Readers devour tragedies, comics, an author or two
The custom is called tachi-yomi, literally standing-reading. The Japanese practice it on commuter trains, buses, street corners and in stores. Especially bookstores. With almost 100% literacy and book sales of more than $3 billion a year, Japan may have the world's most voracious readership.
The national appetite cannot be satisfied at libraries: there are only 1,300 public libraries in the country, and they account for only 1% of annual book sales. Instead, most readers head for the bibliophile's paradise, Tokyo's Kanda district, which houses hundreds of shops with miles of volumes. Here almost all the classics of Japanese and Western literature are available for about a dollar. The softcover books are wallet-size and encased at the store with a protective paper wrapper. About 10% of those volumes are titles originally published in English, German, French and Italian. Tolstoy's novels have been available for nine decades; Isaac Asimov's Foundation's Edge is now being prepared. "The number of translations is on the rise," says Hiroshi Hayakawa, an executive with the nation's major foreign book publisher. "The trouble is, you can never tell which book will become a bestseller in Japan. A popular novel in America does not necessarily sell well here. I always trust my sixth sense." Among Hayakawa's trusted novelists: John Gardner, Dick Francis, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Wambaugh.
In the U.S., publication of nonfiction outnumbers fiction 8 to 1; in Japan, "serious" novels account for 20% of new titles. Optimists regard this activity as the newest event in Japan's long history of literary interest, reaching far back past wars and courts, before the start of printing itself.
Westerners tend to locate the origin of the modern novel in the pages of Don Quixote. In fact, the first instance of fully developed narrative occurred 600 years before Cervantes in The Tale of Genji, a 1,135-page work by Lady Murasaki, a member of the court of the Empress Akiko. The 11th century work offers a panoply of "modern" elements; analyses of character, elisions of time and place, divisions into chapters.
Up to the time of The Genji, Japanese prose works of the Heian period (794-1185) derived from the legends of Japan, China and India, and from realistic poems describing past heroes and wars. The streams were united in Lady Murasaki's work.