Originally posted by Maciamo
Of course, but we are looking for a trend, not something that applies to evrybody. Who would be follish enough to say to "everybody" behaves like this or like that ?
Quite a lot of people unfortunately! Have you seen the Japan Today site recently? ;)

What about Russian literature ? We could only compare a single country at a time with Japan. Russia has a similar population to Japan, historically, it got it's first kingdom and capital (Kiev) at about the same time as Japan, and Japan had more colonial pretention than Russia (and defeated Russia in 1905). Where is the imbalance ? But still, whereas Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Chekhov or Gorky are world famous, no Japanese author really is at a comparable level.
Ok, I see where you're going here, but let's remember that Russia is part of Europe, so Russian literature was widely read in European countries. Those authors are 'world famous', but where is the 'world'?

That's a personal issue. But even inside Japan Western authors are more popular than Japanese ones (something that is not near to happen in France).
Hmm... where did you get this assumption from? Of course as I don't live in Japan I can't say myself, but my partner says that Japanese people know Western literature because they are taught it at school or university, but not so many of them actually read it. At least, translations of Western 'high literature' don't sell very well. Maybe Briget Jones (the equivalent of Banana Yoshimoto?)...

Sorry for taking this thread off topic! Let's get back to other things