Record high unemployment, the stock market in freefall, an exodus of workers to Southeast Asia: Japanese economic disaster novels relating fictional yet plausible scenarios of meltdown are attracting increasing numbers of readers anxious about their future.
This literary phenomenon which has emerged since the bursting of the bubble economy of the 1980s a decade ago, has enjoyed renewed success thanks to the worsening of the Japanese economy.
The literary phenomenon of the year is Main Koda, a former bond trader at an American investment bank in Japan who has sold over 135,000 copies of her novel, Nihon Kokusai (Japanese government bonds) published last November, despite its unpromising title.
The book adopts the format of a suspense novel to tell the tale of the failure of a bond auction against the background of snowballing public debt, a banking crisis and pressure from foreign investors. Other authors are mining the same rich seam of catastrophic potential.
With about 15 published novels and essays to his name, Yoh Mizuki, 63, a former journalist on the influential Nihon Keizai Shimbun, claims to have invented "simulafiction" -- which he describes as a fictional scenario based in reality -- and is about to publish the latest example, entitled The pain of 2003.
"As a former journalist, I have my own opinion," Mizuki said. "I can draw a kind of reality which is worse than [actual] reality. People read it and naturally they don't like it and they will try to prevent this [possibility] becoming real. It is a very effective way to express my views.
"I write a viewpoint, I am not a pure novelist .... I hope the book will make people change and move," Mizuki said.
His latest book develops his "catastrophe scenario" published in July in one of the country's most respected monthly magazines, Bungei Shunju, which has already spawned two television dramas broadcast this summer. It relates the spiral into despair of a 47-year-old advertising-agency executive laid off as a result of the economic crisis and general impoverishment of the country.
Tokyo's trendy Shibuya district is buried under litter and filth and colonized by drug addicts and the high-rises on the man-made island of Odaiba in Tokyo Bay have become a favoured spot for suicides.
September 2003: the Tokyo Stock Exchange's benchmark Nikkei index approaches 5,000 (it fell below 10,000 on Sept. 12 for the first time in 17 years), deflation has pushed prices so low that bicycles and televisions can be bought for ?4,000 (US$34). Unemployment has reached 8 percent (compared to a record 5 percent now), and the jobless are fighting each other in the streets with knives.
It is the day Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government collapses after his approval rating slumps to 11 percent. The hero's family breaks up: his wife moves north to run a shop, his daughter finds a job in a factory in Malaysia, while the protagonist retreats to the village of his birth to become a potter.
Mizuki deliberately takes an extreme view because he fears the recession that Koizumi's all-encompassing reforms could trigger.
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