Roland Kelts's Blog, page 71
June 10, 2011
Latest Yomiuri on TokyoPop, SakuraCon, Kodansha International--and the chasm
SOFT POWER HARD TRUTHS / Japan's pop industries: blind at home, beloved overseas
Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri
By now it's no secret to anyone with a high-speed Internet connection: The gap between the popularity of contemporary Japanese culture overseas and its anemic industries at home has become a chasm.
Anime conventions in the United States continue to proliferate, not only in cosmopolitan coastal cities like New York, Boston and Los Angeles, but also in more rural areas in Ohio and Tennessee. Annual attendance at these conventions is record-breaking. Sakura-Con in Seattle in late April, the convention I most recently attended as a guest, tallied 19,040 individual attendees this year. Elmira Utz of the Asia-Northwest Cultural Education Association, a host of Sakura-Con, notes that their celebration of Japanese pop culture fed roughly 50 million dollars into Seattle's economy from 2006 to 2010. Not sneeze-worthy numbers in post-Lehman shock economies.
Yet here in Japan, the news on the ground continues to be bleak. Anime studios underpay their younger staffers, who often quit as a result, and aging producers are desperately seeking solutions amid a diminishing youth market. Manga publishers, like all publishers, are watching print sales tank.
The pressure on U.S. distributors of manga, anime and other J-pop products has proved unbearable in recent cases. TokyoPop, a trailblazing distributor and publishers of manga and anime in the United States, responsible for global versions of the Sailor Moon series, closed its manga publishing division for good two months ago.
"I'm laying down my guns," wrote founder Stu Levy, who built his company from scratch in 1997. "Some of it worked. Some of it didn't." [more here]
June 9, 2011
New Travel Column in Paper Sky
June 6, 2011
Books RX, from Seattle's Chinmusicpress, includes the MONKEY
Bruce Rutledge, founder of Seattle-based independent book publisher Chin Music Press and editor of Ibuki magazine, has launched an innovative new approach to independent book publishing:
Mail-Order Medicine For Your Mind!
Announcing BooksRX In 2010, small independent publisher Bellevue Literary Press won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with Paul Harding's Tinkers – the first time a small press had won the award since 1981! In 2011, the media bombards us with tales of Amazon's digital books gobbling up demand for the printed page, and yet small presses continue to pop up all over the US and Canada.
With the book business in a state of flux, we here at Chin Music Press believe that independent publishers are poised to carry the banner of the publishing world far into the 21st century. We are fortunate to find ourselves in a literal consortium of visionary presses who refuse to believe the media's Doomsday prophecies foretelling the slow demise of the printed book. In fact, we're convinced that our fellow indie publishers offer the perfect elixirs for eager readers and despairing booksellers alike.
Beginning June 1, Chin Music Press will offer BooksRX, a quarterly curated collection of the best that North American independent publishers have to offer. We're excited to prescribe publishers, writers and artists whom we think should be a part of any literary medicine cabinet. BooksRX ensures that you're getting your recommended dose of vitamin READ.
"BooksRX is undoubtedly the gateway drug for unsuspecting readers into the world of independent book publishing!"
Dr. R. Max Sneezeworthy, Literary Division, US Department of Health and Human Services
Available as a single dosage (one issue) or as a full regimen (annual subscription), each installment ofBooksRX is a limited edition of 100 and arranged around a loose theme. Our first issue is inspired by our passion for finding new ways to tell stories from and about Japan.
Monkey Business: New Voices From Japan A bold new collection including short stories, poems, an interview with author Haruki Murakami and more curated by Motoyuki Shibata andTed Goossen, and presented by A Public Space An exclusive hand-numbered, signed and limited edition giclee print from L.J.C. Shimoda , fine artist and illustrator of OH! a mystery of mono no aware Kuhaku and Other Accounts From Japan Our first book (and manifesto to holistic book design) featuring essays and art by Roland Kelts, Craig Mod, kozyndan, Sumie Kawakami and an irreverent but highly informative glossary of Japanese terms.BooksRX is available exclusively through the Chin Music Press online store:
Single dose (one issue): $40 including shipping to US and Canada ($10 extra for shipping to international destinations)Full prescription (four quarterly issues, save $20): $140 including shipping to US and Canada, ($35 extra for shipping to international destinations)A carefully edited selection including two dynamic books featuring new voices from Japan paired with an exclusive hand-numbered and signed art print!
More: Chin Music Press · Online Store
600 North 36th Street, #212, Seattle, WA 98103
Japanamerica appearances @ Otakon 2011, July 29-31
Photo by: Matthias Ley
Writer, Author, Lecturer
Roland Kelts is a half-Japanese American writer, editor and lecturer who divides his time between New York and Tokyo. He is the author of
May 31, 2011
Japanamerica talk @ Meiji Univeristy, July 25
for Cool Japan Summer Program 2011 Date: Tuesday, July 25 Lecturer: Roland Kelts
Roland Kelts is a half-Japanese American writer, editor and lecturer who divides his time between New York and Tokyo. He is the author of <<http://www.scpr.org/programs/madeleine-brand/2011/02/15/sometimes-comedy-doesnt-travel-pacific-rim-diary-w/>," and the author of a weekly column for<http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/features/arts/T110214005577.htm> The Daily Yomiuri newspaper. His latest project is the English edition of the Japanese literary culture magazine,
<http://www.apublicspace.org/pre-order_monkey_business.html> Monkey Business, and his blog is:
May 27, 2011
Monkey Business Tokyo launch event, June 12
本を読むだけでは飽き足らない！文学、アート、映画、音楽、ストリートカルチャー他
タワーレコードならではの分野のスペシャリストをお招きしてお贈りする定例イベント。
教養は大人の嗜み、生の言葉の価値を一緒に感じてみませんか？
ユニークな文芸誌『モンキービジネスの英語版』が生まれました！
ブルックリンの人気文芸誌『A Public Space』の協力で、年一回、
日本版のなかからベストの作品を選りすぐって刊行。第1号は4月に
ニューヨークの書店に登場、ゴールデンウィークには小澤實、川上弘美、
古川日出男、スティーヴ・エリクソン、レベッカ・ブラウン、といった面々が
参加して刊行記念イベントが行われ、大好評を博しました。今回
TOWER BOOKSには英語版編集者のテッド・グーセン、柴田元幸が
登場、刊行に漕ぎ着けるまでの涙の物語を語ります！！
*******************************************
猿、アメリカに行く --『モンキービジネス』英語版刊行を記念して
出演： 柴田元幸（東京大学教授、翻訳家）
テッド・グーセン（ヨーク大学教授、日本文学研究者、翻訳家）
日時： 2011年6月12日（日） 16：00スタート
場所： タワーレコード渋谷店 7F TOWER BOOKS
トーク終了後にサイン会を予定しております
サイン会参加券は対象商品いずれかをお買い上げの方に差し上げます
観覧フリー
座ってご覧いただけるお席の数には限りがございます。
お座席のご予約はお電話でも承ります
ご予約は タワーレコード渋谷店 03-3496-3661
*******************************************
【出演者プロフィール】
柴田元幸（しばた・もとゆき）
(c)島袋里美
東京大学教授。ポール・オースター、スティーブン・ミルハウザー、
スチュアート・ダイベックなどアメリカ文学の翻訳多数。季刊文芸誌
『モンキービジネス』（ヴィレッジブックス）責任編集。
テッド・グーセン（Ted Goosen)
ヨーク大学（トロント）教授。英訳日本文学アンソロジーの定番
『The Oxford Book of Japanese Shortstories』編者。
志賀直哉、村上春樹、井伏鱒二らの作品をいち早く翻訳している。
今回の『モンキービジネス』英語版では、ほとんどの作品を翻訳する大活躍。
『Monkey Business new writings from japan』
Vol.1 2011
輸入雑誌 ￥1,575（税込）
絶賛発売中！！！
Online here
May 18, 2011
May 15, 2011
Me on Monkey in Daily Yomiuri
SOFT POWER HARD TRUTHS / Fantasy, art--and the real Japan
Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri
For several years, I have been trying to marry my two chief interests in Japan's contemporary culture--its popular arts, represented by anime, manga, fashion and design, and its literary voices: fiction writers and poets whose visions of a surreal 21st century Japan use postmodern conceits with a preternatural calm, as if skies full of falling frogs (Haruki Murakami) and swimmers with suddenly detached limbs (Yoko Ogawa) were perfectly commonplace in today's Nippon. In my book, Japanamerica, and in my lectures, I incorporate comments from Murakami and woodblock prints by Katsushika Hokusai alongside stories about Osamu Tezuka and Hayao Miyazaki, with splashes of Pokemon, Naruto and Hello Kitty. If I'm successful, the integration feels organic. If not, I feel like a hustler.
But last week, I had the good fortune to participate in an evening that gracefully wedded both. Amid a series of events in New York City to launch Monkey Business: New Voices from Japan, the first English-language edition of a Japanese literary magazine by University of Tokyo scholar and literary translator Motoyuki Shibata and York University scholar and translator Ted Goossen, I shared the stage with Shibata, American novelist Steve Erickson and Japanese novelist Hideo Furukawa to talk about storytelling. [Full disclosure: I am invovled in the publication as a curator and contributing editor.] We focused on the visual elements of all narratives--fiction, manga, film, woodblock prints and scroll painting. Miraculously, it all made sense.
The English edition of Monkey Business contains a manga created by a sibling team of artists called the Brother and Sister Nishioka and based on Franz Kafka's story, "The Country Doctor."
It also includes Furukawa's spastically apocalyptic short story, "Monsters," in which the eponymous creatures have overtaken Tokyo's most famous neighborhoods, Ginza and Shibuya, and express deep longing and exasperation about what the humans have left behind. And Furukawa's conversation with Murakami is the centerpiece of a thrilling manuscript.
With all the news from Japan about ongoing aftershocks, the nuclear threat in Fukushima, and rising casualties in Tohoku, the opportunity to bring together manga, anime and literature in a peaceful setting was an inspiring gift.
By sheer coincidence, I've been in the United States since the Tohoku quake and tsunami hit, having flown out of Tokyo 24 hrs. before ... [more here]
May 12, 2011
Moto on the Monkey in Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun
