“Even if you knew the language you wouldn’t recognize the book,” my visitor said to me. “It’s a book you have never written.” He explained to me that the great skill of the Japanese in manufacturing perfect facsimiles of Western products has spread to literature. A firm in Osaka has managed to get hold of the formula of Silas Flannery’s novels, and it manages to produce absolutely new ones, and first-class novels at that, so it can invade the world market.
