Tale of Erotic Love Is Steaming Across the Pacific Ocean to U.S. Bookstores

Is it literature, or pornography dressed up as cherry-blossom art? Is it a mature, modern interpretation of a classic Japanese lovers’ tale, or a stereotype-laden tour of the dark side of sexual passion?

American readers will be able to decide for themselves this month when “A Lost Paradise,” an English translation of the controversial Japanese blockbuster “Shitsurakuen,” hits U.S. bookstores, one of the few Japanese titles to make it across the Pacific this summer.

The steamy novel of adulterous love and dangerous sexual obsession, by Junichi Watanabe, became a pop culture phenomenon in Japan a few years ago. Though scorned by feminists and many literary critics, the story became so ubiquitous that in 1997 the title suddenly popped up in the famously plastic Japanese language as a verb. “To Shitsurakuen” meant “to have an illicit love affair.”

The novel first appeared in 1995 and 1996 in serialized form on the back page of Japan’s version of the Wall Street Journal, the respected but stodgy Nikkei financial daily newspaper. Novels are frequently serialized in newspapers, but it is unusual to pick such a provocative one.

On any ordinary morning, the middle-aged males who make up the lion’s share of Nikkei readers spend their train ride snoozing over the stock tables or scanning the front-page headlines on banking reform. But during the 13 months of “Shitsurakuen,” these “salarymen” could be seen in intense communion with the back page. In offices and bars, the tale of the lovers who defy the rigid constraints of Japanese society and then plot their ultimate escape was a hot topic for months.

“Bar hostesses on the Ginza were saying they had to read it or they couldn’t work,” said Yutaka Akiyama, head of public affairs for the Nikkei. Although the newspaper hasn’t made a direct correlation, the Nikkei saw its burgeoning circulation soar even faster during the serial.

And that was just the beginning. The two-volume novel, published by Kodansha Ltd. in 1997, has sold 2.7 million copies to date, the publisher said. It was made into an award-winning movie starring the gruff and beloved actor Koji Yakusho, who agreed to do the film after the director assured him it wouldn’t be pornographic. It was the biggest hit of the year.

Still, the public’s appetite was deemed unsated. And so, later in 1997, “Shitsurakuen” made its television debut as a miniseries, although the TV adaptation was neither as well-cast nor as popular as the book or movie, said Seiko Yamazaki, research director of the Dentsu Institute for Human Studies, a Tokyo think tank. “It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to watch in the living room with your wife and kids,” Yamazaki explained.

The novel is told through the eyes of Kuki, 54, a mid-level salaryman at a major Tokyo publishing company who has fallen from favor. He has been demoted to the status of a “window-sitter,” given little work and is expected to wait with dignity for his early retirement orders. His lover, Rinko, 37, is a calligraphy teacher trapped in a loveless marriage with a distinguished but cold professor of medicine.

Over the course of a year, the two meet in a variety of scenic locations, all well known to readers of Japanese literature, for trysts that become increasingly abandoned and then downright kinky.

Along the way, they discuss the motivations of the characters in the ancient Japanese court novel “The Tale of Genji,” enjoy scenic hot springs and allow falling cherry blossoms to scatter over Rinko’s moonlit flesh. They also become fascinated by the confessions of Sada Abe, Japan’s most famous murderess of the 1920s, who strangled and sexually mutilated her married lover. Abe insisted she did it purely for love.

“I wanted to write the story of an overwhelmingly mad, passionate and violent love,” said Watanabe, 66, who trained as a doctor then quit to write more than 100 novels--but none as incandescently popular as “Shitsurakuen.”

“In Japanese society, love is seen as light, as trivial--men don’t admit to reading love stories, though, of course, they secretly do,” Watanabe said.

As a titillating trendsetter, “Shitsurakuen” was unusual in youth-driven Japan because it appealed mainly to people in their 40s and 50s--much like the wildly popular but more chaste “The Bridges of Madison County,” which has sold 2.6 million copies here. “Shitsurakuen” in Japanese is “Paradise Lost,” but the translator suggested the inversion to “A Lost Paradise” to make the English title more modern-reader friendly than Milton, Watanabe said.

The book has now been translated into Chinese and Korean--selling 150,000 copies in South Korea--and is on the market in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also circulating, in both authorized and bootleg editions, in China, where it has sold roughly 60,000 copies and hasn’t triggered any complaints from the authorities, according to the author. “I’m told they toned it down in translation,” Watanabe said.

In Singapore, the publishers sweated to get past the censors a book that has parallels with Nagisa Oshima’s dark erotic film about Abe, “In the Realm of the Senses.”

“They did give [the book] a clean stamp, but I understand the movie in Singapore was cut to such a point that you could barely understand the story,” said Keith Roeller, who is in charge of marketing for the U.S. edition of “Shitsurakuen” at Kodansha International in Tokyo.

Kodansha International decided to bring the book out in English as part of a push by the highbrow publisher of Japanese classics to introduce more popular works to an overseas audience, Roeller said.

The other new English titles coming out from Kodansha this summer are “Love Songs From the Manyoshu,” an illustrated bilingual anthology of 35 love poems from the classical Japanese poetry collection of the seventh and eighth centuries, and “Nobody’s Perfect,” the memoirs of disabled youth activist Hirotada Ototake.

“Shitsurakuen” made people “reexamine their lives, their marriages, what love is about, what passion is about,” Roeller said. “I want this to be on every bookshelf in Barnes & Noble, and not just in the [Japanese bookstore] Kinokuniya in L.A.” Roeller said the novel is actually better in its English translation, which cuts some of the repetitive sex scenes that put sizzle in the serial yet preserves the Japanese culture and aesthetic.

While roughly 3,500 English-language books are translated into Japanese each year, only about 200 Japanese books make it into print in English, according to the English Agency Japan, which handles international publishing rights.

Critics questioned Kodansha’s decision to choose “Shitsurakuen,” of all recent Japanese popular novels, for the rare privilege of an English translation. “Nobody here is reading it anymore, and its reputation is fading,” said independent literary critic Junichi Takita. “It remains as a social phenomenon, however.”

Feminist attorney and English literature specialist Yoko Tajima blasted the book as indecent, sexist, stereotypical and dated.

“I’m ashamed that this is being published now in the United States,” she said. “This isn’t literature--I have no idea why Americans should read it.”

Retorted author Watanabe: “There’s nothing to be done about criticisms from people who have not experienced the full depths of erotic love--if they don’t understand it, they don’t understand it.”

While Japanese culture has deep erotic traditions, Japan’s modern society has grown more prudish.

Watanabe said Japan has unnaturally suppressed the human erotic impulse in its drive to economic glory, and still scorns novels about love as “lacking social significance.” But what interests Watanabe is the personal: the power of sex as a primary human motivator, one that indeed poses a threat to the social status quo.

Feminist Tajima said the book’s popularity stemmed from its appeal to personal freedom. Many Japanese wish they could escape from the constraints of their rigid society, she said, describing the “old-style Japanese” way of thinking as, “The man obeys the company and the woman obeys the man.”

Workaholic Japanese males have no time for true love, begrudging the time required to develop a passion as a mere distraction, Watanabe said, adding that his book aimed both to shock and to attack that society.

“When you work like a madman, you lose your family and you lose your self,” he said. “You think only of advancing in your career. But when you become a ‘window-sitter,’ you begin to reflect on how you’ve spent your life. That’s when Kuki becomes capable of real love. He rediscovers his self.”

Critics say Kuki and Rinko are egotistical, irresponsible and ultimately lazy. The lovers don’t bother to confront their spouses, explain themselves to their families or fight to make room inside Japanese society for their love.

Readers who haven’t already guessed where this tale is headed should stop here.

For those who are already familiar with Japan’s literary tradition of double suicide, a theme of books and plays dating back to the 17th century, Watanabe said his goal was to offer a modern interpretation that would seem both realistic and inevitable.

“In the Japanese life view and aesthetic, to retreat and to choose death can be just as beautiful as to advance forward in life,” Watanabe said. “To die at the very peak of love is also beautiful.”

As for his ending, Watanabe said, “I did quite a lot of medical research and decided that it just might be possible.”

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Sonni Efron can be reached at socalliving@latimes.com.