To Get Published in Japan, Write Nonfiction

By Alex Breeden / Japan News Staff Writer

11:02 JST, January 2, 2025

If you are a foreign writer in Japan and hope to get published, your best bet is to go the nonfiction route. That was the takeaway from a panel event asking how expats can get into print here that was held on Dec. 18, 2024 at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo.

“What Japanese publishers are looking for is definitely nonfiction,” said Miko Yamanouchi, president of Japan UNI Agency Inc., a literary agency that represents major publishers such as Simon & Schuster. “With international fiction, [Japanese publishers] are much more selective due to cultural differences” and the complexity of the domestic fiction market.

Even for nonfiction, it helps to prep manuscripts with Japanese editors in mind and to have “something Japanese [writers] cannot really provide,” Yamanouchi added. That special something could be experience working at a prestigious institution abroad or a network of sources that only a foreigner could bring, like the sources that Robert Whiting, another speaker at the event, relied on when writing “Tokyo Underworld.”

Whiting’s network was something “no Japanese writer could have accessed,” said speaker Tetsuya Sugahara, a department manager for Kadokawa Corp. who has been involved in translating and editing books for over 20 years.

For those determined to write fiction, Yamanouchi said international publishers are interested in feel-good books, exemplified in Japan by “Before the Coffee Gets Cold,” and in the “romantasy” genre, or books that combine elements of both romance and fantasy.

Roland Kelts, an editor for the literary magazine “Monkey: New Writing from Japan,” also spoke at the event.