The manager of a bookstore near an arts university in Tokyo feels authors and publishers are deceiving themselves into believing that literary books still enjoy a high prestige in Japan. He dates their becoming just another consumer product from the late 1970s, when Jiro Akagawa started turning out a new mystery every month.
In 1995 "bungeisho" (literature and belles-lettres) made up 14.3 percent of sales at his bookstore, but that declined to only about 8 percent last year. In earlier times, the latest winners of literary prizes would sell 100 to 200 copies a week, but now they sell no more than 20 a week.
The deputy manager of the largest bookstore in Japan, Junkudo in Ikebukuro, agrees that the days when everyone would go out and buy the latest book of a hot novelist like Haruki Murakami are over. Reading literature no longer has a fashionable cachet. Men in their 50s comprise the customer base of her store.