The New Murakami Novel Is Out - So How Many Pages Is It After All?

My copy of the new Murakami novel arrived today. I am very excited to read it. But before I start, I want to correct something I wrote last week about the page count. 

On the Shinchosha page announcing the novel it said that the text would be "1200 mai long" (mai is a counter for flat things like sheets of paper, plates, etc.). English language internet started talking about "1200 pages" and without thinking about it very much, I wrote the same in the last post. But then I saw the news of the book's release and it looked like it was just one volume, not two - which is what one would expect at 1200 pages (as was the case with Killing Commendatore, for example).

Once I received my copy of the book, though, I found that the book is only 655 pages long, not counting a 4-page afterword. So where does "1200 mai" come from?

By my count, there are about 800 characters per page in the new novel. If we subtract the empty pages between the seventy chapters and three parts of the book, we get a total number of actual pages of text closer to 600. If we then multiply 600 pages by 800 characters, we get 480,000; and if we divide that by 1200 -- the number of mai quoted in the Shinchosha announcement and on the obi (or "belly band," the strip of paper wrapped around the book to help with advertising) -- we get the magic number of 400. Which means that what the publisher is referring to by mai is the number of genkō yōshi in Murakami's manuscript, not the number of printed pages (which I should have realized having read the word mai, not péji for "page...").

In Japan people still count the length of a manuscript using a 400-character page unit called a genkō yōshi 原稿用紙 (lit., "manuscript draft sheets"). Before word processors became popular in in the early 1990s, nearly everything - school essays, novels, PhD dissertations - was written on these standardized sheets, which all were ruled with 20 columns of 20 boxes each, for a total count of 400 characters per sheet. When telling someone how long a given text was, the common measure used was the number of genkō yōshi. 

The pictures below show a clean genkō yoshi and a model I found on Wikipedia instructing people how to properly use this kind of writing paper.

Of course, we know that Murakami writes on his Mac, and not in pen on paper (unlike John Irving, James Patterson, or Lin Shaohua, one of Murakami's Chinese translators, who opt for writing in longhand), and what he delivered to the publisher was almost certainly a manuscript in electronic form. However, old habits die hard. So when promoting the novel to readers, Japanese publishers continue to divide the total number of characters by 400 to get a genkō yōshi page count that they know everyone will understand.

Bottom line: the new novel is more like 600 pages, not 1200. On the one hand, this is good news, because it means that translators just have one (thickish) book to translate instead of two, and that non-Japanese readers will get the book that much sooner. On the other hand, this may come as a disappointment for those readers who were hoping for another two-volume Murakami magnum opus.

On a side note, Polish publishers, like Japanese publishers, have their own old-fashioned unit for figuring out the length of a manuscript. This unit is called an arkusz (or arkusz wydawniczy) which could be translated as a "plate" or "publishing plate" or "publishing sheet." An arkusz (of a work of prose) measures 40,000 characters, including spaces. Although I should be used to it by now, I am still surprised when an editor asks me, "How many arkusz will it come to?"