24849
Novels in English are generally completely written in past tense, but Japanese
narration is quite confusing because they constantly switch between past and
present tense. For example, take this excerpt from a light novel I was
reading.

> 加藤は、泣かない。  
>  英梨々みたいに、泣く訳がない。  
>  けれど、いや、だからこそ……  
>  その、初めての叛逆が、まるで尖った木の枝で刺されたかのように、鈍く痛んだ。  
>

From an English reader's perspective, such a paragraph is bizarre since it's a
mix of present and past tense despite describing events happening at the same
time. I have heard of sentences such as 私の言うことを誰も信じなかった, where only the end
part of a sentence is past tense, but I am unsure if this applies to an entire
novel. If I wrote an entire novel in present tense and only made the last
sentence past tense, does that retroactively make the whole novel past tense?

There is also how the present tense of a verb often expresses something
different from future tense or habitual action. For example:

> まだ日も暮れない夕方の通学路を、駅に向かってゆっくりと **歩く** 俺と加藤

A sentence like that is quite confusing because 歩く seemingly means "walking,"
the progressive form of "walk."

* * *

There are also many sections in songs where present tense is used. For
example*:

> 諦めかけた夢がまた **波打つ**  
>  あの日のままで

It doesn't fit the usual definitions of the Japanese present tense. The best
fit, I found, was wikipedia's definiton of the simple present tense for
English where it says "In providing a commentary on events as they occur."

However, now I am in a conundrum. Is Japanese narration done in past tense,
like English is usually done, or are they narrating as the event happens? In
addition, now it is very difficult to distinguish between describing habitual
actions and providing commentary as an event happens when reading Japanese.

*[Link to song lyrics](http://www.kasi-time.com/item-70488.html)
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-06-07T07:49:43.877
24848
2015-11-30T10:14:22.400
2015-11-30T10:14:22.400
542
7712
question
grammar tense
How does present tense work in Japanese narration?
This rhetoric is called
[史的現在](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B2%E7%9A%84%E7%8F%BE%E5%9C%A8), or
[historical present](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_present), which
basically makes the sentence more vivid, and gives the feeling as if the
reader were in the place. In particular, you can see this commonly happen in
sport news.

I'm not quite sure how frequently this happens in the English literature, but
I don't call it a Japanese-only phenomenon.

Related question: [Why did the author briefly jump to present tense in this
article?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/23349/5010)
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-06-07T08:11:59.307
24849
2015-06-07T08:11:59.307
2017-04-13T12:43:44.260
-1
5010
24848
answer