An examination of the role of Japan's publishing industry in determining what counted as modern Japanese literature

Emphasizing how modes of book production, promotion, and consumption shape ideas of literary value, Edward Mack examines the role of Japan’s publishing industry in defining modern Japanese literature. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, as cultural and economic power consolidated in Tokyo, the city’s literary and publishing elites came to dominate the dissemination and preservation of Japanese literature. As Mack explains, they conferred cultural value on particular works by creating prizes and multivolume anthologies that signaled literary merit. One such anthology, the Complete Works of Contemporary Japanese Literature (published between 1926 and 1931), provided many readers with their first experience of selected texts designated as modern Japanese literature. The low price of one yen per volume allowed the series to reach hundreds of thousands of readers. An early prize for modern Japanese literature, the annual Akutagawa Prize, first awarded in 1935, became the country’s highest-profile literary award. Mack chronicles the history of book production and consumption in Japan, showing how advances in technology, the expansion of a market for literary commodities, and the development of an extensive reading community enabled phenomena such as the Complete Works of Contemporary Japanese Literature and the Akutagawa Prize to manufacture the very concept of modern Japanese literature.

"“Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature provides a compelling sociological critique of the institution of literature in early twentieth-century Japan. . . . The problems Mack deals with in Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature remain urgent concerns today, and his compelling study gives us some of the tools we need to grapple with them effectively.”" - Journal of Japanese Studies

"“This book is a must read book for people who are studying about Japanese literature or people interested to know more about the birth of the modern Japanese publishing industry. The author researched the subject thoroughly and gives us deep understanding of how the Japanese modern literature was born. . . . [I]t is very enjoyable to read. Even each footnote is packed with insightful details that give more vivid picture of the ‘manufacturing’ process of modern literature. It is an excellent and unique English language resource for an important period of Japan’s literature history.”" - Publishing Research Quarterly

"Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature contributes to deepening our knowledge and understanding of modern Japanese literature in two equally significant ways: on the one hand, it provides a wonderfully detailed study of two of the most powerful mechanisms for ascribing literary value in modern Japan; more generally, it reminds us that behind the discursive superstructure we call 'modern' 'Japanese' 'literature' there is a material base that needs to be studied, if we are to arrive at a historically-sound understanding of these concepts." - East Asian Publishing and Society