This summer saw an announcement by J-Novel Club that they’d be releasing a number of Yuri Japanese novels. Yuri and science fiction have had a run of popularity after SF Magazine’s Yuri edition and Hayakawa’s release of a Yuri science fiction anthology, Asterism, so this seems like a good time to be into Yuri and Sci-Fi. Yesterday, I reviewed Last and First Idol, and found it to be an impressive piece of work. I took some time to speak with J-Novel Club’s founder Sam Pinansky about this new direction.
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Tell us a little about yourself. How did you get involved with anime and manga originally?
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SP: Back when I was in college, I got really into anime after seeing some VHS bootlegs of Evangelion, and then I started renting tapes of classics like Slayers/Ranma, etc.
In graduate school I took Japanese for fun while studying for my PhD, and started fansubbing anime to help learn. I took a postdoc in Japan, and after that was over put myself in the right place to be one of the first simulcast anime translators, quickly turning that into my career. After gathering a group of localizers I took a job at Tezuka Productions, and then later on Yomiuri TV Enterprise, basically running a localization service for anime, TV shows, movies, and manga from Japan.
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You first popped up on our radar as part of the AnimeSols project, translating older classic anime, including Riyoko Ikeda’s Dear Brother. What are some of the lessons you learned with AnimeSols? What anime series would you like to be able to release if you could?
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SP: Well, I’d been around translating your anime simulcasts for many years before that! But while I was at Tezuka I came up with an idea to try crowdfunding for classic anime titles that couldn’t get licensed using traditional routes. However we ran into the rise of Kickstarter, and our site/system not being on the most popular crowdfunding platform limited our ability to succeed. It was also a learning experience for all the Japanese companies involved about how much communication and community interaction is necessary to have a successful crowdfunding campaign. It seems obvious now, but these were very much the early days back then. I personally think that the classic Tatsunoko series like Yatterman and the like really deserve a proper restoration and western release.
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Tell us about J-Novel Club. How did the idea come about? How has it been received generally?
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SP: The idea for J-Novel Club came from me attempting to answer a question that began bothering me in 2015: Why were there so many anime being made which were based off of light novels, but so few of the actual original light novels being released in English? I set out to create a business model that I felt would enable me the greatest chance to turn a profit on light novels and fix this problem, and in early 2016 got to work creating the company and licensing the first content, using my fairly deep connections in the anime/manga/publishing industry in Japan.
J-Novel Club is a publishing company, but we actually have 3 business models going on at the same time. We publish physical books for some of our series, we publish ebooks for everything, and we also have a paid subscription service where subscribers can read the latest volumes of all of our series week-to-week as they are being translated. This hybrid model is designed to allow all people to consume light novels in the ways they are most comfortable with, as people come to the format from print manga, from weekly streaming anime, and from illegal fan translation groups. Thanks to everyone’s support over the past nearly 3 years, we’ve sold over 1,000,000 ebooks already and have already published our 300th volume!
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J-Novel Club is launching a new line of Yuri Light Novels. Tell us about that – how you decided to do these. What are the qualities of the first batch that you think make them stand out?
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SP: Broadening our readership base and our genres is an important part of how we grow as a company. One thing I began looking closely at is the amount of effort Japanese publishers are putting in to certain genres and series, and I began to see a mini boom in specifically the Yuri science fiction segment. As we already had a good relationship with those Japanese publishers, their latest works in this genre seemed like a natural choice.There are other books we have offers out for, but licensing takes time depending on the publishing house. Books from Iori Miyazawa like Side-by-side Dreamers and Otherside Picnic are simply great science fiction/horror stories on their own, with the Yuri elements forming more of a flavoring than the main course. I think these types of works which are trying to move the idea of what “Yuri” fiction is are very important to release. At the same time, books like Seriously Seeking Sister act similarly, but on a different angle: instead of scifi, this time it’s your typical overpowered fantasy character which is peppered with Yuri elements. Both should serve as ways to draw our current readership as well as the Yuri fandom at large.
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Which is your favorite of the Yuri Novels you’re releasing and why?
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SP: Personally I really like Last and First Idol, but I’m biased since I edited it. The author self-describes it as an “existential widescreen yuri baroque proletariat hard sci-fi idol story”.
It’s a collection of 3 scifi novellas, 2 of which won the most prestigious scifi prize in Japan, the Seiyuu Award, in 2017/2018 respectively. These are extremely “hard” scifi stories, with 11 dimensional string theory and aether based gravitational theory and all manner of trigger warnings for gore and body horror, which frankly blew me away when I first read them. As a first work by the author Gengen Kusano, they are completely bonkers. The yuri in them is so stripped down to the bare elements of “yuri” as we know it (the love of one girl for another, in all of its forms), it can be drowned out at times from the noise of planets exploding, but it’s there, and without it the book would be far diminished.
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What were your favorite books when you were a kid?
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SP: Asimov’s Robot series and Foundation series, Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, everything Tolkien ever wrote, and eventually in high school Infinite Jest and Gödel, Escher, Bach. I read everything.
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Any message for Yuri fans?
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SP: If you’ve only been reading yuri manga, you should definitely try one of our novels! Yuri-n for a treat! *gets shot*
That joke aside, (^_^);, thanks very much for taking time to speak with us today, Sam. We’re looking forward to more from J-Novel Club!
