Born in Akashi, Japan, in 1972, and raised there for 18 years, Ioannis Mentzas is a Greek national who currently serves as the Editorial Director of Vertical Inc., a New York-based publisher of mostly English translations of popular Japanese fiction.

Mr. Mentzas received his A.B. from Princeton University and his Master's from Columbia University. His thesis was entitled "Soseki in London" and it was completed in 1996. He is fluent in Japanese, Greek and French.

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Interview: March 1, 2005

We ask this question because every answer is different: what brought you to focus on Japan?

For one thing, I was born and raised there, and my mother is Japanese. Beyond that, I was a student of comparative literature. It seemed a natural thing to do to join a publishing house with a Japan focus.

Can you tell us a little about your role at Vertical Inc?

I’m the editorial director, so I select the titles, together with Mr. Sakai. I also pick translators, supervise them, and edit their works to the extent that that’s necessary. I’m the only editor at the moment, unfortunately. I have to do absolutely everything including proofreading. Were it not for the intern I’d be doing a lot of photocopying and a host of odd chores too…

What gets your vote for best and worst book on Japan?

Let me be very biased and tell you that Saying Yes to Japan by Tim Clark and Carl Kay, our first non-translation, non-fiction title, due out this April, is the most refreshing book on Japan in a while. It’s a business book by entrepreneurs that doesn’t feel at all like other books about the Japanese economy that I’ve read. Its stance toward Japan is exceptionally mature and responsible. Worst book on Japan: it’s not a book, but I have long found the New York Times’ sketches of life in Japan to be as disappointingly wrong-headed as their coverage of the WMD issue in the run-up to the Iraq war.

What are you reading right now? In general, what do you like to read? Do you read for pleasure or is it work?

My commute reading right now is A. O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, a great book by a great mind. In general, though, I read for work, which in my case means a lot of genre fiction, American as well as Japanese (sci-fi, horror, espionage, etc.). I used to read a lot of those as a kid and am now taking them very seriously again—funny how these things work out. What I’d really like to read right now is the Booker-nominated novel Cloud Atlas, which I haven’t been able to get around to for the longest time. The author is David Mitchell, who spent several years in Japan.

Can you tell us a little more about your current projects? What are you working on now?

Tezuka’s eight-volume Buddha has occupied a lot of my time; it’s Vertical’s biggest ongoing project. The two other series we do, Suzuki’s Ring trilogy and The Guin Saga by Kaoru Kurimoto, have naturally taken up a lot of my energy too. All three have more volumes to go. It’s such an honor to be overseeing the U.S. releases of these hands-down masterpieces.

What books need to be written on Japan? Will you be writing it? Or will you be publishing it?

Well, I don’t have the time to be writing my own books now, I’m overworked enough editing others’. But I can’t speak highly enough of Clark and Kay’s Saying Yes to Japan. It’s exactly the kind of business book that needed to be published and I’m excited that Vertical is getting to do it.

Tell us a little of how Vertical Inc was founded. Why a publishing house dedicated to books from Japan? Tell us a little about the business. . .What did you do before Vertical?

Mr. Sakai and I met in February 2001 when I was a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University with only my dissertation to go. At that time, Mr. Sakai was the president of a literary agency, Magic Works International. We decided that the company could step up and become a publisher if someone like myself joined as editor and funding was secured. Both of those things happened and our first book, Ring, came out in April 2003, two years after that first meeting. It seemed to us that manga and anime imports had prepared the ground for a venture in bringing over Japan’s popular literature, something that, for understandable reasons, college profs by and large weren’t about to undertake despite their linguistic expertise and despite emerging demand. Films like “Lost in Translation” and Kill Bill and the remakes of J-Horror seem to have vindicated our prognosis that a different Japan can be supplied nowadays.

How is it different from other publishing houses? What wasn’t getting published in the other houses? Why a whole new publishing house?

I’m a big admirer of what Kodansha’s international division and U.S. publishers have accomplished in the way of making a swath of Japanese writers fairly well-known in a country that is so averse to reading works in translation. From Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Mishima to Oe and Endo, on to Banana and Haruki Murakami, the record is actually quite impressive. Not just literary fiction but a significant amount of mystery writing—from Seicho Matsumoto and on—has been made available in English, though with less success until recently with Natsuo Kirino. Yet, genres perceived as too lowbrow (horror, fantasy) and works considered too edgy (e.g. Sayonara, Gangsters by Genichiro Takahashi) were getting systematically cold-shouldered in spite of their global competitiveness and appeal. It would have been very difficult even to sell Suzuki’s Ring to a U.S. publisher before the remake actually hit the theaters and became a blockbuster (we acquired rights to the book well before this happened). We wouldn’t have been able to sell Ring if we were a literary agency—but as a publisher we could just go ahead and publish it!

What is Vertical Inc looking for? What sort of books do you publish? How do you find manuscripts?

Our primary criterion is that the book be appealing to American readers, preferably a mass readership. Superior works that belong to clearly defined genres with large readerships, like mystery, are ideal. In other words, potential bestsellers. (It’s very difficult for a small house like ours to market literary fiction successfully.) A second, very important criterion is that the book be an obvious candidate for a screen adaptation. This tends to mean: unique concept, strong story, solid character development. Being a publisher specializing in translations, we don’t solicit manuscripts; we pick our titles from already published books by proven masters of storytelling. We prefer authors with a long string of successes because that means we can immediately follow up a stateside hit with another knock-out.

How do you choose translators? Tell us a bit about the “art” of literature translation. . .What makes a good translator?

Some come to us, some we go after. The typical Vertical translator is a graduate student in one of America’s larger East Asian Studies departments. They need the opportunity and the cash, while we depend on their curiosity, enthusiasm, and talent. In the case of Vertical books, translation is not so much an art but a craft. What matters most is readability. That’s actually a challenge if you’ve been trained as a scholar. Accuracy is a must, but the Vertical translator must achieve full accuracy without sounding clunky.

Given that you publish over such a wide array of genres, is there such thing as “Japanese literature” that unites them?

For Vertical’s purposes, if it’s written in Japanese, it’s Japanese literature. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Korean, Indian, or Caucasian. On the other hand, no matter how “Japanese” the author or content, if it’s in, say, Chinese, then it falls outside our company’s realm of competence. From Vertical’s standpoint, there is such a thing as Japanese literature and it comes down basically to that question of language, not because of any philosophical reason but in terms of sound business practice. Selecting and translating contemporary Japanese books is what we’re streamlined to do. Of course, in unique cases like the eye-opening Saying Yes to Japan, we publish works that aren’t translated from Japanese; I think this sort of exception will be made more for non-fiction than fiction. Fiction that’s originally in English, published by Vertical, won’t make much sense for booksellers and publicity contacts at this stage.

What is the market like for books on Japan? Who is buying? What are people interested in? Is it a specialist house? What was the most popular book? Can you tell us a bit about reader feedback?

First of all, we aren’t really a publisher of “books on Japan” but rather “books from Japan” (i.e. translations). Our readers tend to be young and curious and to have a predilection for “cool” pop stuff. Some of our authors, however—Kenzo Kitakata is probably the best example—write for older readers and have indeed won kudos from seasoned veterans of life. Our bestselling titles have been the ones that have appealed to both types of readers: Suzuki’s Ring series and Tezuka’s Buddha, rollicking great yarns for teens and grown-ups alike. Reader feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, but we’re a small press and I guess people tend not to write mean letters to folks like us; those who like us make it known, those who don’t (if they’re out there) find better things to do than berate us.

Is popular interest in Japan growing? If so, what is it based on? Or is it a fad?

I think the growth is undeniable and that it isn’t just a fad, though some drop-off from the current level of interest is possible. I don’t see manga ever going away. The number one reason for all the interest is, in my opinion, the genuinely high quality of the best Japanese pop culture. People have found out that there’s good stuff there and won’t easily forget such a vast and multifarious treasure trove. Globalization doesn’t equal Americanization: that’s something many of us wish is true, and perhaps here is a happy instance.

American authors such as Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Dan Brown, and UK author J. K. Rowling have avid followings in Japan. Do you think that there is a difference on what is popular in Japan and what will be popular in the US? Will a best seller in Japan be a best seller in the US? Why do you think American pop lit sells in Japan?

Great narratives have universal appeal, I think. For historical reasons, though, it’s much easier to import Western culture (including American pop culture) into the East than vice versa. That’s a fact that has at least as much to do with the way modernization has equaled Westernization as with the merits of those big name authors (all of whom I do respect). It’s just not the case that a Japanese bestseller becomes an instant U.S. bestseller, whereas practically any American mega-hit is bound to be a moneymaker in Japan so long as its having done well in its country of origin is properly touted in advertisements. What should be said about American pop culture, however, is that its producers have always had to face a market that is highly diverse (immigrants in movie theaters since almost the dawn of cinema). That has led, I think, to a built-in tendency toward a kind of universal style that would have at least some appeal to foreigners as well. The typical Hollywood movie and its features (action, heroism, “corniness” and so on) are the outcome of servicing a—not just ethnically—diverse domestic audience. None of that hurt as American pop culture went global. I think it’s no accident that a lot of the Japanese artists who’re winning large numbers of fans worldwide (Haruki Murakami, Koji Suzuki, etc.) almost invariably cite American culture as a formative influence.

Tell us a little about Vertical’s amazing cover art. . .

They’re all designed by Chip Kidd, the most famous book jacket designer in the U.S., and perhaps the world. He works full-time at Alfred Knopf, America’s premier literary publisher, but also kindly moonlights as Vertical’s Art Director. And not because he’s poor. Mr. Kidd, a big comics fan, was so delighted that we were going to publish Tezuka’s Buddha that he agreed to oversee our entire visual direction, name-cards included.

Can you tell us what’s in the pipeline at Vertical Inc? What will Vertical Inc be like in ten years?

This June we’ll be publishing a work of popular history by Nanami Shiono called The Fall of Constantinople. It’ll be only our second nonfiction title. It’s an amazingly engrossing account of that city’s surrender to the Ottoman Turks, from the grand dame of Japanese letters. Ten years from now—well, I won’t speculate. Not even our business plan pretends to such prophetic powers.

What’s the future of book publishing?

Ask me ten years later, or ask someone with more experience. I’m still a tyro in the book world. I don’t doubt, however, that it has a future if that’s what you’re getting at.