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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/23/japanese-fiction-britain-translation>
"Anyone who has been in a bookshop in the last few years will have noticed that
Japanese fiction is experiencing an extraordinary boom. In 2022, figures from
Nielsen BookScan showed that Japanese fiction represented 25% of all translated
fiction sales in the UK. The dominance is even more striking this year: figures
obtained by the
Guardian show that, of the top 40 translated fiction titles
for 2024 so far, 43% are Japanese, with Asako Yuzuki’s satirical, socially
conscious crime novel
Butter topping the list.
Butter also won the
breakthrough author award at this year’s Books Are My Bag readers awards, which
are curated by booksellers and voted for by the public.
The popularity of modern Japanese fiction is not a new phenomenon in the UK, of
course. In the 1990s, two writers broke through and became cult hits in this
country. Haruki Murakami, a worldwide literary phenomenon, took off in Britain
when Harvill Press published
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in 1998. Scott Pack,
who ran Waterstones’ buying team in the early 2000s, is a big Murakami fan and
remembers giving him “lots of attention. Whatever books of his came out, we got
massively behind.” This week, Murakami publishes his 15th novel
The City and
Its Uncertain Walls, about a man who travels to a mysterious walled town in
pursuit of the woman he loves, finding himself in a strange world of libraries,
maps and dreams. So what’s behind the lasting success of Murakami’s books,
which tend to combine lonely protagonists, jazz, cats, and fantasy elements?
“It’s fairly accessible, weird shit,” Pack says.
But, he adds, Banana Yoshimoto got there first. “It’s really important to point
out that she predates Murakami.” Yoshimoto came into English translation in the
late 1980s and early 90s with books including
Kitchen and
Lizard, her work
often featuring alienated young women trying to overcome personal tragedy.
Murakami and Yoshimoto have something else in common: both were criticised in a
1990 essay by Kenzaburō Ōe, the Japanese Nobel prize-winning author. Their
works, he said, “convey the experience of a youth politically uninvolved or
disaffected, content to exist with an adolescent or post-adolescent
subculture”. Many elements that unite Murakami and Yoshimoto’s fiction –
alienation, surrealism, resisting social expectations – are present in today’s
bestselling Japanese titles. But it is only in the past decade that a wider
range of Japanese authors has taken off here. There has been a huge growth in
Japanese crime fiction, both classic and contemporary: joining Yuzuki’s
Butter in this year’s top 20 translated fiction titles is Seichō Matsumoto’s
golden age crime novel,
Tokyo Express. There has also been a surge in
literary fiction, often from female perspectives, by writers including Sayaka
Murata, Hiromi Kawakami and Mieko Kawakami.
Publishing Murata’s
Convenience Store Woman in 2018 was a “a watershed
moment”, says Jason Arthur, associate publishing director at Granta. The novel,
which follows Keiko, a 36-year-old woman who struggles to fit in but finds
contentment in routine work at a small shop, was the first of three Murata
titles published by Granta – the others are
Earthlings and
Life Ceremony –
that have now sold more than half a million copies. “She is a phenomenon,” says
Arthur. “The role of
Convenience Store Woman in the Japanese literature boom
really can’t be overstated,” agrees Alison Fincher, who runs the
Read Japanese
Literature website and podcast."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
