Unpublished work sought in Japanese

For my readers with a Japanese connection, The Japan Times today (Thurs 11 May 2006) reports that Random House Kodansha is looking for unpublished literary works in Japanese:

Unpublished work sought

Random House Kodansha Co. has announced its first annual contest for unpublished literary works, which will include publication of the winning manuscript in both Japanese and English.

The Tokyo-based publisher will accept Japanese manuscripts of any genre and on any subject until next March 31 for the first award. The manuscript must be between 250 to 350 pages, at 400 characters per page.

There is no prize money, but the winning work, chosen by the publisher’s editors, will be published in its original Japanese and then released in English by the Random House group of the United States.

The winner will be announced on the company’s Web site in September 2007 and an award ceremony will be held in New York."

I blogged on the controversy over Memoirs of a Geisha a few weeks ago  - that it was enacted on film by Chinese actors instead of Japanese ones. The book was of course written by a Caucasion man. This competition is a great opportunity for Japanese writers to take back control over how Japanese are portrayed and by whom - and cross-over to a Western readership as much as to gain a profile in their home country!

The link to the Random House Kodansha site is http://66.249.93.104/translate_c?hl=en&u=http://randomhouse-kodansha.co. jp/award/invite/index.html&prev=/search%3Fq%3DRandom%2BHouse%2BKodansha% 26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26rls%3DGGLR,GGLR:2005-49,GGLR:en - it’s in Japanese but I managed to get an auto-translation into English, which makes weird reading if nothing else.

If any of you do submit something to the competition, please come back and let us know.