Japanese FICTION Bestsellers of 2011 (So Far), Part 1

Our coverage of Japan's bestseller lists continues with a look at the fiction bestsellers of the first half of 2011.

I'm almost tempted to go full car-salesman and just start saying "October is Bestseller Month at Wednesday Afternoon Picnic!!!" but I don't think coverage will quite last that long. Anyway, today we'll be looking at just fiction bestsellers.

Japanese vocabulary time!

Tohan divides up the sales numbers between tankoubon and bunkobon. Now, these do not stand for hardcover and paperback, the way we list our bestsellers (although they are, weirdly, similar, but we'll get to that in a second). They don't even describe the same qualities or standards of comparison.  

Tankoubon (単行本）just means a collected or independent volume; it is a complete work. Of course, this word is also illogically used to refer to a single volume in a manga series, believe it or not, to make it extra confusing.

The word bunkobon（文庫本） refers to the size of the book itself, which is similar to our mass-market pocket-sized paperbacks. They are designed, like our mass-market paperbacks, to be super cheap and portable, though they are generally nicer—they get their own dust jackets and everything.

As mentioned above, tankoubon does not refer to the quality of the book itself; however, if you look at the size of any novel on Amazon that's listed as tankoubon, you'll notice the size is usually somewhere around 19cm by 14cm. Which is in fact, just about the size of all the Japanese novels that I own that are indeed, hardcover books. So while it's not necessarily true, today, for all intents and purposes, we can think of tankoubon as the hardcovers and bunkobon as the paperbacks.

Today we look at the tankoubon bestsellers for fiction, according to Tohan:


1) 謎解きはディナーのあとで ("The Riddle Will Be Solved After Dinner")
by Higashigawa Tokuya
2 )ＫＡＧＥＲＯＵ
by Satohiro Saito
3) くじけないで ("Don't Be Discouraged")
by Shibata Toyo
4) 麒麟の翼 ("Wings of the Qilin")
by Higashino Keigo
5) 放課後はミステリーとともに ("After School Will Be With Mysteries")
by Higashigawa Tokuya
6) 傾物語 ("Twisted Tales")
by Nishio Isin
7) 花物語 ("Flower Tales")
by Nishio Isin
8)  江　姫たちの戦国 （"The Bay: The Princess' Warring States")
by Tabuchi Kumiko
 9) 苦役列車　("Train of Suffering")
by Nishimura Kenta
10) 県庁おもてなし課 ("The Prefectural Hospitality Division")
by Arikawa Hiro

The first three on the list should be familiar from last time, so I won't go into any more detail about them. Some comments about the rest of the list:

4) Higashino Keigo is way more popular than he has any right to be. He's like the James Patterson of Japan—anything he writes seems to turn to gold (though thankfully he is not so prolific). I read MOST of Naoko which was put out by Vertical because I thought it had a great sounding premise, but couldn't finish it because it was such garbage...at least in my opinion. Your mileage may vary. You can also try reading The Devotion of Suspect X which was put out by Minotaur. "Wings of the Qilin" (qilin is the Chinese unicorn, way more bad-ass than the Western unicorn) is another murder mystery. Amazon's description is very generic. That's all I have to say.

5) Another mystery story by the author of the number one bestseller "The Riddle Will Be Solved After Dinner." There's a school, and they have a detective club, and for some reason there are a lot of crimes for them to solve. This has also been turned into a movie (although it looks like it was a web series that then had a special in-movie-theaters showing). 

6 and 7) Nisio Isin (not spelled the standard Ishin because his name is a palindrome) is a very popular light novel (basically young adult fiction with some illustrations, kind of a compromise between manga and literature) author. These two books are the latest installments of his "Monogatari" series. The series, under the name Bakemonogatari,  has recently become a fairly popular anime series. 

8) Again, it's because of a TV adaptation that this series (it's actually in three parts) seems to be on the list. It's the latest Taiga drama to be broadcasted on NHK. It's historical fiction. If you're interested in a summary, you can check out the big long Wikipedia article about it. (Sidenote: it stars Nodame Cantabile's live-action Nodame, Ueno Juri, so I imagine as an actress this is a pretty big deal for her and her fans).

9) I recognized this title as a book recommended in the last issue of Japan Book News. Unfortunately, I did not mention it in my write-up of said issue because I thought it looked mega-boring. It might be on the bestseller list because it did win the last Akutagawa Prize, which is a pretty big deal...though the description on Japan Book News can't help but be surprised that this work is a bestseller either. But plotwise...

Written in the form of an I-novel (basically a confessional, thinly-veiled autobiographical work written in the first person), it's about a guy who drops out of school, has some shitty backbreaking jobs, the money of which he squanders on booze and prostitutes... I don't know why I'm so cynical about this work (or rather, the idea of it, I guess). I'm deeply suspicious of any work that uses such bleakness as shock value in lieu of deeper thematic content. And that might not be the case for this novel. But guilty until proven innocent, for me.

10) Arikawa Hiro is another wildly successful light novelist. If you're an anime fan, you might be familiar with her work through the anime adaptation of Toshokan Sensou ("Library Wars"). It's supposedly about a young government worker struggling between bureaucratic red tape and the will of the private citizen as they start their new job assisting a popular local writer...but it's also a story that simultaneously is, you know, interesting to teenagers.


Some parallels are starting to emerge regarding Japanese and American reading habits. I think what we can all take home is that both cultures love:

1) Mysteries and thrillers (and a general darkness in content and tone).

2) Books that are "inspiring" and more about the person behind the book than the book itself (in the case of 100-year old Toyo Shibata and her poetry), see books like this or this.

3) Serialized young adult fiction that easily adapts to non-book entertainment.


Next time, mass-market paperback fiction (bunkobun)!

Japanese Bestsellers of 2011 (So Far)

Besides being a depository for my various attempts at translation, one of the aims of this blog has  been to report the going-ons of contemporary Japanese literary culture. I get to do this occasionally by reporting on Japanese literature from the perspective of what is happening, or might be happening, here in the United States—potential releases, book reviews, American publishing companies and their translations, etc.  But I fear I don't do it that often with what's going on directly in Japan. Every now and then I do, but I realized I've been missing (perhaps ignoring) the most obvious indicator of literary trends: the bestseller lists.

The reason I parenthetically say ignoring is because when I do think to check the bestseller lists, I find it kind of boring—or worse, depressing. Bestselling does not always indicate quality. This week's New York Times Bestseller list, for example, includes eight interchangeable thrillers in the top ten. And The Help. Not to be snooty about my reading habits, but no thank you.

But, I am genuinely curious to see what the Japanese are reading, even if it won't be my literary cup of tea, and luckily, Tohan has data for the top selling books of the first half of 2011.

Let us take a look-see:

In the everything-list, which has both fiction and non-fiction titles put together, there are only three novels in the top ten books, however, they are at least, the very top three.

In first place is 謎解きはディナーのあとで, "The Riddle Will Be Solved After Dinner," by Higashigawa Tokuya. It won the Bookseller's Prize (chosen by people who work at bookstores, but it's basically a popularity prize), and it's described as a collection of six mysteries solved by a lady detective and her "sharp-tongued butler." Ooooh.

If you check out the novel's Amazon listing, it, amazingly, awesomely, has a 2 out of 5 star rating, with a sizable majority of 156 people giving it only one star. Choice review quotes: "A disappointment," and "It's a mystery why this garbage sells so well."

But of course, it's still so popular it's going to become a TV show.

In second place is the non-stop stales behemoth もし高校野球の女子マネージャーがドラッカーの『マネジメント』を読んだら, "What if a High School Baseball Club's Girl Manager Read 'Management' by Drucker?" by Iwasaki Natsumi. (Yes, this is a novel.) This was already a bestseller when I was in Japan a year and a half ago. For more information about this one, check out my friend hopeful in nagoya's write up about the book, and the anime and movie it spawned, as the most strangely-titled yet wildly successful pop culture juggernaut in recent memory.

In third place is KAGEROU, which means both "may-fly" and "ephemera," by Satohiro Saito, also known as Hiro Mizushima, a relatively famous TV actor. This is another one that somehow has both an award, this time the Poplar Fiction Prize, and a terrible Amazon ranking, this time a 2.5 out of 5. It's about a deeply in debt dude who gets downsized and tries to kill himself, only to be stopped by a man in a black suit, who offers him an escape from his money troubles by working for his underground organ donation "company." BUT IS EVERYTHING AS GOOD AS IT SEEMS?

Finally, in bonus fifth place, is granny Toyo Shibata's collection of poetry くじけないで, which we've totally talked about you guys!

Just so you know, three of the remaining five spots are occupied by various Monster Hunter guides (positions 6, 7, and 10). 4th place is 老いの才覚, "A Plan for the Elderly," about what to do with the huge elderly population of Japan,  8th place is a self-help book (do you really care about the title? Fine, it's 心を整える。勝利をたぐり寄せるための５６の習慣, "Re-Arrange Your Heart: 56 Habits to Reel In Success") and 9th place is 救世の法: 信仰と未来社会, "The Law of Salvation: Faith and Our Future Society." I imagine the content is self-explanatory.

Next time, I'll take a look at the actual fiction hardcover and paperback bestseller lists for the first half of this year. Then, in the next week or so, I'll take a look at that current week's bestsellers.

Genichiro Takahashi, Essayist

Genichiro Takahashi, author of the amazingly great novel Sayonara, Gangsters, a book anyone with an interest in Japanese contemporary/post-modern/metafiction should read immediately, is also a prolific literary critic and essayist.

This seems to be a common thing in Japan, when you achieve a certain level of notoriety. Murakami, for instance, has collection after collection after collection of all the various essays, commentaries, and fluff pieces he's contributed to magazines, newspapers, etc. Certainly American authors are somewhat active outside of their respective fiction writings, but I think it is less common than in Japan—especially for publishers to bother republishing them in a collection. (I can only think of the highest tiered American authors having these sorts of essay collections, but this is a personal, not fully informed observation. Please let me know in the comments if I am mistaken about either country.)

I do think Genichiro Takahashi deserves special mention for his literary criticism and essays though, because by his own admission he finds himself to be better known to the public as a critic than as a novelist. He even writes serialized essays on his twitter account, called "Midnight Novel Radio."

I have three of Takahashi's non-fiction collections that I have browsed briefly through with the intention of diving in more thoroughly soon: 一億三千万人のための小説教室　("Novel Writing Class for the 130 Million People of Japan"), 文学王 ("The King of Literary" is the official subtitle), and 平凡王 ("The King of Ordinary"). "Novel Writing Class" is the one I've looked at the most, and is hilarious, and "The King of Literary" has essays on his favorite novels (Natsume Soseki's unfinished 明暗, "Light and Darkness" is one) among various other things.

He also has been quite outspoken after the March tsunami and earthquake, including two articles in the Asahi Newspaper (English versions available here and here) and another in the New York Times.

Finally, Takahashi maintains a semi-regularly updated column at MAMMO.TV. (Totally off-topic, but check out this other columnist Takano Masanori—he looks like a Japanese Charlie Sheen.) The topics run all over the place: many on the quake recently, but also on less weighty matters, like the shamelessness of Trading Card Games that force kids to constantly be spending more money on them."Battle Spirits" is what his son is obsessed with, and if you watch the link, it looks EXACTLY like Yu-Gi-Oh. Exactly. (I personally, back in the day, blew all my money on Magic: The Gathering...)

For today's post, I translated his first column at mammo.tv for your enjoyment.

ー
"My Friend's Bookshelf"


It was in the fall of my first year of middle school when I entered a private school in Kobe. That would be about 40 years ago now. The me then (and I think this was only natural for my age) was a normal middle schooler who of course had no interest in literature, but liked manga instead.

It was after I entered my second year of middle school that I became acquainted with T. The school was part of an integrated middle and high school system, but you still had to take exams to get in, so while all the students were convinced they had to be studying all the time, T was a bit different from everyone else. T was always reading books. Literature, ideology—those kinds of "deep," "difficult" books.  The people around T respected him for it, and students with similar interests gathered around him. And then somehow I started puttering around them too. That's when I noticed that something was going on. I quietly listened to T and everyone gathered around him. They brought up all these names of authors, poets, jazz musicians, and film directors in their conversations. And I didn't know a single one!

Before I knew it, I became one of the people who hung around T too. I would memorize the titles of the books they all talked about, go to the bookstore, buy said book, and go home to read them (though I didn't understand them at all).

One day, I and a couple of other friends were invited to T's house, where we went into his room. The guys who had been there before started talking with T immediately. I, on the other hand, gazed hungrily at T's bookshelf. The bookshelf, which covered an entire wall, was crammed pull of  those "deep," "difficult books that I didn't know. I wondered if I could become a great, fully-fledged adult by reading all these books. Impossible right?

No way, not in a million years.

After that, until I graduated high school I would go to T's house and copy down the names of his books (as I didn't feel like I could borrow them). And when copying down these titles was too embarrassing, I memorized them. Then, stretching far beyond my own capabilities, I read them— even though I didn't get them at all, to the point it made me dizzy. All I could think about how nice it would be if I could catch up with T. T and I graduated high school, and then we went to different universities, and after that took up different jobs: T a journalist, and I a novelist. No matter how I think about it, I feel like it should've been the opposite.

One month ago, I received a notice from the newspaper that T disappeared. T, who was in Malaysia on vacation, told his wife that he was going to go swim at the beach by their hotel, went out into the shoals, and just like that, never came back. And now my chance to thank T for his bookshelf is lost forever.

More on Japanese Literary Journals

A couple months ago I was really getting into the literary journal scene in Japan. It was really only because I got my hands on some recent issues of Bungakukai, but I started looking into Gunzo as well. I did some research, and if you want to stay afloat on the Japanese literary scene but not in Japan yourself, here are some possible means to do so.

 I found out you can order Bungakukai through Amazon, which is pretty freaking awesome. The only problem is that it costs $224 for a year's subscription, or twelve issues. A little over 18 bucks an issue, which is not an impossible price (though certainly out of my price range right now), and it is a lot of content—roughly 3600 pages of fiction, poetry, author interviews, and essays. 


Even better (though for not nearly as much content) is that I found out that Gunzo has an iPhone/iTouch/iPad "preview" app. It's a best of collection, that includes whole short stories, the first chapters in serialized novels and essays (including one about Murakami in America), poetry, and best of all, it's completely free. Obviously this is only useful for those with an iWhatever, but, it's kind of cool to offer it all for free. 


Gunzo and Bungakukai are also on Twitter, where they often announce who is going to be what issue, who has won their big prizes, and retweets people's (favorable) responses to whatever they just published. 

It goes without saying that all of these are only useful if you can read Japanese...


[In the next post, I'm going to look at a literary award (and one of it's recipients) that hasn't been mentioned in English yet because it is fairly new and none of the pieces have been translated yet into English - The Kenzaburo Oe Prize.]

Revival And Survival: A New Online Bookstore for Quake Victims

[As reported by friend Nihon Distractions and the Mainichi News.]

Masahiko Shimada (who we were just talking about recently) has started a new online bookstore to raise money for the victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake of last March called the Fukko Shoten. Any books bought from this store will be signed by the author and the proceeds will be donated to the Japanese Red Cross.

It's only been up and running for about a day but there are many books for sale, and it also includes a section called "Words & Bonds" which is being edited and run by author Shinji Ishii, who I'm going to talk about in a few days in the Upcoming JLPP Books series, but you can get a preview of Ishii's work by reading an excerpt from his novel Once Upon a Swing at Words Without Borders.

So far, Yoshimoto Banana and Nobuko Takagi have contributed stories (or maybe they're just op-ed pieces/essays - truth be told I haven't read them yet). Beyond that, over 130 authors are offering their books in the bookstore, including Kotaro Isaka and the authors mentioned already.

I doubt the Fukko Shoten can ship to America, but if you want to help out on this side of the Pacific, you can buy the #QuakeBook, which was put together through Twitter and run by @ourmaninabiko, with pieces contributed by the likes of William Gibson and Yoko Ono.

[Yes! Literature making a difference, you guys.]

Bungakukai: a Japanese Literary Magazine

Today I got my hands on a number of recent issues of the literary magazine Bungakukai. According to the great and powerful Wikipedia, it is one of the top five most prestigious literary journals of Japan, the others being Gunzo, Shincho, Subaru, and Bungei. I'd only heard of Gunzo before because I've read about Haruki Murakami being published in it.

It is very much like an American literary journal, but a bit larger than the ones I've come across - it's a good 340 pages (for instance, Glimmer Train comes in at a little over 200; Paris Review certainly felt smaller when I held it in my hands at the bookstore a few weeks ago). It has short stories, poetry, serialized parts of longer novels, interviews, and essays. Also, they all have the same type of cover - that of large, scary-looking sculptures of various animals with the same zombie bugged out eyes.

Another cool thing about Bungakukai, especially in comparison to American literary journals, is that it comes out monthly. Not quarterly, or trimester-ly. I have no clue how well these magazines sell or how easy it is find them when in bookstores (I never thought to look for them when I was in Japan) but you would think that they're a bit more popular than our American counterparts.

Here in front of me I have the newest issue, that is, April 2011. There's some interesting stuff here, and a lot of names I recognize. The following is just a small portion of what it has to offer:

• The "headline" so to speak is a new novel(la?) by Yoshimoto Banana called Juujuu ("Sizzle sizzle") - described as taking place at a steak house in Shitamachi. It's advertised as being 200 pages, but takes up only 60 in the journal - but each page has two columns so maybe that translates to 200 regular, paperback sized pages.

• There's also a part of a serialized novel (part 11) by Masahiko Shimada  called 傾国子女Keikokushijo （"Prostitute children"?)

• A conversation between Itoi Shigesato (essayist and Earthbound creator!) and Genichiro Takahashi called (maybe this is not what the Japanese is going for, but it sounds right to me, and also hilarious) "To 'Sayonara', or not to 'Sayonara': 30 Years of Japan and After." Described as: "The first dialogue between two people who together washed away the limelight of the '80s and ran through 30 years of Japan." I think this has something (everything) to do with the live tweet marathon Takahashi did at Itoi's office to promote his latest volume of literary criticism called "Sayonara, Japan: Japanese Novels 2."

There's of course, much much more, but these are the things that jump at me, since these are the names I can recognize in Japanese.

Still, pretty neat, yeah? Maybe I'll do this again with some of my other volumes. Let me know if any of you out there are even interested.