Why use a simple and common character when an unusual and complicated one can do the same job, right?
I recently made a second go at reading the Japanese novel 新世界より (shinsekai yori / from the new world). I’m not far enough into it to know what I think yet, but I thought I’d mention one thing about reading Japanese novels in general.
Some of them really seem to revel in using complicated or unusual characters!
I actually noticed that way back when I started reading my first Japanese novels, the No 6 series. Just as one example, the word “tooth” is normally written 歯, but in the book the form 齒 was used instead.
Another example, “fake” is usually written with the character 偽. When the book referred to the titular city No 6 being fake, which happened rather often as I recall, it was written with the much more unusual character 贋.
Here’s an example from Shinsekai yori that I ran into yesterday:
This is actually a picture I took because I couldn’t make out the character just by looking at the actual page! I needed to photograph it and zoom in!
Even when I could make out the actual lines, I couldn’t find it in the Japanese dictionaries on my phone, so what I ended up doing was draw it by hand in my Chinese dictionary, and then I found out that it was 禱 which is a more complicated form of 祷, meaning “prayer”.
Incidentally the whole word it was used in was 祈禱 (kitou, prayer), and you can see here that it is actually an outdated form of 祈祷.
(To be fair I didn’t know/remember 祷 either, but I would at least have been able to look that one up a lot more easily!)
Like I said, some books like to do this a lot, and I guess that a Japanese reader will have an easier time either knowing these more archaic forms, or at least figuring out which simpler forms they correspond to.
I kind of wonder why some authors seem so fond of doing this though… does it add a more literary feel?
Adventures in Language Self-Study 