When 19-year-old Hitomi Kanehara
and 20-year-old Risa Wataya recently became the
youngest authors ever to win the coveted Akutagawa
Prize (which helped launch the careers of greats
like Kenzaburo Oe and Ryu Murakami), the
Japanese literary scene received just the spark it needed
to ignite an unprecedented boom in book sales. Both
authors are storming up the bestseller list — compiled
by Japan’s largest wholesaler Tohan (translated
for us by Naoko Maeda of Kodansha America)
— and have become nothing less than superheroes of the
Japanese book biz, even evoking one headline that read,
“Young Women Emerge to Save Poor Literary Sales.” Wataya’s
latest, A Back(side) I Want to Kick, (900,000
copies sold) is a tale of two high-school outcasts who
become friends because of one’s obsession with a model
with whom the other had a brief encounter. Her previous
book, Install, reveals a disturbing adult world
through the eyes of a high-school girl and her younger
sidekick who make money in a pornographic chat room.
In Kanehara’s smash hit, Snakes and Earrings
(500,000 copies sold), a teenage girl meets a man with
a forked tongue and is inspired to alter her own body
with piercings and tattoos. Japan Today reports
that sales of the March issue of Bungei Shunju
magazine, which is republishing the two prize-winning
stories, have soared to nearly 1.2 million copies (nearly
double their usual sales).
An author and entrepreneur who
answers to the name Yoshi is on to something
pretty big in Japan — or as small as a cell phone, as
the case may be. He created a website in 2000 to provide
content for cell phones and then self-published his
novel Deep Love — the story of a 17-year-old
girl who finds love in a chance encounter — on the site
in installments of 1,600 characters or less. Yoshi incorporated
plot twists suggested in his readers’ emails and developed
quite a following through simple word of mouth and by
handing business cards to high school girls. The novel
sold more than a million copies when a print version
was finally published. Other authors and publishers
are catching on to this cell-phone-book mania, while
Yoshi, who seems to be one step ahead of the pack, is
already directing the film version of his novel.
And this month we present you
with our first-ever listing of Chinese bestsellers,
compiled by Open Book (see PT, March 04)
and supplied by Luc Kwanten of the Big Apple
Tuttle-Mori Agency in Shanghai. Kwanten reports
that the list reflects actual sales in the nationwide
Xinhua Bookstores as well as major bookstores
— the so-called Book Cities — in Beijing, Shanghai,
and Guangzhou, as well as a few smaller cities such
as Nanjing and Hangzhou. The categories are a little
haphazard to say the least, he adds, but it is a new
effort that is still being formalized.
Eight-year-old Nathan drowns
in a lake and is pronounced dead at the scene in French
high-school teacher Guillaume Musso’s “entrancing”
novel Afterwards..., which “oscillates between
Stephen King and Marc Lévy, but above
all, creates its own character and style.” In a supernatural
twist of fate, the boy wakes up and loses all memory
of the episode, moving on to become a successful attorney
in New York twenty years later. But, his days of prominence
and prosperity are interrupted when Nathan learns why
he had to come back to life. He meets a mysterious doctor
who claims he can sense when people are about to die.
Initially unconvinced, Nathan begins to witness some
disturbing scenes that confirm the doctor’s claims,
but the key to the doctor’s credibility lies on the
final page of the novel. This simmering mystery was
born from an actual event in Musso’s life: In 1998,
while returning from a visit to his fiancée in Nice,
he lost control of his car, and the accident inspired
him to construct a story about a man rejected by death.
Rights have been sold to seven countries, including
Germany (Bertelsmann), Italy (Rizzoli),
and Spain (Planeta). Major film producers are
already on the prowl. Contact Axelle Hardy at
XO.
There’s surely something in the
water in Germany, where Frank Schätzing’s thousand-plus-page
ecological thriller The Swarm, a “gripping cocktail
of fact, thriller and sci-fi,” has wormed its way onto
the list this month. The story opens as marine biologist
Sigur Johanson is hired by an oil company to investigate
the presence of a subaquatic worm that is breeding prolifically
and threatening the stability of the North Sea continental
shelf, not to mention the company’s oil rig. At the
same time, sea mammal expert Leon Anawak is thrown for
a loop as the whales he’s observing start attacking
ships and killing humans. An unidentified swimming object,
nicknamed the Yrr, just might be behind this “systematic
assault on mankind that will bring the world to the
brink of destruction.” Presented in short chapters with
diary-like headings, this startling look at the uncharted
depths of the ocean hearkens back to the exploration
fantasies of Jules Verne, but adds the chilling
sense that nature could unite to combat the destructive
ignorance of mankind — with catastrophic results. Well
known in Germany for his political and historical thrillers,
Schätzing conceives of plagues of biblical proportions,
including poisonous jellyfish, deadly sea-wasps, and
a horde of eyeless crabs. Offers have been submitted
from several foreign publishers, but deals are still
pending. US rights are available from Jennifer Lyons
at Writers House.
Eager to follow in the footsteps
of Ernest Hemingway who described himself in
Paris as “very poor, but very happy,” Spanish author
Enrique Vila-Matas ships off to the city of lights
where he finds himself holed up in a dreary attic —
his landlady none other than Marguerite Duras.
“Brilliantly fusing autobiography, fiction, and essay,”
Vila-Matas relates his experiences in Paris Never
Ends (which also happens to be the title of the
final chapter of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast).
Struggling to avoid a life of mediocrity, Vila-Matas
sets to work on his first novel, but more often than
not he sees himself growing “very poor and very unhappy.”
This “original slant” on the classic tale of
