Beyond the classics: a New York publisher is bent on selling Japan's fiction

Japan, Inc., July, 2004 by Bruce Rutledge

While Japanese anime, manga and pop art creep into the North American mainstream, most of the nation's novelists remain virtual unknowns in the West. Beyond Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto and Kenzaburo Oe is a whole world of the imagination that has been locked away in a box reserved for Japanese readers. Vertical Inc. of New York has decided it's time to unlock it.

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ARTHUR WALEY'S 1925 English translation of The Tale of Genji had an initial print run of just 2,500 copies, according to Japan scholar and Columbia University professor Donald Keene. Fifteen hundred copies were sent to the UK, and 1,000 to the US. When those sold out, an additional print run of 500 was ordered. There just wasn't much appetite in the West for Japanese literature in those days.

Around the same time, the Japanese could browse through the Japanese translations of the latest novels by Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos at their local bookstores. In fact, they could read everything from the dime novels of Bertha M. Clay, a nineteenth century writer of sappy love stories, to the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Even today, Japan's bookstores offer perhaps the most open marketplace for ideas in the world. "I've been told that if one could only read in one's own language, one could read more of the literature of the world in Japanese than in any other language," Keene told an audience at Portland State University in early May. "The most untranslatable works have been translated. James Joyce's Ulysses has been translated into Japanese three times, each time by outstanding writers. There's even a translation of Finnegan's Wake."

Although this translation imbalance has been somewhat corrected in the decades after World War II, the Japan Foundation reports that for every Japanese book translated into a foreign language today, 20 foreign works are translated into Japanese. And yet Japan makes up a significant 10 percent of the world's publishing business.

Why aren't more Japanese books translated into English? This question puzzled former Nihon Keizai Shimbunsha book editor Hiroki Sakai for years. In 1999, he decided to find the answer for himself.

Sakai founded Vertical [www.verticalinc.com] in 2001 to publish Japanese works of fiction in English. His ambitious but small publishing house is taking on the daunting task of translating and publishing as many as 100 books from Japanese writers in the next few years. Some of the names--Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy, and Koji Suzuki, of Ringu fame, for example--will be familiar to casual Japan watchers. But others are relative unknowns beyond Japan's shores. Kaori Ekuni, Kenzo Kitakata, Taichi Yamada and Joh Sasaki are just a few of the writers whose works are being translated and published by Vertical.

Sakai started Vertical with money from Itochu International and Nikkei BP. "We needed to spend money one or two years before the books came out," he said in a phone interview from New York. "We are planning to increase in size, so we are calling out to potential investors now. Since we don't have a big hit yet, we have to keep putting out books."

Sakai moved from Tokyo to New York in 1999 to see if he could find a way to get more Japanese books into the hands of English readers. At first, he ran a company that translated Japanese works, then tried to sell them to big publishing houses. He quickly began to experience firsthand the obstacles that keep more books from being translated into English.

"It was difficult to get a translator to do a first-rate job on a work that may never be published," he recalls. "There was little incentive. Also, the publishers didn't read Japanese, and at times they would try to 'fix' the translated work. I began to think, this is exhausting work!"

In 2001, Sakai decided that to get more Japanese works published in English, he'd have to do it himself. Once he established Vertical, some key pieces began falling into place for him.

First, editorial director Ionnas Mentzas joined the team. Mentzas grew up in Kobe and was a published translator when he joined Vertical. Without him, Sakai says, Vertical would not exist. "The two of us have discussions to decide what to publish," Sakai says. "We're not concerned with whether a writer is famous or if the book is a bestseller in Japan. Rather, we think about what will sell in the American mass market."

This is some of what Mentzas and Sakai have come up with so far: The first four installments of Buddha, a series of graphic novels by Osamu Tezuka; Ring and Spiral, by Koji Suzuki; the first four books of The Guin Saga, a still unfinished epic of 100 installments, by Kaoru Kurimoto; Sayonara, Gangsters, a postmodern work featuring a poetry teacher and a gang that kills a series of US presidents, by Genichiro Takahashi; Twinkle Twinkle, the story of a modern marriage unraveled by the dark secrets between the husband and wife, by Kaori Ekuni; and Ashes, a hardboiled novel by Kenzo Kitakata, who has published more than 100 novels but never had any of them translated into English until now.