Abstract

This article studies the Japanese web novel, which, despite having come to represent a substantial segment of the Japanese market for literature over the course of two decades, remains almost unstudied in English-language academia. To analyze its case, the article examines in turn the media history of Japanese web novels, the online platforms on which they are written, and the aesthetic elements of the narrative-world that frequently characterizes it. The article also closely examines the economic rationale underlying its success within the current Japanese culture industry, allowing a distinction between the elitist, qualitative judgment characteristic of traditional popular literature and the audience-driven, quantitative judgment characteristic of industry trends following the ascendence of the web novel. It additionally introduces the concept of 1.5-dimensionality to describe how web novels exist between being original and derivative other works, and studies the history of the isekai (“other world”) genre as an example. The article lastly notes the similarities between the Japanese model and others models of web novel platforms in East Asia, calling for greater comparisons and theoretical exegeses of these cases.

Keywords

web novel, anime, media platform, transmedia, isekai