Economic disaster novels attract worried readers in Japan
By FRANCOISE KADRI, Agence-France Presse
TOKYO (September 30, 2001 11:07 a.m. EDT) - Record high unemployment, a stock market freefall, workers fleeing to Southeast Asia: Japanese economic disaster novels relating fictional yet plausible scenarios of meltdown are attracting increasing numbers of readers anxious about their future.
This literary style, which first emerged amid economic hardships a decade ago, has enjoyed renewed success thanks to the worsening of the Japanese economy.
The literary phenomenon of the year is Main Koda, a former bond trader at an American investment bank in Japan who has sold more than 135,000 copies of her novel, "Nihon Kokusai" (Japanese Government Bonds) published last November.
The book adopts the format of a suspense novel to tell the tale of the failure of a bond auction against the background of snowballing public debt, a banking crisis and pressure from foreign investors.
Other authors are mining the same rich seam of catastrophic potential.
With some 15 published novels and essays, Yoh Mizuki, 63, a former journalist with the influential Nihon Keizai Shimbun economic newspaper, claims to have invented "simulafiction" - a fictional scenario based in reality - and is about to publish the latest example, entitled "The pain of 2003".
"As a former journalist, I have my own opinion," Mizuki told AFP.
"I can draw a kind of reality which is worse than (actual) reality. People read it and naturally they don't like it and they will try to prevent this "reality" becoming real. It is a very effective way to express my views."
"I write a viewpoint, I am not a pure novelist ... I hope the book will make people change and move," Mizuki added.
His latest book develops his "catastrophe scenario" published in July in the country's most respected monthly magazines.
It relates the downward spiral into despair of a 47-year-old advertising agency executive laid off as a result of the economic crisis and general impoverishment of the country.
Tokyo's trendy Shibuya district is buried under litter and filth and colonized by drug addicts while the island of Odaiba in Tokyo Bay, popular for its high-rises, has become a favored spot for suicides.
The book profiles September 2003: the Tokyo Stock Exchange's benchmark Nikkei index approaches 5,000 (it fell below 10,000 on September 12 for the first time in 17 years); deflation has pushed prices so low that bicycles and televisions can be bought for 4,000 yen (34 dollars); unemployment has reached 8.0 percent (compared to a record 5.0 percent now); and the jobless are fighting each other in the streets with knives.
It is the day Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government collapses after his approval rating slumps to 11 percent. The hero's family breaks up: his wife moves north to run a shop, his daughter finds a job in a factory in Malaysia, while the protagonist retreats to the village of his birth to become a potter.
Mizuki deliberately takes an extreme view to illustrate his fears about Koizumi's all-encompassing reforms.
Akio Ogawa, whose pen name is Akira Midouchi, is another former journalist, but from the liberal daily, Asahi Shimbun. He has an impressive bibliography of essays attacking public works and Japan's bureaucracy, takes a similar approach in his debut novel, Nippon Hokai ("The Collapse of Japan"), which was published in May.
This weighty 500-page tome envisions a 10 percent unemployment rate in 2003, a stock market on its last legs and a plunge below 10 percent in popularity for a government strikingly similar to the Koizumi administration. It has already sold 20,000 copies.
The action also takes place in 2003, at the end of June when foreign investors suddenly realise Japan will never be able to pay off its huge debt, and dump their government bond holdings, triggering a three-fold crash of the stock and bond markets and the yen.
A group of students and ordinary citizens stand as candidates in the general elections and campaign via the Internet because they do not trust the press. Then two cabinet ministers are shot by a group of terminally-ill cancer patients.
Once again, the fictional nightmare scenario is not so far removed from reality.
"I have written many books, almost 10, but this is my first work of fiction," said Ogawa, adding his aim was to wake the Japanese up to the fact that they, not the state, must take responsibility for their fate.
"I wrote a lot on finance, the budget, taxes, public works. But those were for serious people, leaders ... I wanted to reach a wider audience, putting my knowledge in a mystery, in a novel," he said.
"My point is that all tragedies in Japan stem from the bureaucrats. They control the country ... We are a nation of sheep. We are like North Korea, even worse than China." |
