The JLPP

The JLPP website is finally back up! Albeit, in a slightly more truncated form. They used to have lots of cool information, like not only who was winning all the big Japanese literary awards, but also the notable runner-ups (who sound more interesting to me than the winners sometimes). Right now, they only have a home page and some pdfs of their publications. Better than nothing though!

For those of you who don't know, the JLPP, or the Japanese Literature Publishing Project, is an organization that promotes Japanese literature to the rest of the world; they hire translators and give incentives (grants and the like) to promote publishers to actually publish Japanese books. For instance, on my to read list is The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, which sounds kind of disturbing but also hilarious (not a spoiler alert: P stands for penis. Yeah, now you're clicking on the link). I'm not sure how the books are chose to be translated, but a lot of what they put out (see Big Toe P) are things that might not have had a chance in American big publishing, who make almost no money on translated books of any kind (with the exception of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Haruki Murakami types). So they do good work. For instance, when they get a publishing house to buy the rights, the JLPP buys a certain number of copies from them to give out to libraries, so even more people have access to it. Nice!

The JLPP is run by the J-Lit Center, who I've actually had some correspondence with while I was interning for a publishing house. Very friendly people!