The sky's the limit. Photograph: EPA/Everett Kennedy Brown
The three stories that comprise Yoko Ogawa's The Diving Pool are written in haunting, spare, shimmering prose and are punctuated by acts of casual violence and vindictive spite. Profoundly unsettling, magnificently written and instantly memorable, these stories vindicate her status as one of Japan's greatest living writers. What is rather harder to understand, however, is why it's taken 18 years for these stories to appear in English.
The answer, as is so often the case, is one of timing. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Japanese fiction was struggling to make much of an impression on British readers. The film adaptation of Kitchen helped Banana Yoshimoto to a cult following, but other writers were floundering. Haruki Murakami's first books to be translated into English - A Wild Sheep Chase and The Elephant Vanishes - were published with great gusto by Penguin, but sold poorly. It seemed that Britain simply wasn't ready for Japanese novels, no matter how good.
Now, things could not be more different. Murakami is one of the world's bestselling novelists, television programmes have been devoted to his work, his first editions are highly collectible and this year his publisher will release a Murakami diary for his zealous fan base. It's a remarkable change in fortunes - all the more remarkable for the way it happened.
The first edition of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle didn't look like the kind of novel that would begin to alter people's reading habits. It was a yellow slab, its jacket a garish, headachey affair that even the Harvill sales rep described as "foul". Yet it captured the imagination of booksellers, myself included, up and down the country, and we recommended the surreal opus to anyone who'd listen. It was, I believe, one of the last books to be "made" almost solely by bookseller enthusiasm, by bookshop staff pushing it like deranged crack dealers in 1980s Los Angeles.
Interestingly, the novel that boosted Murakami from cult writer to commercial success was more than a decade old when it was published in 2000. Norwegian Wood was an instant coming-of-age classic and sold extraordinarily for a translated novel. It was promoted as a lead title: there were T-shirts, posters and a limited edition box set. The playful nature of the packaging and the wistful melancholia of the story made it feel less intimidating than other foreign novels, and I think it's had a huge effect on both publishers' and readers' attitudes towards translated fiction.
There's always been an audience for foreign fiction, a willing readership who want to discover the world through different voices. But the perception is that translated works are literary and difficult - fine if you like that sort of thing, a bit off-putting if not. Harvill, who specialise in precisely this kind of fiction, recognised that Murakami potentially had a wider appeal.
The Murakami effect has obviously benefited other Japanese writers such as Ryu Murakami (no relation), Hitomi Kanehara and Natsuo Kirino, but it's also helped people cast off negative preconceptions. Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadows of the Wind was a number-one bestseller, proving sales and translations are not mutually exclusive. This is especially true of crime writing, with more and more foreign novels appearing in translation. Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo, Anne Elliot, Boris Akunin and the irresistible Fred Vargas deliver unusual and compelling novels and are valued as highly as their English-writing contemporaries.
Excellent original novels, combined with publishers who believe in them and good translators, mean it's now as commercially viable to publish and promote novels in translation as it's ever been. Hopefully the days of waiting 18 years for your debut collection to appear in English are well and truly over, and fiction as superlative as Ogawa's won't be lost to English language readers anymore.
