Goethe had a famously tumultuous relationship with publishing, expressing that to “exchange [my work] for money seemed hateful to me.” The relationship between creation and distribution is always fraught with the masked workings of industry, further complicated in a world expedited and reconstituted by advancing technologies. Today, a text can go from the mind to the press in a matter of hours, via the mechanics of a profligate self-publishing industry; how does this implicate and transform our urge—and instinct—for storytelling? In this following essay, Assistant Editor Laurel Taylor looks into the culture of dōjinshi, the creation and dissemination of self-published works in Japan, examining our relationship to our creative endeavors, the promises and pitfalls of profit, and the paths our words take as they make their way into the world.
I think there are very few shared universalities across human histories and societies, but those that exist are tied up, I would argue, in the act of creation. The earliest remnants we have of our ancestors include inventions of the practical variety—tools for hunting, gathering, and protecting—but they also include artistic creations, the purposes of which are far more abstract. The traces of our past include cave paintings and sculptures, bone flutes and drums, but also less tangible things: Ainu yukar, Homeric epics, Indigenous Australian storytelling traditions, tales and chronicles performed orally long before they were written down. The far-ranging history of our urge to communicate, to express, and to entertain seems to ultimately serve the same desire: all of us want to tell stories.
In the modern age, storytelling has, for the layperson, taken on narrower and narrower definitions. Despite the oral legacy of narrative, the stories commanding large audiences are usually associated with the written word; even when such texts are transferred into drama, film, television, or song, it first begins on the page. This, of course, narrows the notion of who gets to tell stories. What once was the work of humanity has become the work of the writer, and the road to claiming “writer” as profession is a daunting one, which few people are ultimately able to take. Though we all still share an impulse toward creation, those impulses are restricted by educational demands, job demands, relationship demands, publisher demands, market demands. We live in a world of exigencies, where storytelling is overwhelmed by societal pressures. As such, the act of writing was, for many centuries, dominated by the wealthy, educated, and idle—and our literary canons demonstrate as much.
However, with the advent of mass production and the internet age, writing has been bolstered by more universalized education, increased access to tools, and growing networks of supportive writing communities. The gap between layperson and writer has been further shortened by bustling self-publishing economies, most evident in Japan through the culture of dōjinshi. Those familiar with Japanese popular culture may already be aware of this term in relation to comics and graphic novels, but it has a much broader definition. Written 同人誌, dōjinshi are broadly defined as “document[s] by like-minded people.” They can be made by anyone for any purpose: cooking, gardening, stamp-collecting, train-watching, and yes, storytelling. The closest kindred term in English might be “zine,” but in the Japanese context, dōjinshi lack that same underground punk aesthetic; it’s not uncommon for students to participate in after-school dōjinshi clubs or for retirees to print dōjinshi about their hobbies. Many of these publications are intended to apprise communities of municipal matters or to attract new members, but narratively inspired dōjinshi reproduce the stories of our day-to-day: those told around the dinner table, fanfiction, original children’s tales. They echo the narrative traditions of long ago, told in amphitheaters or sung around campfires or chanted to the churning of the plow, producing local community-based connections rather than mass market commodities.
The roots of contemporary dōjinshi are firmly planted in the fertile soil of Japan’s post-revolution literary circles, beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first such folio, Garakuta Bunko (Rubbish Library), was published by the Ken’yūsha group in 1885, and others followed in quick succession. Most dōjinshi are short-lived creations—Garakuta never lasted more than two years in its four separate runs—attesting less to well-oiled production machines and more to passion projects. Dōjinshi can only be sustained so long as the creators have sufficient zeal—and the funds, time, and means to fuel it. Though the earliest works were often created by the wealthy, the well-educated, and the social elite (men who would become giants of Japanese literary canon), by the Taishō period (1912-1926), the dōjinshi mode of story dissemination would be taken up by “outsider” groups. Seitō (Bluestockings) promoted Japanese women’s literature, Tane maku hito (Sowers) published proletarian literature, and even in territories annexed by Japan, dōjinshi–inspired works like the Korean donginji Pyeheo (Ruins) used literature to describe the sense of decay Korean intellectuals and activists felt in the face of ever-harshening Japanese colonial rule.
These early dōjinshi, though positioned on radically different ends of the political spectrum, served similar philosophical purposes. Productions like Garakuta were bent on exploring and reinventing Japanese literature, molding it to better resemble literature as understood and produced by the Western colonial superpowers pressing on Japan’s borders. While their contents were seemingly depoliticized, their core desire was to better understand the Western philosophical mindset and to prove that Japan could be just as intellectually sophisticated. The radical dōjinshi that came afterward operated with like-minded objectives: to demonstrate the intellectual sophistication of disenfranchised people like women, socialists, and colonial subjects and to appropriate the rhetoric of those in power. In some cases, this subversion even evolved into more radical reinvention of literary styles, deconstructing the archaic formalism expected of women, or embracing a form of radical realism distinct from the sumptuous aesthetics of literary titans like Akutagawa and Tanizaki. While these dōjinshi certainly involved an impulse toward community building, their goals and hopes were broader and loftier.
In the post-World War II era, as the Japanese electronics market burgeoned and fees for mass printing plummeted, dōjinshi production became more and more accessible. At the same time, the literary industries in Japan were codifying and stratifying what had once been a much more decentralized print market, deploying terms like “pure literature” and “the literary stage” to demarcate literary art from the rest. This solidified the distinctions of professionalism; anyone could make dōjinshi, but those who did were not necessarily destined for literary greatness, or even literary goodness. Professional writers debuted in major magazines while home-grown dōjinshi were relegated to the realms of hobbyists, amateurs, societal outsiders, and purveyors of denigrated genres like science fiction, comics, and pornography. In a literary hierarchy of “us” and “the rest,” dōjinshi were decidedly for “the rest.” Even as affordable printing meant that more people could explore the art of storytelling with relative freedom, the title of “author” remained more elusive.
Into this often elitist market, Ōtsuka Eiji, an editor, scholar, novelist, and critic known for working in genre fiction and comics, tossed his incendiary remarks. In the June 2002 issue of literary magazine Gunzo, Ōtsuka published an essay titled “Literature, a Delinquent Loan” (Furyōsaiken toshite no [bungaku]). The text, written in response to another critic’s unwillingness to meet and debate with Ōtsuka in person, begins by outlining the oft-hashed concern of literature—the contrast between “high art” and mass media—but Ōtsuka ultimately finds this area of debate less pressing than what he calls “the vested interests of literature.” Then, as now, economic interests for publishers were, in the face of shrinking markets and waning public interest, ultimately unsustainable, and Ōtsuka was interested in more sustainable operational models—particularly for the writers most endangered by market interests. Ōtsuka’s radical (and radically unpopular) suggestion was to modernize the shrinking publishing industry by dismantling Japan’s major publishers entirely, stripping away all but those staff those necessary for distribution, and relegating the work of editing, design, print production, and PR to the authors. His plan hinged on the notion of “opening publishing up to the readership,” blurring the line between author and reader, professional and amateur, jumping on new digital markets, and making authors more readily accessible throughout the sales process; essentially, his plan followed the model of the Comic Market, a twice-yearly dōjinshi market held at Tōkyō Big Site. This new gathering, however, would be focused solely on the written word, the Literature Free/Flea Market.[1]
I have complex feelings about Ōtsuka’s argument; while his concerns are based almost entirely on literature’s profitability and financial sustainability rather than cultural merit, his points about the inaccessibility and closed loop of Japan’s publishing industries are nonetheless salient. Because the book market is increasingly centralized in conglomerate publishing—a development certainly not unique to Japan—companies tend toward “sure bets” rather than anything radical, challenging, or unique. Even when editorial staff fight to support literature, they can often be overruled by CEOs, CFOs, and budgetary departments. Ōtsuka’s suggestion for dismantling those companies, while fatalistic (and likely at least a little tongue-in-cheek), was also prescient, anticipating the rise of Japanese digital publishers which would come only a few years after his essay. Rather than lament shrinking readerships and decreasing literary quality, Ōtsuka was ready to embrace literature as a niche commodity, produced in limited runs only for a dedicated audience, or even as a purely digital endeavor published on an all-you-can-read service for a subscription fee.
The Literature Free/Flea Market did indeed come to pass, holding its first gathering in November of 2002. At that modest gathering, there were roughly eighty vendors and a thousand guests. In the two decades since, however, the market has grown at a slow but steady pace. It has also spread beyond the metropolis of Tōkyō, holding events in other major cities throughout the Japanese archipelago. I attended the thirty-third Tōkyō market in November of 2021, speaking with vendors, purchasing various self-published works, and contemplating our unflagging desire to create, to story, to write. In spite of the ongoing pandemic, there were 686 vendors and more than four thousand attendees, all of us registered with the local COVID tracing app, masked and sanitized, maintaining social distance as carefully as anyone can while wandering aisles of folding tables and chairs.
During my visit, I saw that, in certain ways, the amalgamation that Ōtsuka aspired toward has indeed transpired. Near the main entrance, 2021’s Akutagawa Prize winner Li Qinfeng shared a table with Over the Rainbow, an anthology self-published by a coalition of LGBTQ+ writers—including Li herself. A few other published authors also had booths in pride of place, but they weren’t only selling their published works. Many had similar anthologies made with friends, filled with stories that hadn’t been picked up by Japan’s major literary magazines. Established authors were also in the minority of the vendors; many of the writers I spoke to were “amateurs” who’d never been published in literary magazines, but who had accrued fans through the digital publishing spheres Ōtsuka foresaw at the opening of the millennium. Across from Li were two long rows of “light novels,” Japan’s genre of writing aimed at casual and young adult readers. Further along, there were three entire rows of poetry, outnumbering the light novelists nearly three to one. In the non-fiction section of the hall, there were booths dedicated to philosophy, mystery fiction criticism, gender studies, cooking, socialism, and cats, just to name a few. Several booths were managed by college writing groups. One booth across from where I was taking surveys and interviews was run only by an older gentleman, nodding off in his seat.
While there were homemade zines, printed and stapled together by hand, most objects for sale were bound soft-cover books, produced through self-publishing companies advertising around the market. Some of those books were further embellished or hand-crafted as art objects; one booth sold miniature books measuring roughly two-by-two centimeters, while another sold large-format calligraphy prints of famous novels like Tom Sawyer. I picked up a “capsule poem,” a long-form poem printed on acetate and cut into minute fragments, each of which were stuffed in a clear gel capsule. The vendor told me that they had made five thousand capsules, selling about a thousand of them over five years. In addition to sales, many vendors were generous with freebies: sample pieces printed on plain printer paper, pamphlets with QR codes linking to websites of initial publications, business cards, stickers.
I didn’t start shopping until 2:30, with the market closing at five. While some vendors had sold out of their most popular works, many more had piles remaining. I picked up a book from two young women who very nearly jumped for joy at having made a sale, while the rest of their stock waited in a forlorn pile. This, of course, is the flip side of the economy Ōtsuka imagined. If the goal is a sustainable profit, as his essay assumed, very few of these authors will ever “make it.” Many will flame out once they’ve said what they wanted to say—just as Garakuta and its like did—illustrating where Ōtsuka’s economic focus falls short of literary reality. Many dōjinshi are never intended as long-term, profitable endeavors. The most passionate writers among them will continue writing, using funds from their day jobs to keep up their craft and continue dissemination, but the barriers for them are as immovable as ever: grueling hours demanded by most full-time work in Japan, pressing needs of family and friends, the reality of inflation outstripping salary growth.
The goal for these writers, though, is simpler than a sizable profit margin—they want to be heard. The act of writing is not complete when the last page is printed, but rather when the last page is read. One author I spoke with had stock remaining from 2020, and he quite literally gave me every one of his books for free, his only request being that I email him my thoughts on his work. The writers at the Literature Free/Flea Market weigh the costs and benefits of creating within the bounds of capitalism, but their “vested interests” don’t necessarily mirror the grand get-rich-quick aspirations of late capitalism. The work of many such writers would be considered unmarketable in the publishing market, yet some even pride themselves on the nicheness of their audiences. As one vendor poster proudly proclaimed: “These sci-fi stories would never be published!”
When we do away with profit, what is it we write for, and for whom? Where do our interests lie? In the vein of Kazuo Ishiguro, the works of the Literature Free/Flea Market are a culmination of writers reaching out and saying: “Here. Here is a story. Here is a thought. Here is an idea, a piece of art, a feeling. Read it and tell me: is your mind like mine?” The return on this investment comes not in the form of coins and paper bills, but rather in the form of a reader saying, “Yes. Tell me more.”
Laurel Taylor is a translator, writer, and scholar currently working on her Ph.D. in Japanese and comparative literature through a Fulbright at Waseda University. Her writing and translations have appeared in Mentor & Muse, The Offing, The Asia Literary Review, and elsewhere.
[1] Japanese lacks the “l” sound, so “l”s become “r”s, leading to a coincidental (and arguably serendipitous) overlap in Keynesian economics and second-hand goods.
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