Are japanese novels/manga dying?

Mangas are and will continue to thrive. I am not including manhwa and manhua in this category. It's just there are still many mangas that haven't been translated. Especially the old gems, so my answer is also a No.
Btw if you are posting this thread then it means you are yet to read novels like 86, Realist Hero, Rokujouma, The Angel Next Door Spoils me Rotten etc. It's the same with Light Novels, not all of them get translated. And all of the new licenses you see for Japanese novels by yen press, seven seas etc are the ones that are popular in Japan. So the less popular ones get ignored.
Btw, I really abhor the current state of Chinese Manhwa translations. A good chunk of them are either machine translationed or poorly edited.
As for Korean stuff, they are very very repititive but the saving grace is they are shorter than their chinese counterparts so they are much more bearable.

 

When I first started reading I went through a phase where I read all kinds of J novels but now I barely touch them; I don't like harem/reverse harem, romance, or beta MC and that leaves very few translated novels for me to read.
manga has a wider variety (even if your picky) and I like some manhwa as well. I have problems with a lot of Chinese Manhua, which tend to ruin perfectly decent cultivation novels after shifting the media.

 

As you became accustomed to most Japanese manga, you then found the Chinese ones which as you said are more direct and bolder in how characters interact and provide tougher direct consequences to anyone that opposes them.

 

Agreed. Your generic JPNs are like that, and even many among those that aren't seem to lack some sort of 'impulse', a certain liveliness... I can't exactly put my finger on it, but whatever it is, makes the reading experience flat. Exceptions exist, but are rare.

I'm not going to bring up anime since I haven't watched those in years (12 years, to be precise).

But when it comes to manga, manhwa, webtoons and manhua, manga still takes the cake. There's always something in it for every kind of reader. I tend to go for adult protagonists' (the high school setting usually doesn't work for me, tho I still read a few of those) romance, sports and some of the out of the way, zany stuff... while updates might be slow (unlike your weekly shounen) and not really God's plenty, they aren't all that lacking, either. There's always something new and interesting in manga, whereas manhwas tend to stick more to certain genres (historical fantasy romance, dungeons, and entertainment, idol industry stuff), and manhuas have severe quality control issues.

 

For quite a while now, I feel that Japanese otaku fiction has been devouring itself for quite a while now. By this I mean that instead of taking inspiration and research from everywhere, otaku fiction is more and more limiting to only looking at other otaku works. While this may not be a major problem yet, it's something that gets worse and worse over time.

For this thread specifically, I think that manga is the least affected by this problem. It's just more expansive than the other media and it has a much more diverse readership so non-otaku works still have a lot of room to thrive. With anime, it's a much bigger problem because the viewership is less diverse and because so many of the creative staff are themselves otaku. Japanese novels are pretty diverse; unfortunately money talks, and the people most likely to buy books are the otaku again. And this is why publishers are constantly scouring Syosetu for anything that's even vaguely popular

 

Agreed on this one.

lol why am I laughing at the accuracy of this haha. Though it gets really complicated sometimes (squinting at the family trees of those in cn novels-oh wait, it's a damn forest shoot), I must agree on the fact that it's really easy to be satisfied in reading it, especially at the slapping parts lmao. Some have really deep plots and yes, up till this point, if you ask me to enumerate all family members of my fav cn novel, I still can't do it.

 

While I do enjoy a fair number of manhwa/webtoons and a few manhua, I've still not seen anywhere close to the same variety in them as I have with manga, although not saying there isn't variety among those as well if you look past all the trend chasers.
But well I have no idea how well that is reflected in terms of the popularity of individual works, a lot of the more interesting stories I come across don't exactly rank at the top in readership.

 

CN novel is recycle even in the same title, the plot is same, i even once swap the mc of two different title and i didn't felt weird, except Ancient Strengthening technique (the first time i see mc get breakthrough with the birth of his children). I never found KR interesting, read few but didn't get hooked at all. So my cycle is JP->CN(read few novel but the plot is too similiar so i confused with what i read)->KR (checking few but not hooked so) -> JP again.

I probably the only one that think Isekai have more diversity than CN Novel lol

 

Manga have a long standing legacy which makes it appeal to a vast range of readers. And this in turn will insulate it from the kind of domination by any one group that we see in other media. It's also been around for so long that it's hard to see this change any time in the future.

Is this for just one genre, or all Chinese novels?

 

I think it's genres and subgenres within the medium that are dying. When was the last time we had a good cyberpunk manga like GiTS, Serial Experiments Lain, or BLAME? How many people still adore the sports-romances of Adachi? Who has even tried to take up the mantle of Miura and create something to compete with Berserk? The content we're getting is narrowing and catering to the more simplistic cravings of the audience. We're getting content that can literally be summed up by their absurd long one sentence titles.

 

Depends on genre imho, right now I'm hating on JP Isekais or villainous types, I also have a healthy hatred of the synopsis titles of JP mangas/novels, it turns me right off. But there are some redeeming qualities, when you sift through the sht you hit diamond that smokes a burning hot trail of joy, but I do agree that wading through sht gets old

 

As much as I want to agree with you on the Jpn LN situation, Jpn manga is on different level with any other comic/manhwa/manhua there.
I could get tired reading Jpn ln, but manga? It'd never die.
Anime on the other hand, it dies on me so fast.

 

Stopped reading novels cause i cant hallucinate anymore, Being a realist is better in my humble opinion.

Maybe i have grown up or maybe i just stopped dreaming.

 

What the exceptions, very curious.

 

Some short stories and oneshots, many from Yoraikun.

 

I'd also add the books written traditionally, so (non-otaku) light novels from before the isekai explosion and mainstream Japanese literature. Generally, where Japanese webnovels lack the most is that the dialogue feels very flat, there's little effort put into descriptive writing, and the characterization is very weak. Writers who learned their craft traditionally work at overcoming these exact problems whereas webnovelists tend to be self taught and often don't even understand what creative writing is supposed to be.

 

No I think mangas are still going strong. Maybe you think that way because you see a lot of Manhwa\Manhua nowadays? In Japan manga is still very popular and has a large audience. In fact, many mangakas are shifting their attention to new mediums and outlets like webtoons to digitize and versify their mangas. I find it beautiful when they also collaborate to produce mangas\webtoons.
I can't remember exactly which webtoon but I came across a story written by a korean webtoon author and drawn by a Japanese manga artist (it was published as a webtoon and maybe a manga as well, not sure).

 

Nah it's most likely a phase like how most weebs go from anime --> manga --> ln/wn

 

Haha I kinda felt like that to be honest

these days the manga that come out more seem to be mostly based on LNs…