Youths Kick-Start Japanese Market, China Makes the Grade, French Teacher Explores Afterlife
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).
