Japanese novels
 

Not sure if this is the right section, if so it can be moved.

Anyway I was in a store skimmed through some books/novels in Japanese out of curiosity. My knowledge in the language is pretty much rudimentary, so perhaps that is it. Aside from the obvious top to bottom and right to left reading. I was confused about something else.

In languages I have encountered before, novels usually have something like

"I am so angry" said character X

However as I skim through one book I did not notice anything like that. There were some [] here and there. It may have been the novel I picked up but do Japanese novels in general avoid identifying who ever is talking or was it the book I glimpse at just unique in that way?

If not how does one follow the story?

In Japanese novels, the narrator often doesn't identify the speakers of the direct quotations. However, this only occurs when it is clear to the reader as to what character is speaking the line.

Not that I've paid much attention to this fact before, mostly because I am a Japanese-speaker to begin with, I can think of a couple of factors concerning the Japanese language that make these unidentified direct quotations possible.

1. Men and women speak totally different from each other.
2. Within either gender, people speak very differently according to their ages and varried social backgrounds.
3. Most importantly, each speaker has his/her own favorite sentence-ending particles, first-person pronoun, etc.
4. Characters speak in dialects. It isn't just "accents" as in some other languages. They actually use different words.

These factors pretty much tell the reader who is saying a particular line.
Thanks for the good question!

We are writing a story in the following thread and though we haven't done many pages yet, you can see this very phenomenon already. Unidentified quotations! :)

http://www.japanforum.com/forum/%E6%...%EF%BC%9F.html

Since there is this thread, I guess I should also ask a question I've always wanted to ask. In English, simple past tense is usually used in narration. However, whenever I read Japanese light novels, I always see that present forms are often used. With my current level, I can only guess that it's because the concept of "tense" is very different in Japanese, and more precisely, the inflection of verbs is based on a completely different system. In fact, in all of the Japanese guides and textbook I've read so far, verbs are taught as "forms", not "tenses". And even though the explanations may be very clear, it's still a long way for me to get a thorough comprehension on this aspect, so it's quite hard whenever I tries to translate parts of light novels into English. I want to ask if I can use simple past when translating Japanese narrations into English. I feel like present forms are used just fine in Japanese novels, but it would sound odd if I use simple present in my English translation. Sorry to ask this, but I'm not a native English speaker, so I don't have the sense that native speakers do, even though I can use English just fine in communication. I think if I can make this clear, it will help me a lot with my studying.

Most English novels do not identify the speaker often, either. It's considered quite poor literary writing.

Here's the first chapter of Tom Sawyer: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

You'll see that practically nothing has "X said, 'YYY'" or "'YYY,' said X."

Ah thanks, that clears up a lot. Yeah those factors would make sense why direct quotations wouldn't be necessary almost all of the time.

Indeed you right that in plenty of English novels , they tend to avoid identifying the speaker. Certainly from English novels I read in the past, it varies on how often the speaker is identified but they usually do it. Some novels almost never and others more often.

However in the Japanese novels I skimmed through, I could not see a single one hence my confusion. You know, being a beginner in Japanase and everything.

So I wanted to go on this forum to see if that is normal for Japanese or if I was seeing things wrongly(keep in mind I only skimmed through the books). Japanese is a much different language then I am accustomed to.