Ever since I have heard the term “Sound Novel” (actually the term I heard was “Visual Novel” which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense since all novels are “visual) I kept on wondering what the heck they were. Whenever I would try to find pictures or a good explanation of what was really happening, I came up kind of short. Whenever I would then look for them in Japanese shops, I would run into the “erotic” game section instead, and I began to think that “sound novel” was just a way to disguise inappropriate material. The more I lived in Japan though, I began to realise that this wasn’t really the case. My first real foray into sound novels was reading the Japanese video game magazine Famitsu, and reading the review of a sound novel called 428: Fuusa Sareta Shibuya de (428: The Blockade at Shibuya) and seeing that they gave it a perfect 40/40 score. I began to wonder what was really up with this rising form of entertainment was really about.
Sound novels usually are PC games (that are then ported to various game devices) that essentially scroll the text of a book at you while music and pictures are shown and played in order to influence the readers reading of the text. Sometimes they have the text read to the reader, but often for both immersion and budget reasons, they rely mostly on music and cartoon pictures to establish mood and atmosphere. Due to the multimedia aspect, they usually play out like a TV serial (which is to say it has a heavy focus on dialog with often convoluted or “pulpy” plots, though this varies from novel to novel). The audience that is most targeted in Japan is 20-30 something males, with deviations and stand outs like 428 that brake the mold and appeal to a wider audience. As these are becoming more popular, people can see their influence on various manga, TV, video games, and other Japanese pop culture media.
As their influence spreads, I first began to wonder why they are so popular. Perhaps it is a sign of the Japanese language itself, with its many complicated characters of kanji and reading capacity supposedly going down every year (also known as the “Nihongo Midare” or “The Disturbance of the Japanese Language”). Also the natural high-context nature of the Japanese language (1/3 of the Japanese language is homonyms which makes context very important to understand what people are saying) makes Sound Novels much more appealing to the Japanese audience. While that is true, it is also very likely that the modern era is mostly about more fast paced TV, movies, and games, and books have unfortunately been left behind by a lot of people. Sound novels can be seen as a natural evolution of books, trying to stay relevant in an age where people seem to have less and less patience for anything not completely stimulating to multiple senses.
Another thing influencing their rising popularity is the fact that Sound Novels have a relatively small budget compared to most other popular pop culture media and therefore can thrive in a niche. Groups of five or six people can make a visual novel, and thanks to the democratization of media on the internet, they can be very profitable. This low budget nature of the sound novel also means that they tend to explore more taboo subjects such as violence and sex. Especially in Japan, censorship can be a huge blockade (even at Shibuya) for a lot of media, but strangely enough, Japan seems to turn a blind eye towards sound novels. Though Sound novels have a huge advantage of being able to write a description of a mature scene, instead of showing it, but that doesn’t really cover why other things aren’t censored. I personally believe Japan can be a little too harsh with its censorship sometimes, so it is all good to me.
What I have discovered about sound novels is that of all the anime, video games, and manga that proliferate Japan, these new multi-media novels are becoming honestly the most interesting emerging thing coming out of the Japanese pop culture scene. While many (if not most) are still limited by the male audience they are pandering to in order to get noticed, the potential for innovation in storytelling and telling stories that are usually shunned by the mainstream, makes it a vast form that has only scratched the surface of bringing back the literary experience back to cutting edge relevancy. Even when I read Higurashi: When They Cry, a pulpy Japanese horror story centered around making the readers like a group of Japanese school children, and then doing horrible things to them, the joy of reading while the author puts in their own touches to further immerse me into their narrative, I found fascinating (to the point that I could overlook the mediocre to poor translation). As Sound novels become something that Japan wants to experience (and as that popularity slowly reaches to other parts of the world) I can’t wait to see if the medium reaches the potential I think it has.
If you want to experience sound novels for yourself, I would probably recommend Phoenix Wright for the Nintendo DS and iOS. While it is not necessarily a strict sound novel, it liberally takes aspects of the medium and makes them its own. I would also recommend Higurashi: When They Cry for PC and iOS, but due to the strange mix of really violent mature things happening to immature people, I can only advise looking into it if you are an appropriate age and have the stomach for it. 9 Persons, 9 Doors, 9 Hours also gets my recommendation, but since it is essentially Saw but with anime characters, it is also hard to give a full recommendation. Well, anyway, happy reading!
Sound novels usually are PC games (that are then ported to various game devices) that essentially scroll the text of a book at you while music and pictures are shown and played in order to influence the readers reading of the text. Sometimes they have the text read to the reader, but often for both immersion and budget reasons, they rely mostly on music and cartoon pictures to establish mood and atmosphere. Due to the multimedia aspect, they usually play out like a TV serial (which is to say it has a heavy focus on dialog with often convoluted or “pulpy” plots, though this varies from novel to novel). The audience that is most targeted in Japan is 20-30 something males, with deviations and stand outs like 428 that brake the mold and appeal to a wider audience. As these are becoming more popular, people can see their influence on various manga, TV, video games, and other Japanese pop culture media.
As their influence spreads, I first began to wonder why they are so popular. Perhaps it is a sign of the Japanese language itself, with its many complicated characters of kanji and reading capacity supposedly going down every year (also known as the “Nihongo Midare” or “The Disturbance of the Japanese Language”). Also the natural high-context nature of the Japanese language (1/3 of the Japanese language is homonyms which makes context very important to understand what people are saying) makes Sound Novels much more appealing to the Japanese audience. While that is true, it is also very likely that the modern era is mostly about more fast paced TV, movies, and games, and books have unfortunately been left behind by a lot of people. Sound novels can be seen as a natural evolution of books, trying to stay relevant in an age where people seem to have less and less patience for anything not completely stimulating to multiple senses.
Another thing influencing their rising popularity is the fact that Sound Novels have a relatively small budget compared to most other popular pop culture media and therefore can thrive in a niche. Groups of five or six people can make a visual novel, and thanks to the democratization of media on the internet, they can be very profitable. This low budget nature of the sound novel also means that they tend to explore more taboo subjects such as violence and sex. Especially in Japan, censorship can be a huge blockade (even at Shibuya) for a lot of media, but strangely enough, Japan seems to turn a blind eye towards sound novels. Though Sound novels have a huge advantage of being able to write a description of a mature scene, instead of showing it, but that doesn’t really cover why other things aren’t censored. I personally believe Japan can be a little too harsh with its censorship sometimes, so it is all good to me.
What I have discovered about sound novels is that of all the anime, video games, and manga that proliferate Japan, these new multi-media novels are becoming honestly the most interesting emerging thing coming out of the Japanese pop culture scene. While many (if not most) are still limited by the male audience they are pandering to in order to get noticed, the potential for innovation in storytelling and telling stories that are usually shunned by the mainstream, makes it a vast form that has only scratched the surface of bringing back the literary experience back to cutting edge relevancy. Even when I read Higurashi: When They Cry, a pulpy Japanese horror story centered around making the readers like a group of Japanese school children, and then doing horrible things to them, the joy of reading while the author puts in their own touches to further immerse me into their narrative, I found fascinating (to the point that I could overlook the mediocre to poor translation). As Sound novels become something that Japan wants to experience (and as that popularity slowly reaches to other parts of the world) I can’t wait to see if the medium reaches the potential I think it has.
If you want to experience sound novels for yourself, I would probably recommend Phoenix Wright for the Nintendo DS and iOS. While it is not necessarily a strict sound novel, it liberally takes aspects of the medium and makes them its own. I would also recommend Higurashi: When They Cry for PC and iOS, but due to the strange mix of really violent mature things happening to immature people, I can only advise looking into it if you are an appropriate age and have the stomach for it. 9 Persons, 9 Doors, 9 Hours also gets my recommendation, but since it is essentially Saw but with anime characters, it is also hard to give a full recommendation. Well, anyway, happy reading!
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