“Biographies of Eccentrics and Great Figures in Fantasy Literature: Memoirs of a Kokusho Kankokai Editor-in-Chief”

“Biographies of Eccentrics and Great Figures in Fantasy Literature,” published this January, is a collection of memoirs about the people who left a particularly deep impression on me during my 40-year career as an editor.

The book contains portraits of 12 eccentrics and great figures, including Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, who gained fame as a defendant in the Sade trial; Osamu Hashimoto, author of “Peach-Bottom Girl” and “The Yohen Tale of Genji”; Shuntaro Matsuyama, a one-armed Sanskrit scholar; Asahiko Sunaga, a precocious genius and vampire poet; and Takenori Nanjo, a hermit-like English literature scholar who spends most of the year at hot springs.

Kesao Sato, the open-hearted and heavy-drinking president of Kokusho Kankokai who appears in the final chapter, often said, “Literature is wonderful because it has the power to change a person's life.” The basic job of an editor is to connect people, and because the privileged and irreplaceable creatures known as books are involved, events stranger than fiction often occur.

The name of Marcel Schwob appears throughout this book like a secret ingredient. He was a minor novelist who lived in a foreign land, France, over 100 years ago. When I graduated from high school, I was attending a vocational school for beauticians without even taking university entrance exams, but after reading Schwob's “The Book of Monelle,” I made a major shift in my life path toward the Department of French Literature at Keio University. I specifically limited my choice to Keio University because Professor Hajime Ohama, who translated the book, was a professor at Keio. In 1980, when I was a sophomore at Mita, I visited his office to get his signature on the book. Professor Ohama lamented a little, saying, “This book is a limited edition of a few hundred copies and isn't in any bookstores. I wonder who on earth is reading it.”

Thirty-some years later, in 2015, I created a complete works edition of Schwob centered on the translations left by my mentor. Then, 40-some years later, this year, a collection of Schwob's masterpieces has finally become available as a paperback (Kawade Bunko's “The King in the Golden Mask”).

There is one more bonus. Professor Ohama's daughter, Fumiko Ohama, won the Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature in 2022. The fact that I ended up working on her award-winning work, “The End of the Sunny Spot,” was due to the connection made during the production of Schwob's complete works.

The ties between people and books truly seem to be mysterious things.

“Biographies of Eccentrics and Great Figures in Fantasy Literature: Memoirs of a Kokusho Kankokai Editor-in-Chief”
Junichi Isozaki
Chikuma Shobo, 256 pages, 2,750 yen (tax included)