It has been a year since Akiyama Shin quietly took down his shop in Shinjuku, closing the revered schtücco design studio, entrusting his former staff with the care of a number of important clients, and returning northward to the humble fold of country life in his home prefecture of Niigata with his wife/collaborator Ayako and newborn son. Tokyo lost an important and vital member of our design community at that moment — prolific and craft-centric in his output, thoughtful in his philosophy and approach. This quiet, humble man’s exit stage-left is something worth noting.1

His departure was followed by a flurry of activity: most notably, a post-mortem, live-in retrospective at Pantaloon an Osaka-based gallery and design studio, which saw schtücco’s oeuvre filling the walls of the entire space alongside misprints, proof sheets, book dummies and a rearrangement of the materials within the space. A tent and catalogued inventory of everything the young family would be using during their month-long stay within the gallery — vegetables, clothing, cloth diapers and technology were all ordered, stacked and itemized — reflecting the Akiyama family’s subsumption into a now totalizing collapse of work, life and art.

A series of lectures and events accompanied the exhibition, individuals from Tokyo and Osaka invited to Pantaloon to engage with Akiyama in dialogue for the public, exploring the roles of design in relation to art, literature, music, and the everyday. Curators, artists, editors, and designers were all invited to speak candidly about work and what design holds for us all at this particular moment. All were invited into a sort of temporary community with Akiyama and his family as its pillar in a rare moment of personal reflection that is usually rare in the hustle-bustle of Japanese business.2

The exhibition and associated events gave nuanced form to so much of Akiyama’s way of working — one that is engaged politically, aesthetically and socially. Everyday graphic design in Tokyo is prominently service-oriented3 and to have this act of servicing brought into a gallery, and then, most importantly, destabilized by emphasizing the more personal, authored, community-centric aspects of a critical and speculative graphic design practice in a setting that had simultaneously been deconstructed and reconstructed according to the designer’s personal vision, exposed the public to alternate ways of working that had potentially not been experienced in Japan before.4

Akiyama’s formal education in architecture is belied by his personal works. Created under the nom de guerre Buku Akiyama, they are a quiet structural assessment of the everyday combined with the bookmaker’s lexical desire for order and cataloging. This on-again/off-again art practice is best documented in his 2009 book, Composition No.2 “an exceptional state”: with equipments owned by hiromiyoshii. Within, Akiyama’s reorganization of FARM, an exhibition space in the Kiyosumi area of Tokyo, was photographed by Masahito Yamamoto, documenting Akiyama’s event in which he took the contents of the studio and rearranged all into structures, three-dimensional compositions, and system-like collections. The book, designed by schtücco and published by Akiyama’s own publishing house edition nord, appears to be damaged, the spine of each in the edition of 600 intentionally torn off, exposing Akiyama’s fascination with raw material and process.

edition nord is both a conceptual celebration and exploration of the most instinctive and primary elements of art-making, combining the immediacy of the found, rapid mark-making and narrative — spinning and folding these attributes into physical forms that are a taught tension of crafted precision and the raw materiality of chance processes. The typography within is highly considered and abundant in its exploration of different methods of reproduction. Papers, printing, and the visual edit that holds each together is rugged and assured — a poised conflation that reveals the authored instinct. As a collection, Akiyama’s work feels like the output of an individual involved to the deepest levels with his craft, rendered in often stark palettes alongside considered typographic scales akin to musical compositions. In all, there is a palpable sense of the book as an expanse that engages the reader physically, mentally, and emotionally — it is not treated as mere printed physical ephemera.

Past edition nord titles have included compendiums of work for artists such as Masanao Hirayama/HIMAA, Tadashi Kawamata, Eiki Mori, and Komichi Kobayashi. The imprint’s inaugural release, an edition of eight hundred bound boxes of photographs exactly reproduced from source material provided by artist Christian Holstad for a 2007 exhibition titled “Blood Bath & Beyond.” The printed cards within question the authorship of the photograph and the concept of assumed identity depicted in the reproductions — a collation of imagery of masked and costumed individuals. The box was the result of two years of labor, mimicking the physical qualities of the original photographs, working with printers to adjust the sheen and surface of each printed replica of the found photographs to perfection, including original inscriptions and backing material on all thirty-eight pieces within the collection. Beyond authorship, these near-exact duplicates bring into question the nature of the copy versus the original in a profoundly Habermasian way; the originals are merely found whereas the reproductions are collated (and thus categorized), given additional focus through the lens of ‘art’5 and monetized. Perhaps it is no accident that the vehicle for delivering these media is a box, as the edition opens contemporary art practices and art publishing strategies up to a bevy of compelling questions.

Shin’s new stüccke line of books for edition nord explore drawing as a medium and focus, most notably Kawai Misaki’s Pencil Exercise — a mammoth compendium of quick, mirth-filled line drawings. This 500-page expanse of quirky mark-making that evince Kawai’s place as the heir to the throne of art-making dominated by so many skateboarders (most notably Mark Gonzales) creating loose, off-the-cuff works that celebrate life, absurdity, and the world around us with more than a pinch of atavistic tendencies. These books are held together using the most spare, yet strongest material. The covers are minimal or essentially dematerialized, taking the form of postcards or smaller sheets of paper. Added to this Is a sense of customization. Kawaii’s book features eight different “cover” designs, a minimal foreground to the mono-color drawings that comprise the edition.

It is natural that Akiyama has turned to self-publishing. the establishment of the edition nord imprint followed fifteen years of designing books and printed promotional materials for some of Tokyo’s most successful galleries, notably hiromiyoshi. Akiyama has designed books for artists such as photographer Araki Nobuyoshi, sculptor/painter Keegan McHargue6, architect Ando Tadao, as well as innumerable others. It is also curious as to what Akiyama’s trajectory from here will be, as a publisher and as a graphic designer. I, for one, am curious- his arc in graphic design and self-initiated curatorial projects is a potential blueprint for how graphic design might be practiced in a distinct way in Japan that veers from the mere labor-based model so prevalent today. It is ‘merely’ a matter of public awareness, acknowledgement and encouragement — phenomena that often occur slowly in a nation slow to change. If picked up and ran with, it’d infinitely enrich design culture in Japan.

1 Despite Akiyama’s pastoral retreat from Tokyo, he is still very much an active force in the city, representing edition nord at the Tokyo Art Book Fair, appearing alongside Kawai at the opening for the Pencil Exercise exhibition and book release.

2 I note this from personal experience, I engaged in the series, giving a lecture and a short question-and-answer session with Akiyama. I am grateful to him for his politeness at me hogging the mic like an American jerk.

3 As noted in my recent lecture series in the United States, the life of the graphic designer residing in Tokyo is often stark — graphic designers tend to work far-longer hours than their American and European counterparts and earn approximately 60% of what their Western counterparts do. There are exceptions, but they are few and far-between.

A personal, anonymized case study:
Naoko is a friend and graphic designer working for a small architecture publishing house. She begins work at 10am and finishes work at 4am. She has not had a day off this month — crafting books, printed promotional material, creating booth designs for book fairs and generally helping out around the office. She is paid approximately ¥2.8 million a year — a near-unlivable wage.

4 This being said, Yokoo Tadanori has continually created situations of a similar nature in the 1960s and 1970s that upheld his stature as a designer, artist, hedonist, and creative individual. But these events tended to be in the service of a cult of personality surrounding Yokoo, as opposed to extending the sphere of public/private and engaging communities as done by Akiyama. Akiyama utilized his relative fame to set public dialogue and critique in motion, whereas Yokoo utilized his actual fame (also relative, but stratospheric compared to Akiyama’s renown merely amongst designers) to propel himself into engaging in self-serving creative projects spanning television (titles for the television show むー), getting his photo taken with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (synergy by association), and acting (in a mediocre fashion in the film 僕は天使じゃないよ/Boku Wa Tenshi Ja Nai Yo).

5 And the gallery system which commodifies art.

6 It was McHargue who introduced me to Akiyama in 2007, during the run of his successful solo show “Mauve Deep”C at hiromiyoshi. McHargue, artist Tauba Auerbach, the Akiyamas and I wended our way through a succession of obscure record stores in Shinjuku, watching as McHargue dutifully dug out new additions to his expansive record collection. No mere name drop, McHargue recognized the intensity in which both Akiyama and myself have articulated our positions within the realm of design. I am merely grateful for the introduction.

A The name and subject matter of the designer’s publishing house has been changed — to open up standard business practices in Japan through the concrete example of an individual is to ruin a person’s career.

B That Yokoo’s varied methodologies and career turns have never been exposed to serious criticism in the design or popular press is case for worry, hence these barbed stings that occasionally appear in my essays.

C I would also like to note that this exhibition title is pretty much the most awesome title for an exhibition ever.

Was the New Yorker‘s story on keitai shōsetsu (mobile phone novels) really published in 2008? It feels like only yesterday that commentators were either hailing or denouncing the arrival of a new genre — Shōnagon-meets-Chikamatsu, crowd-sourced to a million young women on commuter trains. Where is our god now? (Spoiler: On Twitter.)

While tempting to give the iPhone credit for the fall of the mobile phone novel, clamshell cellphones and carefully managed sub-internets are far from dead in Japan. Despite what was generally perceived as a rocky start in the Japanese market, however, it’s hard to deny that the iPhone is an influential presence here now too. The app-ification of everything is putting serious pressure on 1999-vintage online services, and why labor over yet another tale of high-school agony when you have dozens of Twitter followers waiting to hear about the much more involving topic of yourself? It’s probably too early to declare keitai novels dead altogether — they still have their own section at most bookstores — but they have certainly lost their luster, as has the cousin genre of “manga essays.”

So what were people reading instead? Well, Twitter. Other than that, the usual. Light novels, particularly Hirasaki Yomi’s Boku wa tomodachi ga sukunai series 『僕は友達が少ない』. Health-and-fitness books: the commendable Tanita shokudō series 『体脂肪計タニタの社員食堂 ~500kcalのまんぷく定食~』, although published in 2010, have been strong sellers in 2011 too, and Kashiki Hiromi’s “Curvy Dance” series 『樫木式・カーヴィーダンスで即やせる！』 has been a big hit this year. Drucker-on-management volumes riding the tail end of the MoshiDora boom. Books (in the loosest sense of the word) about AKB48 and Arashi (嵐). A few outliers fueled by media interest, like Kondō Marie’s cleanup manual Jinsei ga tokimeku katazuke no mahō　『人生がときめく片づけの魔法』 and a 1975 translation of George Polya’s How to Solve It (of all things).

The Tohōku earthquake and tsunami — and the aftermath at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Powerplant — sparked a separate mini-boom of disaster books: how to prepare for and survive earthquakes, how nuclear power works and whether Japan needs it, crossovers from the economics section explaining why Japan is doomed.

Murakami Haruki’s most recent novel 1Q84 was released in English translation this past October — his most widely anticipated work and arguably the most anticipated Japanese translation ever.

Before its initial May 2009 release, Murakami kept the content of the two-volume novel a close secret. That sense of mystery fueled sales in Japan: The novel quickly sold out and went through several printings. Murakami added Book Three in April 2010 to finish the tale of writer/math teacher Tengo and physical trainer/assassin Aomame, two thirty-year-olds who are transported to an alternate universe and battle bizarre forces that control the universe. Book Three sold a million copies in just two weeks.

News of the Japanese version stoked the interest of the author’s international fan base. Now that Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin, and Phillip Gabriel (in addition to his many other translators around the world) have caught up with Murakami, fanboys and girls have to get their news from abroad via those who can read Japanese, or other languages which are more quickly translated. The Japan Times ran a review of Books One and Two (and later Three) as did The Complete Review cataloged the international critical response as the European translations followed the Chinese and Korean. Orthofer even wrote a review of the first two books based on the German translation.

In October, some American bookstores held midnight release parties, and one New York San Francisco bookstore even bought tacos and beer for customers who had pre-ordered the novel. The critical response to the 900+ page mammoth arrived quickly thanks to review copies that had been issued months earlier. 1Q84 has been included on all of the year-end best of lists by default (Amazon, New York Times, Barnes and Noble, The Economist), and many have lumped it together with Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and George R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons, celebrating the return of the epic five-pound novel.

Critics overall, however, have been far more divided than the initial fervor surrounding the release would suggest.

Some have attempted to locate Murakami’s Japanese-ness as John Updike did in The New Yorker in 2005 for Kafka on the Shore, praising Murakami for his “Japanese spiritual tact.” Sam Sacks of the Wall Street Journal gives a balanced review that is mostly negative, but his final comment claims that the book “floats in a globalized ether”: It’s weak because it is “wrapped in a cocoon — or an air chrysalis — of cultural amnesia” and doesn’t take advantage of the country’s literary history. Emily Parker of The Daily Beast defends the novel with the puzzling suggestion that readers should “stop looking for hidden meanings.” Instead “Be one with the Japanese. Japanese cultural phenomena don’t always translate so well overseas.”

Michael Dirda of the Washington Postand Kathryn Schulz of the New York Times both claim that the book kept them reading (and thinking about it after they finished), but Dirda is far more willing to overlook its weaknesses. Schulz is one of the few critics to question Murakami’s use of rape, calling the novel “psychologically unconvincing and morally unsavory.” She isn’t ready to dismiss it completely, though. She still enjoyed reading it.

Another review in the New York Times, this one by Janet Maslin, was far more negative than Schulz’s and summed up the critical response: “…1Q84 has even [Murakami’s] most ardent fans doing back flips as they try to justify this book’s glaring troubles.” Nathan Heller of Slate is one of these fans, apparently. In the beginning of his review he acknowledges that “a novelist who can draw in, and retain, so large and avid an international audience must be doing something right.” And then the backflips begin. He decides that that “something” is this: 1Q84 succeeds by re-creating a childhood experience of storytelling.” He dismissed the banalities, the childish plot points, and fantastical nature as intentionally childish.

Heller is a more forgiving reader than Christian Williams of The Onion A.V. Club who refuses to play the game and bashes the novel, labeling it “stylistically clumsy” and filled with “tone-deaf dialogue, turgid description, and unyielding plot.” Perhaps the most succinct summary of the novel came on Amazon from a user named “bookcynic” who stated “many curiosities were left unexplained.”

While this is true for many of Murakami’s novels, nowhere before has he been gone on for so many pages with so little resolution. Nor with so much awkward sex: The novel was nominated for a Bad Sex in Fiction Award, an annual contest sponsored by Literary Review. 1Q84 was nominated along side King’s novel as well as Dead Europe by Christos Tsiolkas; David Guterson ended up winning for his rewriting of the Oedipus Rex myth, Ed King.

For more perspective, let us turn to Jay Rubin’s take on Kafka on the Shore in his book Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words — perhaps the most fitting description of Murakami’s fiction post-1987:

One’s reception…depends heavily on the degree of one’s willingness to ‘go with the flow’ of the story. To a reader less willing, Murakami seems to be relying far too heavily on contrivance and coincidence, and he too easily overlooks inconsistencies on the realistic pane.

Critics willing to read past what Schulz called the “surface gaffes” are more likely to enjoy the book. This, more than anything else, explains the range of responses to the book.

Other than Christopher Tayler of the London Review of Books, critics have also failed to mention that 1Q84 is Murakami’s least funny novel. Tayler astutely notes that the third-person narration “dampens the wisecracks, deprives the central characters of Boku’s buttonholing powers and generally takes the edge off Murakami’s storytelling.” One of the most enjoyable (if not the most enjoyable) parts about reading Murakami, especially his early works, is hearing his boku narrator’s commentary on the world around him. Take, for example, the narrator’s encounter with hotel reception when he asks about the development of the new Dolphin Hotel in Dance Dance Dance:

Thirty seconds later, [the receptionist] returned with a fortyish man in a black suit. A real live hotelier by the looks of him. I’d met enough of them in my line of work. They are a dubious species, with twenty-five different smiles on call for every variety of circumstance. From the cool and cordial twinge of disinterest to the measured grin of satisfaction. They wield the entire arsenal by number, like golf clubs for particular shots.

This is the Murakami I know and love. His narration had a healthy disrespect for authority but didn’t make much of it. At the heart of the narrator is sentimentality.

To an extent, Murakami wrote through his own disillusion of the dissolution of the student movement of the late-’60s. While Murakami worked late hours running a jazz bar after he graduated from Waseda University, his former classmates sold out for the Japanese economy, helping run the big businesses that fueled Japan’s boom. Norwegian Wood then is the end of the line — until then his narrators had been capable of drinking off the bad times or forgetting them, but in Norwegian Wood we learn that there is no amnesia, that in fact the narrators have been haunted by memories of lost love and dead friends. While this is a notable shift in tone, Watanabe, the narrator of the book, still has a healthy, sardonic view of the world.

The tone of 1Q84, however, is drastically different than anything Murakami’s ever written. Written completely in third person, the lack of first person narrator makes it difficult to tell when Murakami is trying to be funny and when he is trying to be earnest. Aomame’s lesbian encounter, for example, seems overly earnest:

As her mind traced these graphic memories, the brass unison of Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta rang like festive background music. The palm of her hand was caressing the curve of Tamaki’s waist. At first Tamaki just laughed as if she were being tickled, but soon the laughter stopped, and her breathing changed. The music had initially been composed as a fanfare for an athletic meet. The breeze blew gently over the green meadows of Bohemia in time with the music. Aomame knew when Tamaki’s nipples suddenly became erect. And then her own did the same. And then the timpani conjured up a complex musical pattern.

Yet the strange juxtaposition of bold brass instruments and erect nipples also begs to be read as comedy (unintentional though it may be). Murakami’s biggest failure with 1Q84 may be that he’s trying too hard.

Isozaki Ken’ichirô 磯崎憲一郎. Tsui no sumika 『終の住処』. 2009.
Winner of the 141st Akutagawa Prize for early 2009.

The title story is the winner: a novella that could be translated “Final Dwelling.” Personal hobby-horses first: It’s lacking many of the markers of A-Prize bait. It’s not a first-person narrative, and it doesn’t represent a hitherto overlooked subculture. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s innovative. The story examines, broadly speaking, the travails of the middle-aged salaryman. In this it feels older than old. So old it’s new? Are oyaji the new gyaru?

None of the characters are named. The story follows kare (“he”) from the point of his marriage to tsuma (“[his] wife”) to, essentially, his retirement. They’re both over thirty when they marry, and they seem to have stumbled into it with no great enthusiasm, because it was time to get on with their lives. Later we figure out it must have been the early 1980s when they married, which explains the greater pressure on over-thirties to marry (it’s still there today, but perhaps not as strong).

Almost immediately, he begins to feel estranged from his wife. She has mysterious mood swings. He never tries too hard to figure them out, and they remain unexplained. He drifts into affairs, and at one point is ready to leave his wife for his mistress when his wife announces she’s pregnant. So they stay together. Not that it anything changes. In fact, at one point they go for eleven years without speaking to each other. Not to mention, he keeps having affairs. Curiously generic affairs, though, even the one with the girl in the sunglasses, who he feels is his perfect woman. She’s his ideal, but this relationship doesn’t go much of anywhere either.

Meanwhile we also follow his career. He works for a pharmaceutical company, in sales at first. We follow his challenges at work — long hours, little success — against a backdrop of the Japanese economy from the ‘80s to the present. From about halfway through the novella, the historical markers get pretty specific, and we go through the Bubble years into the long period of stagnation. The climax of the novel involves the unnamed man, an executive now, going to the U.S. to engineer a hostile takeover of an American pharma firm. It takes him years, but he accomplishes it and finally gets to go home.

The third strain of the novel comes into play now. Before he goes to the U.S. he had decided to build a house for his family. The narration goes into uncharacteristic detail on the process. But then he gets called away. When he comes back, at the end of the novella, he’s finally ready to settle down and enjoy the new house. But when he arrives he finds that his daughter, his only child and reason for living, has grown up and moved away — to America, of all places — without telling him.

So this is the “final dwelling” of the title: an expensive, well-built house inhabited only by himself and his wife, who are all but strangers to each other. Now it’s just them, and as the last paragraph of the story tells us, it’ll be just them until they die. Which won’t be long now. The End.

What’s going on here? Two features of the story, I think, point to its aims.

First, the protagonist’s extreme passivity. The members of the A-Prize committee who supported this story seem to have been impressed by this, that the protagonist just kind of meanders through his life, watching, not participating (that’s how Ikezawa Natsuki put it). You can see this in his relationship with his wife: his only effort to understand her is a half-hearted attempt to find out if she’s having an affair. She’s not, he relaxes, and that’s as far as it goes. He doesn’t try to, you know, talk to her. That said, I’m not sure I agree that he’s totally passive. It’s more like he’s on autopilot, taking action only when it’s demanded of him, like when he has to perform the hostile takeover, or when he reaches the stage in his life and career when it’s appropriate for him to build a house. Then he does act. But never in a way that goes beyond the bounds that have been set for him. He never jumps the tracks, kicks over the traces, ignores the carnavi.

Second, we have the fact that nobody in the story is named. This contributes to the somnambulistic air of the story, but it also makes the protagonist into Generic Salaryman, a stand-in for all the company men of his generation. His wife is not an individual either, but Generic Mrs. Salaryman. Same goes for his boss, his daughter, his mistresses.

To me, the brain-dead pointlessness of the protagonist’s life, combined with his utter facelessness, suggest that what Isozaki’s after here is a good old-fashioned poke at the bourgeoisie. Salaryman = cog in the capitalist machine = alienation from one’s own feelings = mindless consumption to compensate = lingering dissatisfaction = dying alone. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that critique, but it’s hardly a fresh one. It’s been decades since that perspective alone was enough to make a story worth the reader’s while. If this story had appeared in, say, 1959, it would have made sense. But in 2009 it just feels, well, old-fashioned. An oyajiesque critique of oyaji.

What I’m saying is that even the reader most sympathetic to Isozaki’s message (if he’s doing what I think he’s doing) is probably going to want more from the story than that. Character, plot, style: some kind of novelistic pleasure. But this story offers very little in that regard. By opting for generic characters rather than specific, the author denies us the opportunity to understand why someone would live like this, or its effects on a real person; we’re always gazing down at kare from above. By adopting passivity as the organizing principle, the author is neutralizing plot as a source of interest. In fact, in the very first paragraph the narrator tells us that the protagonist and his wife are going to stay together for decades in an unchanging relationship, meaning we know the end from the beginning.

And style? This was tricky. By and large, Isozaki’s prose is undistinguished and occasionally awkward. But now and then he lapses into some nice description. (I liked his evocation of the Illinois prairie in winter). And at times he seems to be gesturing toward parody — he throws in exclamation points here and there that made me feel he was trying for a laugh at the main character’s expense, at least.

At those times I found myself wishing he’s gone farther toward humor. It would have been cruel humor, bourgeoisie-baiting, but at least it might have made the story entertaining. As it is, I do think there’s a parodic element here, at least I hope so. The protagonist’s travails — the eleven years he goes without speaking to his wife, the fact that he’s totally unaware that his daughter has moved out of the house, the way his boss tells him to execute the takeover or his life will have been a failure — are too exaggerated to be taken seriously. They have to be a parody of the kind of salaryman concerns you see in things like Shima Kôsaku. But they’re a parody with little humor, in fact little animating emotion of any kind.

That was my first reaction to the main story “Tsui no sumika.” Now, here’s why I liked the extra stories.

“Penanto” (“Pennants”) is the name of the one in this volume. The title refers to an image in the first of the story’s three segments: a boy sneaks into an older boy’s room and sees the walls covered with souvenir pennants. The old fashioned kind, with the careful embroidery. They’re all pointing the same way, and they make him feel like he’s in the midst of a school of fish or something.

It’s an arresting image. This story has a few of them. But they’re in the service of something pretty abstract. That first segment culminates in the boy hearing a noise in the wall, tearing it down (!), and finding a snake’s sloughed-off skin, glowing silver behind the wall.

The second segment concerns a middle-aged salaryman who loses a button from his coat. He finally finds it in a diner he’s never been to before, where an old woman tells him it’s been waiting for him. The last segment concerns a boy (probably different from the first one, but because nobody in this story has names either, we can’t be sure) taking a walk in the woods, encountering another boy, finding an ant-lion.

It’s pretty clear that this story is supposed to work on a semi-abstract level: dream logic or magical realism (Ikezawa invoked Garcia-Marquez in talking about “Tsui no Sumika”). And it almost works. I don’t know what they add up to, if anything, but I think I can see the mood Isozaki’s trying to create.

But in the end, I don’t think this story succeeds. If you’re going to abandon character and plot in favor of poetic imagery, then your images themselves have to be pretty powerful. And it helps if your prose is flawless. Isozaki doesn’t quite have these bases covered yet. The images here aren’t consistently striking, not like they need to be, and while there are some nice passages in this story, his writing doesn’t have the polish and precision this kind of exercise requires.

What’s interesting is that there’s enough commonality of tone with the first story to make me wonder if he wasn’t trying for a dreamier effect there, too. That is, maybe the salaryman-existentialism wasn’t intended to be as overriding as it is. Or maybe I’m making too much of that aspect of the story.

At 1000 yen for 150 quickly-digested pages, Ishii Hiroyuki 石井裕之 and John W. Culver’s book on “black cold-reading,” Aru nise-uranaishi no kokuhaku あるニセ占い師の告白 (“The Cold Babble: Confessions of a Pseudo-Psychic”), was an ironic presence on the shelves earlier this year. A book with the stated purpose of teaching its readers to recognize and resist emotional manipulation, advertised with “Banned from sale?!” (発売禁止！？) in large print plus a tiny “Pick it up before it is!” (になる前に手にとってください！) alongside — not to mention the sister volume on “white cold-reading” released at the same time for the same price — well, you could be forgiven for concluding that the first lesson is to wait for it to turn up on the 105-yen shelves at Book Off.

There’s nothing wrong with the content of the Confessions. The writing is purple but not labored. The account of Culver’s early psychic wood-shedding is pointless fluff, but the sentence-by-sentence breakdown of a sample cold-reading session is a decent introduction to the topic. The most interesting thing about the book, though, is that one of its authors doesn’t exist.

“This book,” Ishii explains in the first sentence of the introduction, “Is in the form of a translation of John W. Culver’s ‘The Cold Babble: Confessions of a Pseudo-Psychic’ [...] but, in fact, this is a work of fiction by myself, Ishii Hiroyuki.” He goes on to explain (or claim) that this was one of his first ideas for writing about cold-reading (a term the katakana version of which, incidentally, Ishii appears to have trademarked), rejected by the publisher for being too “provocative,” but that he has decided to revive the idea in the hopes that it will help shock Japan out of its ongoing susceptibility to fraudulent spiritualists and ore ore scams.

Ishii is not the first Japanese author to fake a foreign nationality. Inukai Yūichi 犬飼裕一 has argued that pretending to be a foreigner in order to criticize Japanese society is “a tradition” in Japan. One of the best-known examples of this trend is Yamamoto Shichihei 山本七平, who used the pen name “Isaiah Ben-Dasan” in the 1970s to publish the Nihonjin to Yudayajin 『日本人とユダヤ人』 (“The Japanese and the Jews”) and attack Honda Katsuichi 本多勝一’s Asahi Shimbun series on the Asia-Pacific War. A few years later, Fujishima Taisuke 藤島泰輔 began his twenty-volume-plus Fushiji no kuni nippon 『不思議の国ニッポン』 (“Wonderland Japan”) series under the name “Paul Bonet.”

There are differences. “John W. Culver” is pure glamour: a fake psychic in the U.S., land of celebrity, and crime is a good if unadventurous hook. “Ben-Dasan” and “Bonet” were partly about glamour too, but more importantly, they were meant to suggest objectivity — “I have no particular stake in any Japanese culture war; here is what I think.” Ishii cheerfully reveals the truth about “Culver” in his introduction, while Yamamoto reportedly did not ever fully admit to being “Ben-Dasan”: one’s show business, the other’s sock puppetry.

Either way, it’s disappointing that Ishii decided to pound on a blue-eyed straw man like that. Surely Japan would have been better served by an exposé on cold-reading within its own borders.