Factbook

A Dynamic Compendium of Interesting Japanese Literary and Publishing Facts
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    Japanese authors in the 1800s turned tuberculosis into a romantic condition[UPDATED: 9-18-2020]

    In Japan’s Meiji era (1868-1912) when the nation was rapidly modernising after more than 250 years of isolation, Western influences were extremely strong. These spanned almost everything – even literary perceptions of tuberculosis, which was originally stigmatised in Japan.

    The disease became a romantic condition with titles such as Hototogisu, referred to in English as The Cuckoo or Nami-Ko: A Realistic Novel, penned in 1899, by Roka Tokutomi (1868-1927).

    Hototogisu, one of the first of this genre depicting tuberculosis, was published long before Thomas Mann’s (1875-1955) famous novel, The Magic Mountain, which was published in German in 1924, and is considered a classic of this genre.

    The Magic Mountain, a favourite of contemporary Japanese authors, such as Haruki Murakami, uses the experiences of a young man at a Swiss sanatorium to depict the microcosm of Europe and the ideologies of the time.

    Hototogisu, on-the-other-hand is the tragic tale, of a young woman called Namiko who contracts tuberculosis, that blends grief, and love with tragic realism in its narrative. 

    A digital edition of an English translation published in 1904 under the title Nami-Ko, translated by Sakae Shioya (1873-1961) and E. F. Edgett (1867-1946), is available online.

    The author writes in its introduction: “it was not to reveal our life and customs to the foreigner that Nami-Ko was written however, for at the time of its writing, four years ago, I did not dream that it would ever be translated, or, indeed that it would ever reach the popularity it has gained in my country”.

    According to Nobue Urushihara Urvil, an academic at the University of Texas, in modern Japanese literature, tuberculosis was a special subject. In addition to the romanticised images of the illness, what is characteristic of the construction of tuberculosis in Japanese literature is its association with the concept of the individual or self. 

    “Tuberculosis in literature of the time was celebrated as a tool to conceive the inferiority of [the] modern person. Tuberculosis was an important theme in an enormous number of works of literature including novels, short stories, haiku poems, free-style poetry, and essays”, according to Urvil.

    Many Japanese writers were themselves suffering from tuberculosis and most of them who had it died from the disease. A good by tragic example of this is Masaoka Shiki (1867-1907) considered one of the four great haiku masters who a close and influential friend of Soseki Natsume (1867-1916) who himself is often referred to as Japan’s greatest modern novelist.

    Shiki, who was only 34 when he died, studied alongside Soseki in high school and also at Tokyo Imperial University. His penname Shiki can also be read as hotogisu, cuckoo, and according to legend in Japan this bird coughs up blood when it sings.

    Nonetheless, not all diseases were treated the same way by Japan’s Meiji era authors. In contrast, syphilis, which some famous Japanese authors are known to have had, as well as leprosy (Hansen’s Disease), were generally not depicted in works of fiction, and when they were, they were not usually seen as romantic or philosophical diseases that portrayed the human condition, and the peripheral and margins of society. 

    That said, the world’s first cell phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, Deep Love, released in 2003 treated AIDS as a romantic and tragic condition with echoes of Hototogisu in its narrative. Written by a 30-year-old Japanese man, it’s a gritty young-adult novel about a girl who turns to prostitution to pay for her boyfriend’s heart surgery, and tragically dies after she contracts AIDS. 

    The 2020 pandemic, caused by the coronavirus (Covid-19), immediately spawned reading lists on social media as well as book recommendations from independent bookshops and newspapers including lists such as: Pandemics: An Essential Reading List ; Your Quarantine Reader, and Your coronavirus reading list: reader suggestions to bring joy in difficult times.

    These lists include famous titles such as: A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) published in 1722, The Plague by Albert Camus (1913-1960) , Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and even occasionally books by Japanese authors, Ascendance of a Bookworm by Miya Kazuki for instance. 

    Unsurprisingly, the lists have generated new interested in and demand for these titles. Camus’ novel started flying off the shelves in Japan in March 2020 at the height of news about the virus, for example, leading to Shinchosha, Camus’ Japanese publisher, to order a reprint. 

    New ‘Lockdown Literature’ is bound to start appearing in Japan and elsewhere in different forms and formats, but whether the canon of ‘Corona-Literature’ to come will be defined by a narrative or author that treats the virus as a romantic condition, like tuberculosis, or focuses on the self, relationships at a distance or social distancing in our social media age is something that future generations of readers will determine.
    Japanese authors in the 1800s turned tuberculosis into a romantic condition Posted by Richard Nathan
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    More than 50 Japanese authors have killed themselves since 1900[UPDATED: 9-11-2020]

    Research shows that at least 54 Japanese authors have committed suicide since 1900. This includes some of Japan’s most famous and highly regarded authors and one of its two Nobel prize winners, Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), as well as Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) after whom one of Japan’s most prestigious literary prizes is named. 

    Another very well known example is Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) who famously and publicly committed suicide. His spectacular death, age 45, in November two month before his birthday, made international news and confirmed his position as Japan’s most internationally famous individual and notorious author.

    Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) author of the novel No Longer Human, which alongside Dazai himself, is often cited by contemporary male Japanese writers as their favorite, also killed himself. Dazai, who attempted suicide several times from an early age, idolized Ryunosuke Akutagawa, whose death in 1927 had a very profound and terrible impact on him. 

    Sadly, Dazai’s own death in turn had a terrible impact on Hidemitsu Tanaka (1913-1949), the Olympic rower and novelist he mentored, who also killed himself. Tanaka wrote two Olympic related novels Orinposu no Kajitsu, The Fruit of Olympus, (1940) and Tantei Soshu, The Boat Rower, (1944). Tanaka killed himself at Dazai’s grave the year after Dazai’s death. 

    There is no doubt over how these four famous authors died, but Kawabata’s suicide is considered by some, including his wife, as accidental. Nevertheless, his death and the circumstances were reported widely and internationally as suicide in publications such as The New York Times, for instance. 

    Kawabata helped Mishima at several important points in his life and the two were close. Kawabata officiated at Mishima’s funeral, which was attended by thousands. However, unlike Mishima, Kawabata was at the end for his career and in poor heath when he died on the 16 April 1972, 17 months after Mishima. 

    Other well known Japanese authors included in the list of more than 50 authors who reportedly killed themselves are Takeo Arishima (1878-1923), Tamaki Hara (1905-1951) Ashihei Hino (1907-1960), Izumi Suzuki (1949-1986) and Hisashi Nozawa (1960-2004). And no doubt other lesser known and aspiring authors make have also taken their own lives.

    Japan is often associated with suicide partly due to its Kamikaze pilots in the war and stories about famous Samurai warriors. However, it does, in fact have a higher suicide rate than many nations.

    According to OECD data, Japan’s suicide rate is 18.7 per 100,000 one of the world’s highest rates amongst the nations surveyed by the OECD, and about 60 percent higher than the world average, but behind South Korea, which has an even higher rate at 28.7.

    People often cite Japan’s long tradition of an ‘honourable suicide’ as one reason for the high rate and also the lack of the Christian concept of sin and suicide being one such sin.
    More than 50 Japanese authors have killed themselves since 1900 Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Many of Japan’s most interesting creative writers cite ‘No Longer Human’ by Osamu Dazai as their favourite book or one that had a huge influence on them[UPDATED: 5-29-2020]

    According to Fuminori Nakamura, one of the most exciting new generation of Japanese authors, his only escape when he was young was reading, and the one book that really resonated for him, was No Longer Human (Ningen shikkaku), by Osamu Dazai (1909-1948). 

    Many other leading Japanese authors say something similar when asked about influential books or authors. The multi award-winning author Shusuke Michio, for instance admits that No Longer Human was the first novel he read after his “bookworm girlfriend” in high school gave him a copy changing the course of his life. Up until that point he had been more interested in music and being in a band than books. 

    Dazai is an author who seems to fascinate many of Japan’s commercially successful and brilliantly creative male contemporary writers. They seem to find echoes of themselves in him and this novel in particular about a reclusive young man who feels “disqualified from being human” but finds solace in literature. 

    Ryu Murakami, author of Tokyo Decadence and Coin Locker Babies, who is from an older generation than Michio and Nakamura, is another example of a high profile award-winning author who has been influenced by Dazai.

    Reviewers have described him as: “Dazai’s true spiritual heir: a worldly, unshockable writer whose natural milieu lurks in the degeneracy of the world around him”, a moniker that he would no doubt be delighted by.  
    Many of Japan’s most interesting creative writers cite ‘No Longer Human’ by Osamu Dazai as their favourite book or one that had a huge influence on them Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Japan’s first generation of postmodern authors grew up listening to Bob Dylan and the Beatles[UPDATED: 2-26-2020]

    The generation of Japanese authors that grew up in the 1960s, including some internationally renowned names like Kiyoshi Kasai, Haruki Murakami, Kenji Nakagami, Masahiko Shimada, Soji Shimada and Genichiro Takahashi, are sometimes referred to by academics as Japan’s first postmodern authors.

    They were all born after the Second World War, experienced the student movements of the 1960s, and grew up during a period when Japan was rebuilding and growing in confidence.

    Their worldview and experiences were very distinct from the generation of authors that preceded them, who witnessed devastation and national defeat. Authors like Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) and Yukio Mishima (1925-1970).

    Japan’s so-called first postmodern authors grew up in an optimistic period heavily influenced by the United States and a growing mass market that included new American pulp-fiction arriving in Japan in translation. The influence of Western music, literature, film and television would have been significant.

    As is often the case in Japan after an initial period of digestion that involved imitation and experimentation local creative communities, including the nation’s writers and storytellers, started to develop their own approaches and styles. 

    These postmodern authors were the first generation to grow up listening to the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, which many of them became ardent fans of.

    The guitar-playing Beatles-loving so-called master of post-modern Japanese whodunnits, Soji Shimada, who is credited with inventing a new sub-genre of murder mysteries, is for example, on record saying that one of his dreams has been to sing If I Fell (A Hard Day’s Night) in chorus, as a duet, with Paul McCartney.

    Shimada also cites many Western films, such as Slueth directed by Joesph L. Mankiewicza and staring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, as influences.

    Their writing styles and narratives, which authors such as Murakami for instance have woven musical influences into sometimes for simple effect and at other times as a literary device, evolved and developed to mirror and document Japan’s social and economic changes.

    Works by these post-modern Japanese authors now span different genre and periods including, for example, the inflation and subsequent collapse of Japan’s economic bubble in the 1990s that led to Japan’s so-called Lost Decade (1991-2000).

    These rhythms of change combined with different Western, often American, motifs have fascinated many outside Japan, including documentary makers at the BBC. As well as academics and filmmakers from other countries including Denmark, who have looked to these authors and their works, especially Murakami’s, in order to explain and explore contemporary Japan and its Heisei Period (1989-2019) in particular.

    In 2019, the Asahi Shimbun surveyed 120 experts, who had contributed book reviews to this important national Japanese newspaper about their choice for the best book from the Heisei period. 1Q84 by Murakami topped the list, which will no doubt encourage even more journalists, academics and historians to use his works in particular to depict and understand both postmodern Japan and postmodern Japanese literature.

    Japan’s first generation of postmodern authors grew up listening to Bob Dylan and the Beatles Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Japan’s only convicted cannibal, who lives at large and now describes himself as a food critic, has written more than 20 books[UPDATED: 6-7-2019]

    Issei Sagawa killed and cannibalised a Dutch woman when he was living, and studying for a PhD in French literature, in Paris in 1981. The 25 year-old Dutch woman he murdered was his classmate at the Sorbonne. 

    Sagawa was found legally insane and unfit to stand trial in Paris. He was subsequently deported to Japan where he was initially housed in a mental hospital in Tokyo. 

    However, as the French authorities reportedly sealed all the court papers, dropped the charges, and did not hand over documents to the Japanese authorities, he could not legally be detained in Japan. 

    He was therefore in the unusual position of being able to check himself out of the Tokyo hospital in Japan in 1986, one year after he returned to Japan, and live at large. 

    Despite much criticism, there was apparently nothing that the Japanese authorities could do instantly making Sagawa even more famous. Sagawa’s notoriety helped him became a minor celebrity. 

    Today he is described on book and social media sites that promote the 20 or more books he has written since his return from France, as an essayist, author and food critic. 

    In addition to the many books he has written, he has penned restaurant reviews for the Japanese magazine Spa, starred in pornographic films, been a panellist on television talk shows and has even been featured in a lyric in a song by the Rolling Stones:  Too Much Blood (‘And when he ate her he took her bones/To the Bois de Boulogne’). 

    Sagawa, now wheelchair bound, lives with his brother outside Tokyo and still responds to media requests for interviews.
    Japan’s only convicted cannibal, who lives at large and now describes himself as a food critic, has written more than 20 books Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Japan’s most prolific male and female authors have written 1,000 books[UPDATED: 12-27-2018]

    Jiro Akagawa and Kaoru Kurimoto are Japan’s most prolific authors and have written around 1,000 titles between them. 

    Akagawa has written more than 530 books and sold millions of copies. His first published short story in 1976 Yūrei Ressha, Ghost Train, which was awarded the All Yomimono Mystery Prize for New Writers, helped launch his career.  

    Akagawa’s two major series are: the Mike-Neko Holmes, Holmes, the Tortoiseshell Cat, series, which contains 35 novels and 14 collections of short-stories and the series; Three Sisters Investigates, which includes 23 novels. He has won and been nominated for many important literary prizes and had his books adapted for film and made into video games. At pixel time he continues to write. 

    Kaoru Kurimoto (1953-2009) wrote more than 400 books, but also had a second pen name Azusa Nakajima. When books published under both names are added together she probably wrote approximately 500 titles. Her most famous series is a 130-volume series called Guin Saga. The series has sold in the millions.

    Like many other famous Japanese authors, she studied literature at Wasada University. She wrote across different genres and won several literary prizes including the Edogawa Rampo Prize and the Gunzo Prize for New Writers. 

    Another prolific Japanese author from a much earlier period is Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848) who wrote 470 books with titles such as: Strange Tales of the Crescent Moon and The Chronicles of the Eight Dog Heroes of the Satomi Clan of Nanos, which took almost three decades to compete and consists of 106 volumes. This work by Bakin has been highly influential and adapted many times. Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), for example, one of Japan’s most internationally famous authors, adapted it for kabuki, and it has been adapted for anime as well. 

    In comparison, the British author Barbara Cartland (1901-2000) published 722 books, an estimated one book every 40 days during her career. Agatha Christie (1890-1979), another British author, who is often cited as the World’s most published and translated author, wrote 19 plays and 69 books. 

    Christie is reported to have sold 4 billion books, four times the number of books distributed in Japan each year. Cartland and Christie are both listed in the Guinness Book of Records.

    Corin Telledo (1927-2009) is also listed and is considered the most read author in the Spanish language and successful author in terms of the number of Spanish language books written and sold. She published thousands of novellas during her career, mostly romances.  
    Japan’s most prolific male and female authors have written 1,000 books Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Japanese literature and creative writing is being exploited cleverly to attract more tourists to the country[UPDATED: 5-28-2018]

    Literary tourism is now a growing part of what is known in Japan as kontentsu tsurizumu (contents tourism). The term is used to describe tourism inspired by popular culture and includes both literary tourism and film-induced tourism. 

    It is defined by academics, who run The International Journal of Contents Tourism, as “travel behaviour motivated fully or partially by narratives, characters, locations, and other creative elements of popular culture forms, including television, film, television dramas, manga, anime, novels, and computer games”. 

    Historically, books like Snow Country by the Nobel prize-winner Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) have been used to market hot spring resorts such as Yuzawa Onsen, in Niigata Prefecture, that feature in the book, but literature in all its forms is increasingly being used very creatively as part of the government’s Cool Japan branding campaign to project soft power and increase Japan’s inbound tourism. 

    The local government in Kagawa Prefecture, for example, sponsored a series of four romantic novels set in their prefecture, Japan’s smallest, by Thai authors titled: Kagawa, Let Love Lead. 

    Thailand is an important and growing market for Japanese fiction in translation, as well as a rapidly growing source for inbound tourists since visa restrictions were lifted in 2013. 

    Tourism has become a strategic priority and economically important to many regions in Japan. The number of tourists has trebled over the last five years, reaching an estimated 28.7 million in 2017. Local officials hope that the specially commissioned novels will increase awareness of their region and inspire more people to visit. 

    There are now a plethora of literature-related tours in Japan. You might for instance, want to follow the steps of haiku poets, discover the locations in Haruki Murakami’s novels, or go in search of those locations that feature in Japanese crime fiction popular in China.

    There are also countless websites and posts providing recommendations on social media sites for the world’s book lovers who plan to visit Japan. So much so that Kadokawa, one of Japan’s major publishers, has set up its own travel company, Cool Japan Travel, Inc to increase demand and provide those who have embarked on a literary pilgrimage to Japan, a better and more memorable experience.  
    Japanese literature and creative writing is being exploited cleverly to attract more tourists to the country Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Three books written by English speaking non-Japanese female writers have had a massive impact on creative writing in Japan[UPDATED: 3-11-2018]

    According to industry experts and academics, the three most important books in Japanese publishing history written by non-Japanese women are: Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte; Anne of Green Gables, by LM Montgomery and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. 

    After a false start in Japan’s Meiji Period (1868-1912), the Brontes’ complete works including Jane Eyre, by Emily’s sister Charlotte, and Wuthering Heights were published in translation in the 1930s in Japan. Anne of Green Gables, was published in Japanese, as Anne of Red Hair, after the Second World War. 

    Anne’s literary ambitions, strong willed personality, and optimism struck a chord; as did the fact that, like many in post-war Japan, she was an orphan. 

    These books have led to Japanese spin-offs and adaptations, including manga and anime. And as has been the case outside Japan, have inspired new generations of authors and creative writers. For example, Takeo Kono (1926-2015), who won almost all of Japan’s major literature prizes; and Yuko Tsushima (1947-2016), author of Pregnant with a Fox, were both influenced by Emily and her sisters. 

    The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood is a fan of Anne of Green Gables and wrote on the hundredth anniversary of its publication about the importance of the book, its impact on Japan and how the bestselling manga Sailor Moon is its descendant. 

    It is, however, still far too early to known how JK Rowling and Hermione Granger and her friends will inspire the next generation of creative writers in Japan, following the amazing success of the Harry Potter books and films in Japan.
    Three books written by English speaking non-Japanese female writers have had a massive impact on creative writing in Japan Posted by Richard Nathan