Originally posted by Sekabin
Hmm, a few of thoughts spring to mind. Firstly, we should be careful about generalising about a whole nation's peoples - there are surely *some* people who laugh, gufaw etc in certain circumstances, and others who don't. That's the same everywhere (but we knew that anyway )
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 ?

I'm not sure it's possible to compare the popularity of European literature in Japan and the popularity of Japanese literature in Europe... there's a power imbalance (and a historical one).
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.

We should remember that Japanese literature is definitely marginal, in terms of worldwide readership, but this reflects in no way on 'quality'.
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). Take Banana Yoshimoto or Haruki Murakami, they are some of the most famous contemporary writers, but my opinion after reading them is that they suck - what can be more banal really ?