The Financial Fiction Genre
Japanese Business Novels
In Japan business novels have been a popular genre since the 1950s, typically
depicting the trials and tribulations of white collar employees who have enough to
cope with in their everyday work but frequently find that the businesses they work
for are enmeshed in corruption. What is true of literature is also true of the
cinema. So-called salaryman films are to Japanese cinema what cowboy movies are to
Hollywood. Many business novels deal with financial institutions, but only a few have
been translated into English. Nevertheless some of the untranslated novels have also
attracted interest in the West because of what they, and the public response to them
of the Japanese people, tell us about business in that country. This section also
includes details of the work of a few western novelists who have written about
Japanese financial institutions.
Main Kohda
Main Kohda was originally a bond seller at Continental Illinois National Bank and
Bankers Trust in Tokyo until she left in 1988 to start a consulting firm.
Subsequently she became a writer. In 1995, Toshihide Iguchi, a bond trader at the New
York branch of Daiwa Bank, was arrested for concealing $1.1 billion in losses. With
impeccable timing, just two weeks earlier, Main Kohda published Intangible
Game, (the paperback was given a different title - Money Hacking) about a
Japanese trio who break into the computer system of a large American bank with the
aim of stealing millions of dollars but in the process, they uncover a fraud by a
major Japanese bank seeking to hide huge trading losses.
There are also parallels between her later novels and real events. The heroine of
Kizu, or Scar is an international bond saleswoman (like Main Kohda was
in her earlier career), who uses a combination of her financial expertise acumen and
sexual allure to avenge the suicide of her lover by bringing down a century-old
Japanese bank. It was published in 1998 but Ms Kohda actually completed it a few
weeks before the collapse of Hokkaido Takushoku Bank in 1997, the first big bank
failure in Japan since the Second World War.
Nihon Kokusai or Japanese
Government Bonds, became an instant success when it was first published in
hardback in 2001. It tells the story of a group of bond traders who deliberately
create a financial crisis by crisis by boycotting an auction of 1.4 trillion yen
worth of 10-year government bonds. However, their motive is not to make a killing in
the market. Instead, by provoking a crisis they hope to force the Japanese government
to make much needed reforms. Main Kohda's novel is particularly topical as the
world's second largest economy has long been stuck in a recession and some of the
banks have been kept solvent by the sale of government bonds. Among the more than two
hundred people she interviewed when writing her book were some from the Ministry of
Finance, who Ms Kohda said, were willing to cooperate with her because they want to
see reforms take place.
Main Koda followed up Nihon Kokusai with Rinretsu No Sora (Bitter Skies) in
2002 which is about a foreign-owned securities firm that sells massive quantities of
fraudulent derivatives and then destroys the evidence. There are parallels between
the plot and the case of the Princeton notes sold to Japanese firms by the Tokyo
branch of Cresvale International Lts., a French-owned securities firm. The people
involved were accused of fraud after the Princeton companies defaulted.
Ryo Takasugi
One of his novels, Shosetsu Nihon Kogyo Ginko (Industrial Bank of Japan). was
listed in a World Bank bibliography on Insider Control and the Role of Banks - an
illustration of the educational value of some fiction. However it was a film called
Jubaku (or Spellbound in
the English version), based on another of his novels, that attracted international
recognition. The arrest of a sokaiya gangster exposes links between the Asahi
Central Bank and the Yakuza (the Japanese equivalent of the Mafia). Four middle-level
salarymen decide to investigate the illegal payments but are obstructed by those who
have something to hide. It has been claimed that the film is based on a real scandal in 1997
involving banks that made illegal loans to racketeers but in an interview with the
Japan Times in July 1997, Ryo Takasugi said that it was just a coincidence
that the novel Kinyu Fushoku Retto (An Archipelago of Financial Corruption)
came out just as a major sokaiya scandal hit the headlines with the arrest of the
former president of Nomura Securities Co. and the former chairman of Dai-Ichi Kangyo
Bank, as well as many other senior executives. However, although the timing may have
been coincidental the novelist said he had had a premonition that something of that
sort could happen and his work was based on interviews with people who had dealt with
the racketeers and other shady aspects of the banking business.
In 2002 Ryo published Za Gaishi (Foreign Capital) which has the intertwined
themes of the struggle against corruption and on the threat to Japanese banks of
American takeovers. It has been said that the takeover of the Long-Term Credit Bank
of Japan by Ripplewood Holdings provided some of the inspiration for the plot.
Eiji Oshita
In 1998 Oshita, a writer for a weekly magazine who became a novelist, published
Shosetsu Nippon Baishu (the Buy-out of Japan) about the threat from
foreign-owned financial institutions, a theme subsequently tackled by Ryo Takasugi
and Main Koda.
Ikko Shimizu
Ikko Shimizu was formerly a financial journalist. Three of his short stories were
translated into English by Tamae K. Prindle and published in 1996 under the title
The Dark Side of Japanese Business: Three Industry Novels. The first two
stories Keiretsu and The Ibis Cage are about an automobile parts
manufacturer and geishas, respectively but Silver Sanctuary is about bank
employees and in particular an upstart banker whose choice of marriage partner is
dictated by his need to maintain an ideal self-image. It has been described as a
romantic melodrama but Silver Sanctuary is also
notable for its portrayal of the intense competition that companies face in the
Japanese domestic market.
Saburo Shiroyama
Saburo Shiroyama is the pen name used by Eiichi Sugiura, a former professor of
economics. He wrote a biographical novel, Brave and Fearless, about the life
of Shibusawa Eiichi, a leading businessman during the Meiji period who played a role
in founding the Daiichi National Bank to provide assistance to Japanese industry. For
much of the post-war period Japanese business has been bedevilled by the
Sokaiya or corporate racketeers but was not until the late 1950s that the name
Sokaiya came into general use following the publication of Shiroyama's novel
Sokaiya Kinjo (or Kinjo the Corporate Bouncer) depicting the power plays that
mar shareholders' meetings. One of his few books to be translated into English is The Takeover which concerns
the fate of a family run department store, in a fashionable area of Tokyo, which has
difficulty in raising capital.
Akimitsu Takagi
One of the most popular of all Japanese mystery authors, Akimitsu Takagi was born in
1920 and after studing metallurgy at Kyoto University he worked for an aircraft
company but became a writer at the age of 28. He was a self-taught legal expert and
the heroes in most of his books were usually prosecutors or police investigators. The Informer,
originally published in 1965 and subsequently translated into English, is the story
of a former Tokyo stock exchange worker who is fired because of illegal trades. A
subsequent stock market crash means that he has no hope of returning to his old
career and therefore he accepts a job from an old friend even though he eventually
discovers that the new firm he works for is really an agency for industrial
espionage. The plot is based on actual events.
Peter Tasker
Peter Tasker is a British financial analyst working in Japan. He has written a
factual book about the country, Inside Japan : wealth, work and power in the new
Japanese empire, the American edition of which had the title The Japanese :
portrait of a nation. Another work of non-fiction by Tasker is Nihon no jidai
wa owatta ka, (The end of Japanese golden age?) published in Japanese in 1992. In
that year his first work of fiction, Silent Thunder, was also published. It is
about a plot to disrupt the world's economic system, thereby establishing Japanese
domination over Asia. In Buddha Kiss, his second thriller, a British financial
analyst and a Japanese private detective are the main characters in a plot involving
a huge financial fraud, designer drugs, and a fanatical religious cult. Samurai
Boogie published in 1999, is another story involving the private detective, Kazuo
Mori . The death of a senior bureaucrat at the Ministry of Health leads to Mori being
caught up in a plot involving the Yakuza and two computer-game manufacturers.
Although not about financial institutions the novel depicts life in Tokyo in the
aftermath of the financial bubble.
Julia Notaro
In the late 1980s Julia Notaro, a corporate trader in London, decided to learn
Japanese in order to enhance her career prospects and therefore she moved to
the island of Shikoku in western Japan where she got a job teaching English to
businessmen. One evening she met Masaru Ishikawa, a local carpenter who later became
her husband and so her career plans changed for good. Julia Notaro (or Marisa
Ishikawa as she is known in Japan) started writing and in May 2000 her first
novel, Short Change, was published in Britain. It tells the story of of Lisa
Soames, a young British woman graduate who is beginning her career in a Japanese bank
in the City of London. The novel does treat some serious subjects such as sexual
harassment but is basically a comedy.
Tom Clancy
The Debt of Honor deals with a Japanese plot to destroy American and European
financial markets. See the section on spy thrillers.
Roy Davies.
Last updated 17 May 2010.
