There's a ton of great western fiction that does the same thing, it's just not usually gonna show up on traditional channels. Heck, that's not even entirely true since Travis Baldree's slice of life Legends & Lattes won Nebula and Hugo awards last year.

If you go on Royal Road there's tons of great fantasy stories. The West is just missing the Japanaese pipeline of web serials -> light novel -> manga -> anime -> live action movie. Although there's companies like WebToons that seem to be trying to get such a pipeline going by making comics based on popular western web serials.

I've read my fair share of both Western and Japanese light novels, and you can definitely find quality content everywhere. In Japan they just do a better job at capitalizing on success by giving every slightly popular light novel series a try with an anime season or two. As someone who usually checks out 1 or 2 episodes of most seasonal anime, I can tell you that most of it ends up being barely memorable slop though.

It's worth noting that the West seems to be catching up, a few popular series are getting animated series. Two big ones that come to mind are Cradle by Will Wight, and Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman.

I think there are also issues of scale of investment and revenue splits - I can't find right now, but there was a rant tweet from a Japanese comic author that apparent typical compensation for webtoons was below labor cost of his team by couple digits, and I also remember seeing similar rants on topic of AI training materials that were off by even larger magnitudes(like $.25 per dozen images one-time vs $1k per use recurring).

So authors seem to be getting paid more, and that leads to an obvious question of how. One possible answer to that is maybe Japanese media contents - be it images or anime or light novel or classical novel - are still heavily subsidized by its strong and isolate domestic consumption. Average household expenditure on reading is about $120 per year in US and $325 in Japan[1], which IMO roughly coincide with this hypothesis.

If there actually is such a situation... maybe what's missing in Western media is just accelerated consumption. It's weird to think that Americans and Europeans might not be consuming enough media, but that could be it.

1: at current rate of 150 yen/dollar; raw value is 50k yen or ~1% average yearly income