aware of the UK's New Man / New Lad gender stereotypes[3] and realized that the main characters of these shows fit. As a result of this awareness, I can no longer enjoy these shows without being reminded of cultural conflicts of the present day. A story about a social issue set in the 1960s used to be just that, but now it's more apparent to me that the narratives are meant to shape present-day perception of these issues.

It was nice not being reminded of the political struggles we face on a daily basis. Now I'm unsure if media consumers who lack this awareness are the lucky ones or the sheep. I wonder if British people have always felt this way about these shows and I'm only just catching up now. I also wonder if this dynamic is mutual with other cultures - for example, is Rings of Power considered non-controversial in SE Asia due to the cultural disconnect?

* My preference for anime has waned as certain tropes have become quite overused and tiresome.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foyle%27s_War

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_George_Gently

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midsomer_Murders

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Man_(gender_stereotype)#

It's important to recognize that any discussion about Japanese media outside of Japan is more or less only receiving the media that Japan is exporting to the world. Yes there are exceptions to this, people going out of their way to fan sub shows and such, but for the majority of Western people who are experiencing Japanese media it is very mainstream popular stuff like Studio Ghibli films and the most popular anime

With that said, I think the approach Japan has towards making media is very different than Western studios, especially when it comes to depictions of real world Japan

American TV and writing is very cynical about America. Consider the common depictions of rural America in most American media (rednecks, racist, boring, dirty) to the common depictions of rural Japan in Japanese media (idyllic, colorful, spiritual, friendly)

Even compare how a fictional Japanese city is depicted in the Yakuza game series (where you play a criminal doing crimes) and how a fictional American city is depicted in the Grand Theft Auto series (where you play a criminal doing crimes)

I really think Japanese creators like Japan more than American creators like America, and it shows through their work by smoothing over a lot of the rough edges of Japanese society

I agree that the well known works are usually the better productions, but that detail is wrong. Crunchyroll puts out almost everything that's currently being released, including complete nonsense like reincarnated as a vending machine

And while I'd agree that most Japanese authors seem to have gigantic pride for their culture, it does get old because it's become such a trope to introduce Japanese culture/food as the best thing ever created...

I mean I'm more likely to watch an anime then the woke garbage the west is currently producing, but I think the main reason is because our own productions have so massively dropped in quality.

There just hasn't been another series such as Dexter, Breaking Bad etc in over 10 yrs now... If there were, I think anime would be a lot less relevant right now.

Japan produces a lot more media than just anime, the west does not see most of it. When was the last time you saw a live action Japanese procedural crime show localized to English? Or really any live action Japanese shows that aren't something like Kamen Rider or Godzilla?

Also, arguably the only reason Crunchyroll even exists today is because of dedicated fan subs making Japanese media available for decades

I think most people would also agree that anime, manga (and games as a distant third) are the main cultural exports of Japan, while life action movies/series are often centered around American productions

"It's important to recognize that any discussion about Japanese media outside of Japan is more or less only receiving the media that Japan is exporting to the world"

Which is a really just a long winded way of saying "The majority Japanese media we are exposed to is anime, manga and games"