Can a novelist be a YouTuber?
Recently, people from various fields have joined YouTube. Comedians, musicians, traditional performers, scientists, makeup professionals, cooks.
But what you hardly see are painters and maybe novelists.
Perhaps there are many novelists who seem to have a strong belief that they should only compete with their works, but I think they have little affinity with visual images to begin with.
The other day, I saw a video on YouTube of Genichiro Takahashi sitting on a park bench and reading from his own work. I watched it with great interest, partly because I have always been a fan.
Perhaps the first thing novelists think of when they decide to do something on YouTube is to read their own work. Next would be something like Genichiro Takahashi’s “Flying Classroom” style. Then, life counseling.
Unfortunately, I can’t think of anything after that.
Unless the talent is very good, it is obvious that playing a golf game or shooting a scene of city walking will not be very interesting.
In the Showa period (1926-1989), when novels were the mainstay of the culture, there was a type of literary drama in which popular novelists gathered to perform Chekhov’s plays, etc. The plays became more popular than expected, and there is an anecdote that the Kabuki theater performers were jealous of them.
However, nowadays, such plays are completely relics of the past. Even if they did, they would hardly attract people, and would be laughed at. It’s a world of “Who are you? Who are you? In that sense, it is unlikely that bungaku-geki will ever be revived.
If that is the case, is there anything we can do? YouTube is thriving. There is no way not to take advantage of it.
Then there are lectures, dialogues, debates, roundtable discussions, and so on. But that would be the same as what literary magazines are doing now. And since literary magazines themselves are not selling at all, the result would be the same even if they were made into videos.
Perhaps, if there is a possibility, it would be the visualization of my own work, but this seems to be a very high hurdle.
Nowadays, it is quite easy to make CG and digital animations, but even if a novelist made a film by himself or herself and a few staff members, it would not only take a lot of time, but the quality of the work would also be unknown.
In this era, novels are not selling at all. If you still want people to read your work, you must make full use of YouTube and social networking sites.
It is only harmful to advertise a work that is not good enough, but there must be some works that are too good to be buried, both in the past and in the future.
However, there must be works in the past and in the future that are not worthy of being buried in the past or in the future. In this day and age, novelists themselves have to think about even that. Is it sad, or have we been too fortunate?
It is a well-known story that Kan Kikuchi created Bungei Shunju-sha originally to sell his own works. The same is true of Dostoevsky, who had no choice but to create a publishing house to publish his works after publishers kept rejecting him at the door. Maybe there is a clue there.
See you soon.
