About Me
This isn't "about me" so much as about what I do. I do two things: I write, and I publish. What do I write? What I please. Who do I publish? Me. Myself. I am a self-published writer. In short, I am doomed to literary oblivion. Well, so be it.
I think all writers should be self-publishers. What do we need giant publishing corporations for, now that the technology is available (technology which, I admit, I was slow to welcome, being something of a Luddite by temperament) to make every writer a publisher? Why should writing and publishing be separate professions in this new century of (for better and for worse) individual empowerment?
Corporate publishing has turned literature into an adjunct of the entertainment industry. What is a book? A book is the profoundest cultural tool known to man – an honest book, I mean; not a book that has been poked and prodded by editors who think they can write better than the writer, citing as proof the fact that they are editors! – as opposed to "mere writers," presumably. To an editor who had deleted one of his sentences Thoreau wrote, "I should not read many books if I thought that they had been thus expurgated." In sitting down to write, he vowed to give readers "a strong dose of myself." That is what I mean by honest writing. When I use the word "book," I am not referring to television in printed form, though that is the most typical product of today's publishing industry, but about honest writing, in which the writer gives readers "a strong dose of him/herself" – "though," adds Thoreau with his characteristic salt wit, "I bore them beyond all precedent."
This does NOT (the point cannot be stressed too strongly) mean autobiographical writing. There are very few people, and I am not one of them, whose autobiographies merit being imposed on strangers. I could write my "autobiography" in a paragraph: I am Canadian-born, Japanese-domiciled; I have a Japanese wife and a grown son who says of himself, "I have a Western face but a Japanese heart." I earn my living as a freelance writer-cum-translator. What do I write? Various things –book reviews, feature articles, essays, and one-third of a weekly feature known as Tokyo Confidential. That about sums up my autobiography. Now I must say a word about Tokyo Confidential.
I could cite it as an example of what I mean by writing with "a strong dose of myself" and yet in no way autobiographical. It appears every Sunday in the Japan Times. The subject is daily life in Japan, with emphasis on its quirkier aspects (revenge artists for hire, temples specializing in prayers for aborted fetuses, corpses under the love hotel bed, and so on). Three of us work on it together, each contributing one story a week, the material coming from Japan's plethora of scandalous weekly magazines –the "tabloid" press, you might say, which accounts for the title of our second book, Tabloid Tokyo (Kodansha International, 2005).
For Tokyo Confidential, which after all is a cooperative venture, I depart from my self-publishing ideal. But for fiction, it stands. I can see the knowing smirks: "Ideal! Isn't that just another way of saying no real publisher is interested in you?"
Yes. At least, no "real" publisher was interested in me back when I was interested in them. We're talking a period of about twenty years, until 1998, when I learned quite by chance of the existence of print-on-demand publishing. In my excitement I threw out the bulk of the rejection slips I'd accumulated over the decades. Too bad. I wish I'd kept them. I did keep some, and even this remnant is no small pile. One letter in particular I enjoy going back to occasionally. Dated Jan. 6, 1993, it is from an agent who said of my submission, "This is a well-written, good novel, but unfortunately it falls into that now defunct category, mid-list." She concluded with this advice: "Please, please write for the market, and that means you must read, read, read current successful novels."
She meant well, of course, and I bear her no grudge, but "writing for the market" is not what I had in mind, and most "current successful novels" don't interest me. Not that there's anything wrong with them, or with the market – but there has to be some room on this overcrowded, over-busy planet of ours for the odd crank who goes his or her own way regardless of the market, regardless of success. I am one of those cranks. I am a defiant "mid-lister."
The self-published books I feature on this site were never seen by a "real" publisher, and therefore never rejected, though very likely they would have been. But reviewers, at least the ones who condescend to consider self-published books, have generally found them worth reading, which suggests to me that whatever else I may be, I am not mad.