Speaker: Mark Schreiber, author (The Dark Side, ...)/editor (Tokyo Confidential) Author, journalist, translator Mark Schreiber is perhaps best known to patrons of Good Day Books as a contributor to "Tokyo Confidential," a weekly feature that appears on Sundays in The Japan Times and consists of edited translations of articles selected from recent issues of Japan's weekly tabloids, such as Shukan Shincho (Weekly Tide). The selected articles are often described as quirky, in the same sense that the Coen brothers' exceptional movie Fargo is often so described. Schreiber's recent translations of less quirky material include How Canon Got Its Flash Back: The Innovative Turnaround Tactics of Fujio Mitarai (Wiley, 2004). Although he speaks, reads, and writes both Japanese and Chinese, Schreiber claims that he first came to Japan as a 17-year-old U.S. Army dependent. If suitably provoked, he can support this claim by flashing a mint-condition 1965 USAFJ driver's license that includes a photograph of a person bearing some resemblance to himself. After attending Tokyo's International Christian University, he worked for Japanese companies in various capacities and, in the late 1970s, began to work as a freelance writer. In an interview published in Metropolis, Schreiber later recalled that he had "interviewed the inventor of the roach motel and a guy who was selling life-sized rubber play-mates by mail order" and had become "the first foreigner to report on what it was like to spend a night in a 'capsule' hotel." In 1992, Schreiber began translating/editing material from Japan's weekly tabloids for The Mainichi Daily News. He later edited Tokyo Confidential: Titillating Tales from Japan's Wild Weeklies (The East Publications, 2001), a representative selection of articles that he and several "partners in crime" had generated for the Mainichi between 1992 and 2000. When the Mainichi ceased publication of its broadsheet edition in April 2001 and moved to the Internet, Schreiber moved to The Japan Times as one of the contributors to that newspaper's "Tokyo Confidential" feature. Schreiber has authored two books to date, each on true crime, each reflecting both his work on "Tokyo Confidential" and his long-standing interest in crime fiction. His first book, Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan (Yenbooks, 1996) includes accounts of 16 violent crimes committed in Japan after 1945. The crimes, which were chosen by Schreiber because they were considered particularly shocking by the Japanese public, range from serial murders committed in 1946 by a lone sociopath to the gassing of several Tokyo subways in 1995 by members of AUM Shinrikyo. While researching Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan, Schreiber unearthed many written Japanese accounts of crime, law enforcement, and the penal system from the Edo (1603-1868), Meiji (1868-1912), Taisho (1912-1926), and early Showa (1926-1945) periods. These accounts formed the basis for a biweekly series "Crime and Punishment in Old Japan," which ran in the Mainichi from 1998 to 2001, and for his second book The Dark Side: Infamous Japanese Crimes and Criminals (Kodansha International, 2001), which recently went out-of-print. Schreiber recently compiled Tabloid Tokyo 2: 101 All-New Tales of Sex, Crime and the Bizarre fron Japan's Wild Weeklies (Kodansha International, 2007), a third collection of articles from Japanese weekly tabloids that he and his "partners in crime" have translated/edited since 2005 for the on-line Mainichi and for the "Tokyo Confidental" column in The Japan Times. Your ticket for admission to Mark Schreiber's presentation "Japan, the Quirky, and Myself 2" will be a copy of Tabloid Tokyo 2 bought from our shop. Paperback copies of Tabloid Tokyo 2 may be purchased at Good Day Books for one thousand four hundred seventy yen (¥1470) each, tax included. |
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