Book Review: “Picking Bones From Ash” by Marie Mutsuki Mockett Skillfully Interweaves Time and Place 30 Aug 2010, 5:28 pm

Reviewed by David Kowalsky

Every year there are a few debut novels with Japan-related themes. I wrote a short review on this year’s If You
Follow Me (Harper Perennial) by Malena Watrous for this blog, but also deserving attention from last year is Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s Picking Bones From Ash (Graywolf).

Picking Bones starts out as a 1950s coming-of-age story set in a small mountain town in Japan. Eleven-year-old Satomi narrates about living as an only child with her unmarried mother, who alone runs a small izakaya.

Satomi’s talent at playing the piano leads her to attend high school and college away from home. After graduating from college, she cannot continue to get the kind of instruction she needs within Japan to launch a career performing for international audiences, so she auditions and gets accepted to continue her training at a school in Paris. There she meets Timothy, an American courier for a antique collector in San Francisco, and both Hitomi’s career path and this book go in a very different direction.

While skipping out on her piano studies for a trip to Japan with Timothy, Hitomi hears the news that her mother died a month earlier. She was so late to find out by not being back in Paris when the news arrived by post. Her mother’s body was already cremated (here we understand where the book’s title comes from), but Hitomi is in Japan just in time to attend her mother’s forty-nine day memorial. During the weekend of the memorial, Hitomi meets an Englishman named Franςois, who is in Japan studying to be an anthropologist.

The book soon jumps ahead from the late 1960s in Japan to San Francisco in the 1980s with Rumi, the daughter of Franςois and Satomi, now as the narrator. Learning the ins and outs of the Asian antique business as she works for her father, it isn’t long before she becomes a gifted authenticator of antiques thanks largely due to her own rather unusual talent of being able to hear the stories of inanimate objects. If that is not already strange enough, Rumi starts hearing a ghost, who she believes to be her mother (whom she always assumed was deceased) calling her to Japan.

Picking Bones again heads back in time, picking up where it left off earlier with Satomi as the narrator as she travels with Timothy in Japan. It is not as confusing as it may sound, but the final part of the book is told in separate parts by both Rumi and Satomi, back in Japan, now in the early 1990s. There is the inevitable merging of the two story lines, but I won’t write as to not give away what happens.

Picking Bones From Ash is an enjoyable book to read on many different levels. It changes directions out of the nice coming-of-age story into something much more complex; it skillfully interweaves the stories of three generations of women, and finally, it blends a mystery and ghost story into one overall highly recommended debut novel.

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Bookslut Loves Buddy 2 Aug 2010, 9:17 pm

…Buddy Zooka, that is.

Today, Bookslut launched its 99th edition with a brilliant round-up of “Southbound and Down” books for young adults. Including our very own tale of zany French Quarter antics and contemplative environmental awakening, reviewer Colleen Mondor shows us her take on recent books taking place in southern locales with Buddy joining in as the Gulf Coast delegate.

Ms. Mondor hails author Tracey Tangerine’s debut novel as “utterly original” and “a very charming novel with an element of sweetness tempered by humor and occasional silliness.”

“This book is a wake-up call about the environment. But it never preaches or becomes didactic, and Tangerine clearly is more determined to paint an accurate picture of her home city’s quirkiness than anything else.” “(She) successfully walks the line of creating a character who both exemplifies New Orleans while not dissolving into parody.”

Speaking to the book’s vintage-inspired design: “To say that Buddy Zooka will stand out on the shelves is an understatement, and further proof of just what an indie press has to offer that the big publishers (so fond of their black and purple photo illustrated covers) have yet to embrace.”

Thank you! We’re very flattered and glad that you enjoyed reading Buddy Zooka as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you.

Find Bookslut’s full review here. Also, check out Ms. Mondor’s feature on the post-Katrina angle of the University of New Orleans Press for some other great picks.

Buddy Zooka is available through our online store and through fine booksellers and wholesalers everywhere.

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Penguin’s New “Beautiful Books” 12 Jul 2010, 6:18 pm

By Jessica Sattell

Courtesy of Anthropologie.com

How much literature do you see in retail outlets beyond bookstores? Lots, with Penguin’s new wave of book design taking hints from smaller presses.

In addition to my work with Chin Music Press and other fine independent publishers, I lead a second part-time life as a shopgirl at an upscale boutique in Seattle’s Japantown. Besides books and paper of all kinds, my other passion is scouting store design and opportunities for both Chin Music Press and my little shop to sell beautiful papergoods, clothing, and antiques. I constantly scour local sources as well as the grand world wide web to find new talents and creative artists. Over the past year, I’ve noticed a gentle swing towards larger publishers catching on to something that Chin Music has been dedicated to since its beginning: making beautiful books at a very affordable price.

Recently, a series of tomes by Penguin Books are the darling of design blogs and mainstream publications alike and are steady sellers in both big box book and lifestyle stores. Penguin has a long and treasured history of a dedication to simple yet incredibly desirable book design, and they’ve made the jump to affordable hardbacks with their cleverly designed Hardcover Classics series. Curated by renowned designer Coralie Bickford-Smith, at an accessible ($20) price point you can own your very own copy of Jane Austen’s Emma dotted with proper parlor chairs, or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island lush with palms and parrots. Touted as “striking new editions of literature’s most beloved books to cherish, collect, and pass on,” the books feature stamped linen covers, colored endpapers, and ribbon markers. In a stack, they’re visually striking, and in one’s hands they feel wonderful. They harken back to the literary curio collections of old with a vintage feel, intended to last for decades.

The line has proven very popular for booksellers everywhere, and also for international retail chains such as Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters, who incorporate the books into their artsy, quirky lifestyle aesthetic aimed at a demographic both highly educated and highly discerning. They’re also popping up at smaller, more thematic home and clothing boutiques as marketed lifestyle accents. With Penguin’s shift towards a re-thinking in book design looking to decades past, breathing new life into classics (and reflecting it in a visual presentation taking cues from the past but updated with modern sensibilities) has proven a refreshing approach to an industry still caught up in pinching pennies and sacrificing product quality.

Although Penguin’s project feels progressive in 2010, Chin Music Press has been doing this from its beginning in 2002. Have you seen Kuhaku, with its woven-in bookmark and four-color artwork? How about the foil-stamped cover of Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? It looks like the big guys are taking the hint from the smaller presses, and the widespread public is catching on to what books can (and should) become.

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Jeff Gillenkirk Discusses “Home, Away” at Borders Mission Bay on July 17 12 Jul 2010, 5:01 pm

Just in time to beat the summer heat, Chin Music Press author Jeff Gillenkirk will discuss and sign Home, Away this Saturday, July 17th at 4:15pm at Borders Books Mission Bay, just across the street from AT&T field (home of the San Francisco Giants).

Come for this (air conditioned!) baseball-themed soiree and hear Jeff along with authors Steve Steinberg (1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York) and Mark Armour (Joe Cronin: A Life In Baseball). The Giants are playing the Mets just across the street in a night game, as well!

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The Blue Note Records of Publishing: An Interview with Bruce Rutledge (Part 3 of 3) 12 Jul 2010, 4:09 pm

By Michael Ramirez

Part 3 of 3.

This interview was originally published in Japanese in the twenty-fourth issue of Gunkei, one of the few independently published Japanese literary magazines with biannual print runs well into the thousands. It appears here for the first time in English. In parts one and two, we discussed how Chin Music Press aims to fill the gap between US and Japanese publishers and their thought process behind their editing and presentation. Here we move on to discuss the future of publishing and some advice on change in the industry.

Mike: Do you think that one way for bookstores to survive would be to become publishers as well? Or, to somehow merge with the internet? What kind of advice do you have for bookstores?

Bruce: They need to change. They need to be community spaces. They need to draw people in. They need to be less warehousey. I don’t think that the bookstores of the future are going to be those big box Barnes & Noble-type places. They’re probably going to be smaller. There’s one in Capitol Hill here in Seattle called Pilot Books. It has a lot of attractive titles, but it limits how many they have. They have most of them placed face-out rather than lined up in rows, so it has more of a vibe of a museum or a gallery rather than a retail space. It’s sort of like the owner is the curator. I think that the indie stores might be able to find their way by presenting themselves in that kind of way- breaking from the traditional retail mold. The bigger stores are going to need to have a mix of front list and hand selling if they’re going to stay around, but I don’t have the answers at all because this is a rough business.

Mike: Publishing does seem like a rough business, but it’s great that it sounds like book quality is improving. I remember having a debate with a friend of mine in Japan. She was talking about how American books deteriorated after a year or two, but even a regular Japanese paperback could last for thirty years or more. I told her that American paperbacks weren’t so bad, and then, sure enough, I came back to my books in the US and I realized that the pages were just crumbling in my hands! In a way, publishing is heading towards a renaissance where the fact that you have multiple centers of operation is promoting healthy competition.

Bruce: I kind of agree. What’s lacking now for the industry is big money from the big presses. Book Expo America, used to be a big deal and the place that publishers would have extravagant spending and all these free giveaways. I went last year, and at one level it was really bleak because a lot of publishers didn’t want to give anything away and many of the big publishers didn’t even show. On another level, it was great because all of a sudden we, the little presses, shone. People were discovering us because we weren’t overwhelmed and overshadowed by flutes of champagne and lavish expense accounts, so we did great there.

Basically, the big publishers are just coming down to the margins that we’ve always lived on, which are pretty skimpy. It’s made things more democratic. There’s now more of a chance for us to create a deal and put out a book that before would have been unheard of. We go by a model where we don’t give standard royalties. We set up break-even points for the production of the book and then we share the profit 50-50 with the author. This means that either the author gets next to nothing because our advances are very low but their book comes out and it doesn’t sell very well, or, it sells well and they make way more than they would with a big publisher. Doing it this way brings us together.

Our goals as the publisher are the same as those of the author. With the old royalty deal, if the author could convince you to fly him around the world to do readings, then he would be selling books but you wouldn’t be making any money. For every book he sells, he’s going to buy another plane ticket with your money, so it’s like a rivalry that forms. When you share the profits evenly, you’re together. You’re both trying to sell the book and keep costs lean. It’s not a perfect fix, but most authors understand that and trust that we don’t have some secret cache of cash that we’re hoarding to ourselves and while we laugh behind their backs. We’re in it together, and that allows companies like us to get by because we don’t have to throw a big advance of $30,000 for a book as per the old way of doing things. We could never do that. We’d be lucky if we could do three, but usually we can’t.

Mike: I think at the same time, unless it’s, like, Oprah Winfrey or Hillary Clinton we’re talking about, most authors are pretty happy to see their work published and get their names recognized. They’ve got something else going on in their lives that pushes them through and they don’t really expect a big advance. I recently went to a reading by William Vollman, and he said that he writes with this whole aesthetic and morality that he brings to both writing and living, and now he’s able to live as a writer alone. He’s got this, like, Buddha-like, laser-sharp, super solid consistency. His interviewer at the reading asked some audience member, “Did you know that this author smoked crack with a prostitute?” And William just calmly looked at this guy and said, “That was an accident.” I thought that it was great to see somebody who had so much attention to words that he wouldn’t let that one slip by. In the whole audience, no one laughed at his response except for me! I think the audience understood but didn’t really know what to make of it, but I felt that by doing that he was protecting his craft and implying that there was no reason to put it out there so explicitly.

Bruce: That’s great! I just read a quote from him, actually. Someone had asked him how he keeps his voice or his vision, and his response was, “I don’t own a cellphone. I don’t own a fax machine. I don’t surf the internet. I put my phone in the closet, and I have small laptop that I work on.” That was his response. I read it to my wife and told her that I would like to be like that.

Mike: Well, go for it!

Bruce: Not totally, but there’s days where I just want to put the phone in the closet and feel like everything would click, and then I could focus and eliminate distraction. I thought that was a funny quote in this day and age– how would you keep voice and focus without doing something like that?

Mike: Do you have any advice for people who are out there keeping their own guiding lights and literary lights lit?

Bruce: Well, when we’re on a project, it’s almost like being in meditation or keeping a strong focus on something. I often have a specific writer or piece of literature to guide me back to the focus. When we did Kuhaku, it was Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Innocents Abroad. For Goodbye Madame Butterfly, it was the works of Studs Terkel. And for Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, it wasn’t a work of literature but the tradition of jazz funerals that provided us with the inspiration and the overall structure. I think this sort of exercise keeps us aware that we’re working in a continuum and that we are adding to the dialogue while respecting and being inspired by what has come before.

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The Blue Note Records of Publishing: An Interview With Bruce Rutledge (Part 2 of 3) 28 Jun 2010, 3:53 pm

By Michael Ramirez

Part 2 of 3.

This interview was originally published in Japanese in the twenty-fourth issue of Gunkei, one of the few independently published Japanese literary magazines with biannual print runs well into the thousands. It appears here for the first time in English. In part one, we left off discussing how Chin Music Press aims to fill the “void” (kuhaku) between Japanese and American cultures through their books, and now we move on to how language learning trains one to be a better communicator.

“Review it, slow it down, and try to find that space where you’re really concentrating.”

Mike: I think that it’s hard to listen. I realize this. When it comes to listening, do you have any advice for somebody who wants to read better or listen better? You know, to have more insight into a book?

Bruce: I guess what I would do is to slow it down. I think our culture ramps everything up, and so that whether it’s a conversation with a person or with a book, I suggest to read it three times instead of one. Review it, slow it down, and try to find that space where you’re really concentrating. I know that for me, if I’m reading manuscripts at work all day, I’m not really giving the time to think critically about them or enjoy them. If I had a nice Sunday afternoon where I read and take my time, then I would.

What I try to do, and I’m not…I mean…by far…far from a role model, but I try to make sure that I mix contemporary works with works from a hundred years ago or three hundred years ago. I change up the historical periods of what I read, so I’m not reading all contemporary all in a row– I’m reading Mark Twain or Shakespeare or something mixed in. In that approach, I try to get used to different languages and different ways of using language, just to mix it up that way. That works for me. But, again…

Mike: I think that’s great. At first I didn’t notice this, but then I eventually did from my own experience: When you go to Japan, especially when Japanese is not your native language, there’s something that you become much more sensitive to. You become more sensitive to language, and words, and their sound and their feel. It’s kind of like they become very present, very visible. Did you find that such an awareness was something that led you to want to publish? Did that awareness make you a better listener? That idea that by traveling out of your element, somehow this ability was enhanced?

Bruce: Absolutely. Picking up a language while living in a foreign country was maybe the biggest thing for me in terms of learning how to listen. I went to Japan thinking that I spoke Japanese after taking a couple of classes–and then realizing that I spoke barely any–and could understand only if whomever was speaking slowed down their speech for me. So, from day one I was picking stuff up and learning the language from scratch. I kept a little notebook, kept filling in words that I would hear and hear, and then I’d get another notebook. It was just amazing that if you listened, you would hear the words that you were studying. So, it was like the most obvious example of when you’re learning a language. Listening is often key, just for picking up the proper intonation. To have awesome intonation, well, that comes from the ear. It’s just like music– it’s huge for me.

Also through language, you just start to see your own country in a different light and start to have a new perspective. It’s too dramatic to say that she grew up without a country, but my wife Yuko really grew up between countries. Nowhere ever really felt like home for her because she’s Japanese, but she was born in Manila and lived in Hong Kong and L.A. and moved around a lot with her family. She lived in Japan but never quite felt like it was “home,” and also never felt like the US was totally “home.” There are parts of her that are connected to each place, and that just gives her a completely different perspective. I was a kid who basically spent the first eighteen years of my life in Ohio and never left. I was the opposite of her– I was totally nurtured in one place, and then I went to England and then Japan, and I sort of never looked back after that.

Mike: Wow.

Bruce: I’m sure you’re the same way in some respects.

Mike: I don’t know if it’s like pulling a thread, there’s something fun about traveling and living in many places, something amazing about it, and you just keep going with it. Kind of like how, I think, Haruki Murakami was once quoted in a review of his sort-of memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I haven’t actually read it, but the reviewer gave an actually great review of his work about just running, and how he talks about how “you know you just keep running, every day, just keep running…” and eventually something good happens, and you get back to it.

“The book is an incredibly evolved object, it’s going to be hard for digital culture to beat it”

Mike: So, I guess I’m going to turn this around and ask if you had any questions or topics that you thought would be good to talk about?

Bruce: Let’s see…there’s a lot of good questions. I think one that’s important, and I think one that defines us is, “When did you begin to focus on making quality, craftsman-level books?”

That’s really important to what Chin Music Press is about, and it goes with my idea that when I set up the press, the key thing would be to have a designer on board first, even before we had someone who could help us with marketing, and even before we had another editor besides myself. Other people could be hired as freelance, but the key component in the beginning would be myself, Yuko, and a designer. The reason I thought that way was because we were going through this digital shift in our culture, where everything was changing, and it was coming to books. Book design had become, like, just about typography and a really nice cover, but that was it. Not with art books, but with text-driven books, design was starting to lose care. The cover, the binding, all that stuff was lessening in quality as people tried to carve out a few more pennies from their budgets. I was very well aware of this because my dad was sort of a book collector. He’s not a professional one at all, but he just had an amazing collection of books that I saw growing up as a kid. So, I knew about that aspect of quality. I believe that a book is an incredibly evolved object.

It’s going to be hard for a digital culture to beat books. You can see that in terms of Amazon’s Kindle. Obviously there’s an ecological issue with cutting down trees, but I do think that’s a bit overstated. The first batch of worn-out Kindles will get shipped to some landfill in Nigeria and then it’s all about churning out these new versions. That’s not necessarily such a great argument for the E-book.

So, I looked at things in this light and I thought that our goal would be to make books that are worthy of being in both paper and in ink in a digital age, and this was sort of the guiding principle for us. We thought that a book needs to be made with all of the things that make a book worth being in paper-and-ink form, like the interplay of the art on the pages, or the sewn-in bookmark, how the foil stamping on the cover feels to your hands. That’s also inspired because of Japanese aesthetics, in a way. Paper is such an integral part of Japanese culture, from Shinto shrines to origami, to washi, there’s so much focus on appreciating paper. We borrowed from Japanese publishing, in a way, like with the idea of the “book obi.”

Mike: Yeah, I love those.

Bruce: When we first started we hired a designer from Tokyo, Craig Mod. He and I agreed that we didn’t like sleeves on books. You get a sleeve around the cover and then you pull it off, and the rest of the book is just so ordinary. We thought that cover should be on the physical book, foil stamped in, and the little obi could be used to put in the blurbs, or the bar code, or the price. Then you could keep the obi there or take it off as you want. We also agreed that we liked the sewn-in bookmark.

Mike: That’s another thing I love.

Bruce: So, we went back and integrated these little touches into our books. Part of that inspiration to do so was going through my Dad’s old collection and seeing how they were made. We found that more and more we were being identified as makers of beautiful books, even if people didn’t know what our books were about. People understand the design of our books right away, as soon as they pick them up. Getting back to Blue Note as our model, it’s become part of our goal to get to that level. People already trust us on the physical beauty of our books, and next we’re going to need to also gain their trust on the content. We just need more titles out there. We have so few, and since they’re so eclectic it’s kind of hard. It’s kind of unheard of for one publisher to jump focus so quickly, like from Morita’s political style right to Goodbye Madame Butterfly, which is written very much in a journalistic tone about the sex lives of real Japanese women.

Mike: Really?

Bruce: Yeah, I mean…you could do that…

Mike: Ah, you mean, some people would, and some people wouldn’t. But you’re right– if somebody were interested in politics, they would go to Morita, and it could be required reading for a political science class. If you were to assign it academically, then Goodbye Madame Butterfly would be discussed in a literature class, or maybe a women’s studies or gender studies class. But, even with this jumping around on subject matter, people are understanding what you do, right?

Bruce: Right. The craftsmanship of the book is really important to us. It’s not like we’re Luddites– we’re doing tons of stuff online, and we often ask prospective authors why they think their book should be a Chin Music Press book. We ask them why they would rather take the time to publish with us rather than self-publish and get it out into the world right away. Why us? We’re looking for authors that hopefully understand our goals, like, “Oh, because book art works best in this way,” or “because the subject matter needs wonderful design.” We like to talk about designing the book from the inside out. It’s not ninety percent cover design and some typography. It’s really the whole thing. I think people really respond to that.

More and more in this age, I think a phone call is worth more than it used to be because we do so much e-mail and texting. When I get a phone call, in person, it’s kind of like what it used to be like to get a letter. I think that a beautiful book is along the same kind of thinking. Sure, there’s good reason that the hastily made paperback should be digital–why not, if they’re just going to fall apart anyway? The really wonderfully made ones shouldn’t be like that. At least not yet.

“Write something that, if someone found it a hundred years from now, would illuminate the world you’re writing about.”

Mike: Treating literature well is one of those things that culture aficionados and art lovers are probably somewhat spiritual about, right? I think it was in the The Time Machine where the main character goes into the future and the books are all dusty and they’re dead because the culture didn’t treat them right. There’s a scene in the 1960 movie where the people of the future have discs that spin and retell their tales, and he’s shocked as to what happened to their books. He touches the dead books and they’re falling apart. He’s literally disgusted by it. Was there ever a time when you felt that we can do so much better, and we can do it right, and we can make books last for a hundred years or more? Is that part of your thinking at Chin Music Press?

Bruce: Yes, It absolutely is. In fact, a hundred years is specifically the span that we use. As an editor, I use that with writers, too. I tell them not to worry so much about commenting on contemporary issues, but to write something that if someone found a hundred years from now, it would illuminate the world they’re writing about. Right? That’s what I sort of told the writers of Kuhaku, to give me a story that will somehow illuminate your world. Whether it’s about taking out the garbage, or drinking coffee from a can, the reader should come out thinking, “Oh, so that’s what it was like.” It’s sort of street level, and it’s a main principal for us to create work that lasts. Because I worked as a journalist for a long time and know about the instant and transient nature of things written on daily or hourly deadlines, I try to imagine that a book will last and still be relevant five, ten, twenty or thirty years, or infinitely into the future. Thinking like that is such a fun exercise for your brain. It takes you away from all the day-to-day, doesn’t it?

I try to think about the kind of book that’s going to last. Even if it gets bad reviews in the present, I’m going to keep trying to find it new readers. That’s the kind of book that we’re trying to make. It also makes business sense because you’re never dead and done because the New York Times didn’t review your book, or your author didn’t get on “Fresh Air” on NPR with Terry Gross. Instead, you’re constantly allowing readers to discover the work that you created five years ago. It’s that good, and you know it’s worth it. So, that’s our way. To break through slow and steady.

Stay tuned for part three of this interview, coming soon. For more information about Gunkei, the literary magazine where this interview originally appeared in Japanese, visit their website (Japanese only).

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The Blue Note Records of Publishing: An Interview With Bruce Rutledge (Part 1 of 3) 24 Jun 2010, 8:17 pm

By Michael Ramirez

This interview was originally published in Japanese in the twenty-fourth issue of Gunkei, one of the few independently published Japanese literary magazines with biannual print runs that reach well into the thousands. It appears here for the first time in English.

In the fall of 2009, I sat down in “Freelard,” an area in Seattle situated between the neighborhoods of Ballard and Fremont, to discuss the ins and outs of publishing in the Digital Rococo known as the 21st century with Bruce Rutledge, the president and founder of Chin Music Press. Bruce has worked tirelessly in mass media and is at present on the frontline of the crossroads of print and online publishing. There is much to be learned from his work and success in bringing high quality books to consumers across the globe.

Mike: What day is it, the 24th?

Bruce: It’s the 22nd.

Mike: Oh yeah, “don’t eat the time,” a favorite phrase of one of my French friends.

Bruce: It’s going fast enough.

Mike: So, recently you’ve been talking about Blue Note Records and how people should look at Chin Music Press as it exists holistically?

Bruce: Yeah. In publishing, we often go to our favorite author, but we don’t really care if it’s published by Knopf or Random House or Kodansha. I think because of what’s going on now in the publishing world and the digital shift, there’s kind of a panic about what’s going to happen to the book. It’s good to come out where the publisher is the thing that attracts the reader, and that if you’re going to bring in new writers, new voices, you sort of have to do that, because there’s sort of a cacophony of new works coming out. How do you get above the fray and draw the attention of the readers? It’s hard to do it with a writer that no one’s ever heard of, but if you can build up a sort of reputation as someone who is bringing out interesting work, then you can have that sort of “Blue Note” cache, and that’s what we hope. We don’t have it. Yet. By a long shot.

Mike: Really?

Bruce: No, not yet. But we’re working towards it. That’s what we’d like to do with our stuff on Japan. We’d like people to recognize us and say “oh yeah, Chin Music Press,” and just like with Blue Note, you kind of know what you’re going to get. Obviously it’s different, and there’s some wide range within that since there’s a lot of books being published on Japan. But our taste is a little different, our focus is a little different. We’re not better or worse, but we’re filling the gap. You had mentioned “culture jamming,” right?

Mike: Yeah.

Bruce: That’s interesting because I hadn’t really thought of it this way before, but there’s a book by that name. I don’t know if you’re read it? It’s called Culture Jamming.

Mike: No, I haven’t.

Bruce: It’s by a guy out of Vancouver who runs this really interesting and well designed magazine. He wrote this book called Culture Jamming. I hadn’t made the connection before, but I suppose in a way Chin Music Press is “culture jamming” because we’re obviously different from some of the other presses that focus on Japan. A part of us is very American. Our name, purposely, is very American. “Chin Music” has a lot of different meanings throughout American history, but it’s what H.L. Mencken called “one of those hyphenated terms that Americans love to use” because they’re sort of downgrading something. In the beginning, Chin Music meant something like “eloquence.” So instead of saying “eloquence” you’d say, “ah, that’s Chin Music.”

So, anyway, we definitely gave our press an American name on purpose. You know, to sort of say that we’re going to interplay between the cultures, to sort of say that we’re constantly writing for maybe not Americans but for English speakers. We’re not writing to get approval from the Japanese press, or from the Japanese media. We’re writing for Westerners interested in Japan. So yeah, we are sort of mixing between cultures, and “culture jamming” as you say.

Mike: That reminds me of certain DJs and composers who go between two mediums and are always trying to look for harmony between two separates. Especially when it comes to Japan, which luckily has a long aesthetic history that it’s been able to maintain, everything right now is mixed. Publishing is a huge and interconnected industry representing both high and low, everything from manga to obscure websites to the heights of academic publishing and catalogs for museum exhibitions. When I look at that whole spectrum, it leads me to another question. How do you feel that Chin Music Press is situated within the publishing world, and what’s your specific role? You discussed that a little bit when you were talking about the “Blue Note” concept and how people will look at Chin Music Press, but what about the difference between, I guess, “vulgar” and “academic” publishing? What you guys do is very broad, and you’re not looking at one subject. You’re not publishing in only print, either, so when you’re looking at this whole world of publishing, I think it’s a very much more holistic approach.

Bruce: Well, it seems to me that in order to succeed, small publishers carve out a certain niche. They don’t necessarily carve it so narrow that they get too academic or too esoteric. Our niche is contemporary Japan, but within that, we have a whole world from poetry to politics that we can play around with there, and I think that niche is narrow enough. I’ve actually rejected some really well written historical novels because we don’t want to do that. Other places are already publishing things like that. It’s not that we don’t like them– I read them and I enjoy many of them, but big publishers still kind of like that genre, and so there’s no need for us to fill in.

We’re looking for the gaps, and then understanding them, “culture jamming,” and finding within those gaps what the best voices for us to bring out are. I think a lot of small presses are doing the exact same thing, just not about Japan. Whether it’s poetry, or architectural theory, or whatever, they’ll find a niche and they’ll find the gaps. The gaps are bigger now because the bigger publishers are going more towards celebrity cookbooks and certain things that are safe. So, we have more of an opportunity and sort of a mission to bring those other titles out.

Mike: Wow.

Bruce: Yeah.

2002: Kuhaku and The Beginnings of Chin Music Press

Mike: That actually brings me to a couple of different things. One of them is the introduction to the first book you published, Kuhaku And Other Accounts From Japan.

Bruce: Yeah?

Mike: I thought it was a great introduction.

Bruce: Oh, great!

Mike: That timing, especially. 2002, was kind of…well…would you like to talk about that? About what that introduction means to you?

Bruce: Well, the whole idea of Kuhaku was that it was to be our calling card as a publishing company. It was our first book, so a lot of thought went into questions like, “do we give it a foreign name?” or “do we allow writers who aren’t ‘professional’ into the book?” Also, “how does art fit into the book?” or “how do we present conflicting styles of art in the book?”

Obviously, basically every one of these questions we answered in the “small ‘d’” democratic way and made Kuhaku less of a…you know, an unapproachable academic exercise. This made it much more of an explosion of a kind of joy and frustration of Japanese culture– everything you feel while being in Japan. So, I set up the press in 2002 for two reasons. One was media consolidation. As big media gets bigger, they get more and more blind to the reality that happens on the ground. Throughout my career I had worked in newspapers, TV studios, and magazines, and I could see it happening. I felt that the way to bring out new stories was with books, because in some ways there’s less risk. With books you’re putting out longer stories and you don’t have to meet weekly deadlines and smack the reader right away, like a magazine does since it has to come out every month or every quarter. With books, they’re not as fast-paced. You can linger over them and they can grow with you. You can re-discover Kuhaku again in 2009, five years after it was first conceived, and it will still bring something new to you. And so, that intro is about that.

The other reason is that the internet allows us to create sort of a virtual culture that brings together all these people looking for this material, even though they may be in places as far apart as Topeka, Shanghai and Lebanon. They’re not in the same community in the physical or geographical sense, but through the internet they can come into a community that we can create like an outpost and they can share a similar experience. Those are the two things that are working in our favor. Again, our guiding light is that we try to look for what’s missing. One example of this is our book by Minoru Morita, Curing Japan’s America Addiction. We may never do another political book, but we sort of looked within the field of Asian Studies and felt that he’s so on the left, and he’s so well read in Japan, and he sometimes very eloquently states the frustration that the average Japanese person feels. Thus, we felt that he was filling a niche and that he should be out there in the English language. It’s not like his book was going to be some groundbreaking thing, but I think he’s quite good and he’s really at his best if you hear him speak. He’s witty, he engages the crowd, he can deliver serious news to a room full of Japanese people and then turn around and make them laugh hysterically. He has this wonderful knack of comic timing that doesn’t quite come off in his writing. It comes off a little strident, but that was what we could do to put it out there. That’s what we’re always looking for in poetry or fiction, in literary nonfiction: “what’s missing?” Sorry, I’m way off the topic of the question…

Mike: That’s a great answer. It ties into the Kuhaku (“void”) concept, negative space, and the huge rift between American culture and Western art. It reminds me of how we have to try to fill in everything– “horror vacui,” how there’s spaces and you’re left with the question of what to do with them. Sometimes it’s an aesthetic space, and sometimes it’s a beautiful, peaceful space that provides a distance between things. And sometimes it’s an space left through ignorance, and I definitely get the feeling that with Mr. Morita you’re dealing with a lot of media ignorance in a certain way.

Bruce: Yeah.　

Mike: That seems to work in both directions. In Japan and in America as well, you just mentioned that you had to deal with media conglomeration. This is another issue about space and voids and vacuums, which is a huge argument. Walter Cronkite, for one, is a big proponent of exposing what’s going on in the presentation of news due to a lack of coverage. Aside from that, what would you say about this space that exists both in America and Japan, this kuhaku void that exists between the two cultures? How would you describe it in America, and also in Japan?

Bruce: Thinking of the US, a quote from Oe Kenzaburo comes to mind. What it says is that in the West there’s the Japan of the blue-suited salaryman, and the working drones, and the Japan of the samurai and the geisha. Somewhere in between this illusion of Japan is where the real Japanese live–in the gap. I think that’s true to a certain extent. The idea with Kuhaku is to fill in these stories about that gap, to tell stories about those places that are in-between the real Japan. I even told one of the writers not to shy away from the mundane, if that’s what you see. Not everything has to be exotic, or a moment where we can wrap up the whole country. It can be open ended, and we tried to make it that, to leave a lot of things unfinished. It’s kind of ironic, actually, since the content is a bit of a clash with the way Kuhaku is so beautifully packaged, but the stories themselves don’t really necessarily lend you to a specific interpretation of Japan.

As far as Japan, there are several things going on that I see a lot of. On the one hand, there’s a thriving underground literary publishing scene, like with Henkuchi’s stuff, and on the other hand there’s way more of a media conglomeration at the top, and then there’s this gap in-between that people like Morita speak to. And it seems like an even sharper gap than here in America. I’ve often told people that if we want to see where media consolidation is going in America, look at Japan, where there’s these titans of media like Yomiyuri and Asahi, and they’re national, not local. So, I see that sort of gap being even more pronounced. I see that the basic lives of the Japanese are kind of like an afterthought. That’s why we could put out a book by Mr. Morita in 2008 saying that the LDP is finished. He was essentially right, since all of a sudden at the end of August there was this big election defeat and the LDP was indeed out of power. We were all just like, “Oh my gosh! He was right!”

Morita does about three hundred lectures a year throughout Japan. While he travels around, he’s listening to the people and understanding the country, and I feel that there are very few people that are doing that. There’s a lot of pundits and analysts, but he’s getting back to the people that are living in and listening to Japan, and responding to it. Maybe it’s in poetry, and maybe it’s in other realms that people are really doing that, too. But on the mainstream level, there’s not so many people like that.

Stay tuned for parts two and three of this interview, coming in late June. For more information about Gunkei, the literary magazine where this interview originally appeared, visit their website (Japanese only)

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Home Away’s Gillenkirk Scores Op/Ed in San Francisco Chronicle 19 Jun 2010, 3:24 pm

By Dave Jacobson

In an op/ed published today in the San Francisco Chronicle, Home, Away author Jeff Gillenkirk asks America to celebrate, not castigate, its fathers:

What really troubles me about Father’s Day is the bad rap fathers get. Three years ago, Time magazine marked the approach of Father’s Day with an article wondering “whether dads have done a good enough job to deserve the honor.” Two years ago, presidential candidate Barack Obama used a Father’s Day sermon to proclaim, “Too many fathers are MIA, too many fathers are AWOL.” Last year, National Geographic News focused on a tribe in the Himalayas for its Father’s Day coverage. The title: “No-Fathers Day: Remote Group Has No Dads, and Never Did.” The concluding thought: “Are fathers really necessary?”

But that’s not fair, he writes, since studies and census abstracts show that more American dads are spending more time doing more things with their kids than at any other time.  One study even found that fathers ”hug and kiss their children an average of five times a day.” A fact startling to Jeff, as, he writes, his father never hugged him in his lifetime.

“More dads are doing more for their kids since the days when families lived together on farms. They’re demonstrating awareness that the word father isn’t just a noun – it’s a verb. “To father” means to be involved from the moment your child enters this world, until the very day that one or both of you leave it. Hopefully, the more fathers who do this, the fewer stories will appear about the ones who don’t – which would be better for everyone.”

To see the whole editorial, click here.

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Home, Away: “Authentic in Two Separate Worlds” 19 Jun 2010, 2:35 pm

By Dave Jacobson

In a review published earlier this week, the executive editor of AlterNet Don Hazen says Home, Away is authentic in “two separate worlds”:

“Gillenkirk’s book is hardly just about baseball — which is why it is an important book. Using baseball as a backdrop, Gillenkirk explores the fundamentals of personal life — intimacy, relationships, miscommunication, anger and missed opportunities. In the process, he digs into a topic that seems quite unexplored in our culture — the challenges facing a single father who fights to stay part of his son’s life after a divorce.”

But according to Hazen, himself a baseball nut, Jeff gets the baseball part of the book right, too.

“There are many rich details, including some of the underside of drinking and carousing, and the rigidity and rigor of the jock’s life. He spins his story as only someone who has been immersed in and loves the game can….

“Gillenkirk makes clear that as much as we want to focus on the game on the field, the game of life takes precedence: love and hate, intimacy and estrangement, contempt and respect will always be the dominant forces. Jeff Gillenkirk’s accomplishment in Home, Away is that he has provided a very entertaining and colorful framework in which to explore with real depth what makes us all tick.”

And in an interview with longtime TV sports announcer Greg Papa that aired June 10, Jeff describes how he got the inspiration for Home, Away:

“My son was out at a baseball game with the Giants with my ex-wife’s boyfriend, and I watched the stands fill up, and I thought, what would it be like to be a pitcher, standing on the mound … and you see your kid with another guy?   [At that point] the plot just kind of came to me about a father who confronts that and asks to be traded to be back with his son, then gets traded again and loses touch with his son.  It’s about how they come back together again and how hard that is once you lose touch.”

For the entire interview, click here.

Don’t forget:  Our Father’s Day package of Home, Away and documentary film The Evolution of Dad (including a 15% discount on the film) ends tomorrow.  All you have to do is purchase a copy of Home, Away through the Chin Music Press store, and we’ll send you instructions how to get the film.  For more information, see our earlier blog post here.

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London’s Antidote to the iPod 10 Jun 2010, 6:24 pm

By Jennifer Abel

On Tuesday, London’s Daily Telegraph reported on a new project by  Nathan Dunne. Underwood Stories is a “publication produced as a vinyl LP featuring two writers.” Available every May and November, the vinyl LP costs £23.00 (shipping included, roughly $34US). Dunne is himself an art historian, published author, and a contributor to Monocle and other publications. He wants subscribers to enjoy “the intimacy of the listening experience” he encounters when listening to an author read her work.  Dunne is also on a mission to move away from what he calls the corporate, “alien digital gloss” of MP3s. Thus the Telegraph labels Dunne the “antidote to the iPod.” Telegraph reporter Sukhdev Sandhu explains, “The Underwood discs, scheduled to appear twice a year, represents part of the growing resistance to the dematerialisation of art. By emphasising tactility, scarcity (each issue is limited to 1,000 copies) and physical beauty, it offers something that can’t be digitally replicated.”

We definitely see similarities between ourselves here at Chin Music Press and the folks at Underwood. For both presses, form and function work in a symbiotic relationship. The medium contributes to and comments upon the delivered content. And admittedly, we both tend to appeal to more of a niche market of consumers who look for an experience when engaging with literature (whether it be tactile or auditory). Chelsea Murray over at the Quill & Quire blog adds, “If the recent explosion of vinyl records is, as in Dunne’s case, a reaction to digitized sound, it makes one to wonder how else books might be published in response to the rise of digitized literature.” We’d like to think that we, like our fellow indie publishing friends Tara Books (affordable, limited-edition handmade books) and Featherproof Books (downloadable and free mini-books that come with Origami instructions so you can read and play with your book) are an example of such a reaction to digitized literature.

Yet within the walls of the Chin Music Press office, we tend to tout our epithet, “Seattle’s Antidote to the Kindle,” with our tongues firmly stuck in our cheeks. We’re not against the digitization of literature and media, nor are we shy to celebrate those who experiment within the new realms of the iPad, Kindle, etc. (Former CMP designer Craig Mod, along with Ashley Rawlings, have reprinted the beautiful Art Space Tokyo, with a much-anticipated iPad edition coming soon). And while Chin Music Press certainly does not intend to transform itself into a publisher of solely digital material, you will — dear Reader — see some of our titles available as ebooks in the very near future.

Mr. Dunne, with his Underwood Stories, walks the fine line between being a noteworthy publishing pioneer and a bemusing, anachronistic mention at digital media conferences. One always risks being termed a “Luddite” if one’s anti-New Media message is too strong, too narrowly articulated. Nevertheless, Chin Music Press — understanding all too well the delicate balancing act such juxtaposition requires — loves the idea of the vinyl LP literary journal, and wishes it great success!

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