Few modern Japanese novelists have found American audiences. Haruki Murakami, author of critically acclaimed novels like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) and A Wild Sheep Chase (Kodansha International, 1989), and Banana Yoshimoto, who wrote Kitchen (Grove Press, 1993), are among the handful who have a following in the US.
A few other publishers are trying to bring more Japanese books to English-speaking readers. The American arm of Kodansha International, a Japanese publisher, translates one or two Japanese novels a year. In January it published In the Miso Soup, a thriller set in underworld Tokyo by Ryu Murakami (no relation to Haruki).
Random House recently started a joint venture with Kodansha to publish books in Japan, and Kodansha hopes to translate some works into English.
Anyone trying to sell translations faces a difficult market. "Opening the door in many cases to a very different culture makes that aspect of the business wonderfully exciting," said John Glusman, editor in chief of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which got its start translating European literature in the 1940s. "But at the same time it's very challenging, especially from an economic view."
Much of Vertical's success will depend on the books it selects from the hundreds published in Japan every year. So far Mentzas and Sakai have chosen novels whose plots can be easily described in a few sentences and, they hope, might readily translate to film.
"If there is a lot of good Japanese writing to be translated, then I would say great," said Marty Asher, editor in chief of Vintage Books and Anchor Books, units of Random House. "But if they're just doing it because Japanese is this week's literary flavor of the month, then I would be more skeptical. I hope they find lots of treasures." (Next year Asher's Vintage, which publishes Haruki Murakami's work in paperback, will publish Out, a mystery novel by Natsuo Kirino that was first published by Kodansha in hardcover.)
Paul Anderer, a professor of Japanese literature and film at Columbia whose former students include Mentzas and a number of Vertical translators, said that he supported Vertical's efforts but that he wondered whether some of the company's novels would attract strong reviews or readers. "I'm not sure that all of the fictions, as fictions, are necessarily going to hold up, no matter how cleverly packaged or marketed," he said.
Sakai admitted that his friends in Japan think he is crazy. But that hasn't stanched his ambition. His goal? "One million copies of one title, within this year," he said. He paused. "Within several years," he appended, smiling.
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