Light Novels are an important subculture in Japan and Anime and is an addictive hobby once you get into it. ‘What is a light novel?’ You may ask. Light Novels, also abbreviated to LN by enthusiasts are related to manga in a way but it has 89% fewer drawings and is well, a written novel, in a nutshell. It is a style of Japanese novel aimed mostly at high school and middle school students, but like anime, there are more mature light novels out in the world too. The average length of a LN is about 50,000 words (roughly about a hundred pages on average), close to the minimum Western requirement for a novel.
What makes light novels distinctive is that they are illustrated, in a manga art style and like manga, LN are often adapted into anime. You may have watched a few adaptations from LN, series such as No Game No Life, Spice and Wolf, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Sword Art Online and Kino no Tabi – The Beautiful World started out as light novel series before they became anime series. LN are mostly published in separate book volumes, but some have their chapters serialized in anthology magazines before being collected in book form, similar to how manga is published.
Light novels on recent years received a boom in fandom, but it isn’t a new concept, it actually evolved from pulp magazines. Aiming to attract more readers in the 1970s Japanese Pulp magazines started to add illustrations at the beginning of each story and included articles about popular anime, movies and video games. Each generation added more to these books, more illustrations and evolving narrative styles until the light novel became what we see today.
These books span many genres such as horror (Boogeypop), Dark Fantasy (Goblin Slayer), Medieval Fantasy (Spice and Wolf), Game (Sword Art Online), Slice of Live Adventure (Kino no Tabi – The Beautiful World), Food Isekai (Restaurant to Another World), Isekai (Death March kara Hajimaru Isekai Kyusoukyoku) Magic (A Certain Magical Index) and Psychological (Welcome to the NHK) are just a few examples. Some light novels are also canon extenuations of anime series not based from LN such as the Naruto Light Novels inspired by the manga and series.
Like an anime based on a light novel?, then we give you fair warning that the LN usually is ten times better and tend to continue on far past the anime, so don’t say ‘I’ll wait for the next season of the anime’ (which sometimes never happens) and pass up on the opportunity to find out the actual destiny of your favourite anime heroes.