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Paper short abstract

This paper applies computational analysis to a digitized chronology of Japanese newspaper novels (1875–2025) to trace large-scale shifts in title vocabulary, authorship, and deixis, highlighting emotionalization, stabilization, and increasing internal focalization.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores what computational literary studies can contribute to the history of modern Japanese fiction by examining a large-scale dataset of newspaper novels. Drawing on Takeo Takagi’s Chronology of Newspaper Novels, I construct a digitized corpus of a million serial works by more than 2,500 authors, published between 1875 and 2025. Focusing on the titles of these novels, which succinctly signal themes and guide readers’ interpretations, I apply basic quantitative methods—morphological analysis, lexical matching, and diversity measures—to trace long-term changes in vocabulary and authorship.

The preliminary analysis highlights three notable tendencies that become especially pronounced from the 1930s onward. First, there is a marked rise in emotion- and psychology-related vocabulary in titles, alongside a decline in body-related terms. This contrast suggests a gradual shift from narratives centered on physicality toward fiction that foregrounds psychological interiority. Second, the field of newspaper novels becomes more stable and concentrated: a shrinking number of authors accounts for a growing share of titles, and the range of lexical choices in titles also narrows. At the same time that serialization lengths increase, the overall diversity of surface expressions declines, pointing to a phase of standardization within the genre.

Third, the frequency of deictic expressions such as “this,” “that,” “here,” and “now” rises significantly in titles from the 1930s. Because deixis invariably presupposes a speaking or perceiving subject, this tendency can be read as evidence of a progressive localization of narrative perspective, in which stories are increasingly presented through the viewpoint of a protagonist or narrator—what Gérard Genette terms internal focalization. Taken together, these findings indicate that newspaper novels participated in a broader transformation of modern Japanese fiction toward psychological emphasis and individualized perspective. More broadly, the study illustrates how even relatively simple quantitative measures, when combined with close reading, can reposition forgotten or minor works within literary history and open new comparative perspectives on media formats, genres, and narrative techniques in modern Japan.