Surrealism, cafes and lots (and lots) of cats: why Japanese fiction is booming | Fiction in translation
Anyone who has been in a bookshop in the last few years will have noticed that Japanese fiction is experiencing an extraordinary boom. In 2022, figures from Nielsen BookScan showed that Japanese fiction represented 25% of all translated fiction sales in the UK. The dominance is even more striking this year: figures obtained by the Guardian show that, of the top 40 translated fiction titles for 2024 so far, 43% are Japanese, with Asako Yuzuki’s satirical, socially conscious crime novel Butter topping the list. Butter also won the breakthrough author award at this year’s Books Are My Bag readers awards, which are curated by booksellers and voted for by the public.
The popularity of modern Japanese fiction is not a new phenomenon in the UK, of course. In the 1990s, two writers broke through and became cult hits in this country. Haruki Murakami, a worldwide literary phenomenon, took off in Britain when Harvill Press published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in 1998. Scott Pack, who ran Waterstones’ buying team in the early 2000s, is a big Murakami fan and remembers giving him “lots of attention. Whatever books of his came out, we got massively behind.” This week, Murakami publishes his 15th novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls, about a man who travels to a mysterious walled town in pursuit of the woman he loves, finding himself in a strange world of libraries, maps and dreams. So what’s behind the lasting success of Murakami’s books, which tend to combine lonely protagonists, jazz, cats, and fantasy elements? “It’s fairly accessible, weird shit,” Pack says.
But, he adds, Banana Yoshimoto got there first. “It’s really important to point out that she predates Murakami.” Yoshimoto came into English translation in the late 1980s and early 90s with books including Kitchen and Lizard, her work often featuring alienated young women trying to overcome personal tragedy.
Murakami and Yoshimoto have something else in common: both were criticised in a 1990 essay by Kenzaburō Ōe, the Japanese Nobel prize-winning author. Their works, he said, “convey the experience of a youth politically uninvolved or disaffected, content to exist with an adolescent or post-adolescent subculture”. Many elements that unite Murakami and Yoshimoto’s fiction – alienation, surrealism, resisting social expectations – are present in today’s bestselling Japanese titles. But it is only in the past decade that a wider range of Japanese authors has taken off here. There has been a huge growth in Japanese crime fiction, both classic and contemporary: joining Yuzuki’s Butter in this year’s top 20 translated fiction titles is Seichō Matsumoto’s golden age crime novel, Tokyo Express. There has also been a surge in literary fiction, often from female perspectives, by writers including Sayaka Murata, Hiromi Kawakami and Mieko Kawakami.
Publishing Murata’s Convenience Store Woman in 2018 was a “a watershed moment”, says Jason Arthur, associate publishing director at Granta. The novel, which follows Keiko, a 36-year-old woman who struggles to fit in but finds contentment in routine work at a small shop, was the first of three Murata titles published by Granta – the others are Earthlings and Life Ceremony – that have now sold more than half a million copies. “She is a phenomenon,” says Arthur. “The role of Convenience Store Woman in the Japanese literature boom really can’t be overstated,” agrees Alison Fincher, who runs the Read Japanese Literature website and podcast.
The success of Murata’s books is “really astonishing”, says Ginny Tapley Takemori, Murata’s English translator, who has lived in Tokyo for 20 years. People tend to see Convenience Store Woman as a book about autism, she says, “which was not what Sayaka necessarily intended, but she doesn’t mind people seeing it that way. She shows us that what we take for granted as normal is not actually normal at all.”
Takemori has been instrumental in the drive to have more work by female writers translated, setting up the group Strong Women, Soft Power with fellow translators Lucy North and Allison Markin Powell. However, as Fincher points out, the idea that “women are being overrepresented in translation” is “absolutely not true. I think in 2023 there was parity. There isn’t this year.”
The popularity of female authors has had a knock-on effect, Fincher observes. “Publishers went from asking, ‘Can you give us another Murakami?’ to ‘Can you give us another Murata?’” The downside of this desire to build on success, however, can be the pursuit of superficial similarity – and this is evident not just in the search for the next big novel about alienation, but in the comfort books that are the true juggernauts of fiction translated from Japanese.
Known in the industry as “healing” or “heartwarming” fiction, comfort books often go unreviewed in the press but represent more than half of the bestselling Japanese fiction titles this year. There are recurring motifs: coffee shops (Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold); bookstores and libraries (Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking for Is in the Library); and, most of all, cats (Makato Shinkai’s She and Her Cat).
One of the most successful UK publishers of Japanese comfort books is Doubleday, where Jane Lawson is deputy publisher. Lawson grew up in Japan, and when she was a junior editor, “I was the only person looking for Japanese fiction,” she says. “I saw a copy of The Guest Cat,” Lawson recalls, referring to Takashi Hiraide’s 2001 novel, which went on to become a bestseller, and she thought, “I want to publish a book like that.” In 2017, she published the English translation of The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa, which has “gone on and on”, selling more than a million copies.
What is interesting about the comfort genre, says Lawson, is that it crosses divides, appealing to young and old alike. These books “have qualities that have always been around – like [Paulo Coelho’s] The Alchemist – but it’s been elevated and given a more cool element because of Instagram and BookTok.”
There is, Lawson acknowledges, a sniffiness about comfort books, and the cat subgenre in particular: “I don’t mind, because they’re selling so many copies. We don’t mind if people are a little bit envious or supercilious.” In fact this attitude is probably less to do with individual titles than with the sense of a bandwagon being pursued at high speed by so many publishing houses.
Publishers have been known to adapt books to appeal to established trends in Japanese fiction. Literary agent Li Kanqing, who specialises in east Asian literature, gives the example of one of her own agency’s titles, a nonfiction narrative about a female bookseller. “It has an entirely different name in Japanese, but the UK publisher changed the name to The Bookshop Woman in order to make it sound slightly similar to Convenience Store Woman.” (The book is, Kanqing acknowledges, “selling really well”.)
The cat motif on a cover is now so powerful that, as book blogger and Japanese fiction enthusiast Tony Malone points out, the presence of cats within the novel itself is superfluous. He recently read Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morasaki Bookshop, the fifth bestselling translated fiction title of 2024. “There’s a cat on the cover. There is no cat in the book. Not a mention.” (The sequel, he observes, has two cats on the cover.)
“It’s not like cat books are huge in Japan,” says Takemori. “They exist, but it’s not as big a thing as is being made out in the UK.” She adds that Japanese fiction generally can be “unashamedly sentimental”, and she has translated a number of cat books, including Shinkai’s She and Her Cat. “I’m not a big fan of sentimentality,” Takemori continues, “but I do really like that little book. I had to work quite hard to avoid making it overly sentimental in English.”
Meanwhile, as Fincher points out, there are readers for whom “comfort novels are a kind of gateway into the broader world of Japanese fiction”. Their success means other, more complex, Japanese fiction is being translated that may not otherwise have seen the light of day.
The fact remains, however, that the genres of Japanese fiction that are popular in the UK – crime, young women’s literary fiction, comfort books – are “heavily curated”, as Fincher puts it, to the detriment of other genres that are popular in Japan. “We’re not seeing very much hard sci-fi, supernatural or horror. We don’t see very much romance outside of light novels and manga. Japan has a very strong tradition of historical fiction, especially the samurai novels. We don’t see those.” Li Kanqing agrees. “There are books selling hugely in Japan that don’t travel well. Short story collections don’t sell.”
Aside from the dominance of a few genres, is there something else about the themes or style of Japanese literature that appeals to readers here? Fincher points out that a novel she read in 2018, Hybrid Child by Mariko Ōhara, about a cross-gendered robot and AI, was published in Japan in 1990. “And I realised that Japanese literature started coping with these late-stage capitalist issues, and these gender and feminist issues, in ways that English language literature didn’t start dealing with for two decades.”
For Kanqing, a factor is that, in modern Japanese literature, “writers are almost always coming from urban settings. And I think this urban landscape is both familiar for the audience here, and a little bit fascinating, because it’s in the east.” As Malone puts it, “what people want is an ‘otherness’ that’s not too other. A comfortable other.” For Takemori, “Japanese [literature] is much less judgmental than western literature. Western literature tends to be focused on whether things are good or evil. Whereas in Japan, the border between good and evil is much more blurred: evil characters often have something good about them; good characters are often flawed. The endings of novels are much more open.”
But in an industry driven by trends, is Japanese fiction in danger of losing its appeal? Has it already peaked? “There are always waves in publishing,” says Kanqing. “It will pass one day. I’m totally fine with cat books passing like sand.” But other Japanese books, she says, will stay. She predicts that Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void, about a young woman who rebels against society by pretending to be pregnant, “will enter literary studies”. Granta’s Jason Arthur believes we are “at the crest of a huge wave”. Granta, he says, will “always be publishing Japanese fiction, but I think after a few corporate publishers put a lot behind some books that don’t work, they will lose interest.”
Ultimately, what sells fiction, whether from Japan or other countries, whether cat books or crime, is its universality across genre and language. As Fincher observes of Murata’s work, it tells us that “we’re all a little bit weird, and human society is weird, and this is all of us in this story”.
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