HERE'S A STATISTIC Hiroki Sakai and Ioannis Mentzas would like to change: for every 20 translations of foreign books published in Japan, just one Japanese book is translated into a foreign language.
Sakai, founder of Vertical, a four-year-old publisher of translations of Japanese commercial fiction, and Mentzas, Vertical's editorial director, are betting that the time is right to get a western audience hooked on Japanese books.
In the past few years, Americans, in particular, have become big consumers of Japanese pop culture, from food to film. The popularity of manga comics has been a driving force. Last year, US sales of graphic novels exceeded US$200 million, according to Publishers Weekly.
Since 2001, Vertical has been trying to harness that hip factor, bringing out a total of 20 titles, five of which are manga. 'Given how well manga was doing,' Mentzas says, 'we thought that meant there was a readership among young people who weren't turned off by Japanese culture and who felt comfortable with Japanese place names and people's names. I guess it means globalisation isn't just the Americanisation of the world.'
Sakai, a former book editor for the Japanese media giant Nikkei, came to the US in 1999 to start a literary agency dedicated to bringing Japanese works to US publishers. He recruited Mentzas, then an English master's student at Columbia University. The son of a Greek father and Japanese mother, Mentzas grew up in Kobe and is bilingual, in English and Japanese. But there was little interest from publishers. Sakai soon realised that the best way to get the books published was to do it himself. He secured financial backing from Nikkei and investment company Itochu International and set up an office in Manhattan. The name Vertical alludes to the way Japanese text is written. The company now has a third full-time employee, who handles marketing. In a coup for the publisher, celebrity book designer Chip Kidd, a fan of the colourful Japanese animation style called anime, agreed to design its jacket covers.
Vertical's focus on mainstream commercial fiction distinguishes it from other US publishers of Japanese translations, which tend to stick to literary works. In selecting titles, Mentzas takes into account the way western literary tastes differ from those of the Japanese.