Is there a future for Japanese literature? That is the question posed by an article in the February issue of Bungakukai. Writer Akira Nagae visited various bookstores and publishers in search of an answer.

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.