Light Novels - Writing Style

Writing Style

Light novels are written as popular entertainment, so the writing style is often very different from that of literary novels aimed solely at adults. Light novels often use a short style with paragraphs of one to three sentences. They are usually driven by dialogue. Light novel authors make use of literary minimalism.

The major difference between light novels and other forms of literature is that light novels are marked by play with language. They frequently use more furigana than is normally used in adult fiction, for two main reasons. First, furigana help younger readers who do not have a strong command of kanji. However, light-novel writers popularized a second way of using furigana, which has a long history in Japan. Writers will make use of unusual kanji readings which are not in common use in Japanese or simply create new readings for kanji. These readings might be borrowed from foreign-language words or they might be completely invented names for existing things. This exploits the fact that each kanji character is associated with both a meaning and a set of sounds. Authors manipulate the meanings and sounds of kanji to give words several layers of meaning. This gives light novels additional complexity, in contrast to their sometimes simplistic writing. Unfortunately, some aspects of this writing style are lost in the process of translation.