sovbooks Chapter 4: It's all fate's arrangement
Chapter 4: It's all fate's arrangement
"Novels are all lies after all..."
Three days later at noon, the sunlight was dazzling.
Shuichi Kanbara sat on a bench in front of the building, holding a cup of delicious milk tea, sipping it slowly.
The building in front of me, located in Chuo Ward, Tokyo, with its brown exterior and about fifteen or sixteen stories high, is the Tokyo headquarters building of the Asahi Shimbun.
Yes, the entire building.
As the saying goes, a single floor is a company, but an entire building is a group.
This building houses a number of subsidiaries and affiliated departments of the Asahi Shimbun Group, including Asahi Student News Agency, Asahi Media Production, Asahi Real Estate, Asahi GG Delivery, and ABC International.
The core publishing entity is Asahi Shimbun Publishing.
Asahi Publishing Group owns numerous popular Japanese publications, including Asahi Bunko, Asahi Shinsho, AERA, Weekly Asahi, and Bungei Asahi, which he wanted to visit today. To put it bluntly, Asahi Publishing is the gateway to success that countless writers dream of.
However, it's obvious that he's still drinking milk tea at the entrance in the middle of the day, which shows that his "plan to think about what the protagonist of a novel would do—to target a young new editor and use sweet talk to trick him into reading the manuscript" has failed miserably.
Asahi, a major publishing house in the 90s, almost never hires inexperienced newcomers for its formal editing positions.
What they need is immediate, readily available talent. Rather than recruiting newcomers, they prefer to poach experienced editors from small and medium-sized publishing houses who have already worked on best-selling books and have author resources.
Of course, it's not entirely impossible for top university graduates to be recruited through campus recruitment and then promoted internally, but the number of positions is extremely limited, and they all follow the "general career" route—first rotating through departments such as distribution, marketing, and printing for three to five years doing odd jobs, and whether they can get an editing position afterward depends on luck.
To put it bluntly, there are very few new editors in the entire Bungei Asahi magazine.
He waited there for at least three days, and didn't even catch a glimpse of him.
As for the veteran editor...
The other party simply couldn't be bothered with an ordinary person like him; saying sorry when refusing was already considered polite.
"It was still too much of a stretch."
"Let's wait two more days. If it really doesn't work out, we'll try our luck with those small and medium-sized publishing houses."
After sipping the remaining milk tea from the bottom of his cup, Shuichi Kambara patted the wrinkles on his pants, stood up, crossed the street, and walked deeper into the alley.
There was an inconspicuous bicycle parked there, with several large cardboard boxes containing boxed lunches on the back rack. The owner was secretly doing lunchtime business.
This is Chuo Ward in Tokyo, the heart of Ginza. Shop windows display handbags worth hundreds of thousands of yen, and waiters in tuxedos stand at restaurant entrances. The entire neighborhood is so bustling that you can almost hear the sound of money flowing through it.
But this glamorous lifestyle is irrelevant to poor people like him. A kaiseki set meal that costs several thousand yen, a Michelin-recommended steak lunch... he doesn't even have the luxury of glancing at the menu.
He squeezed in front of the stall with a group of sweaty manual laborers in overalls, scrambling to buy the last item. He finally managed to grab one. Sitting back on the bench in front of the Asahi Building, he placed the bento box on his lap and silently ate his rice.
Unbeknownst to him, as he was eating, a television news van drove past him and slowly stopped in front of the parking lot's security barrier.
"Shuichi?"
Honami Suzuki stepped off the car, casually slung her bag over her shoulder, and her gaze fell directly on the boy with his back to her by the flower bed.
He was still wearing that black tracksuit, his back not straight but not bent either, his cheeks twitching as he chewed his food, but his bright black eyes were always fixed on the main entrance of the building.
Because of its large size, TV Asahi is one of the few subsidiaries of the Asahi Group whose offices are not located here. In addition, she has been busy with an interview for the past three days, so she hasn't paid much attention to Shuichi Kambara.
She thought the other person was busy preparing for the start of school, but she never expected to run into them here.
"What's he doing here?"
Honami Suzuki was slightly taken aback.
The security guard in the booth seemed to notice her gaze. After a moment's thought, he poked his head out and asked, "Miss Suzuki, do you know that boy?"
"Huh? Why do you ask that?"
"Oh, it's nothing. It's just that the way Ms. Suzuki looked at him seemed like she was looking at someone she knew."
"Hey, you wouldn't believe it, this young man has had a tough time. He seems to dream of becoming a novelist, and he's been coming here every day for the past few days to wait for an editor. Even when he gets soaked in the rain, he doesn't want to leave and just hides under the eaves. In the end, he was even chased away..."
The security guard kept rambling on about what Shuichi Kanbara had been up to these past few days, and as Honami Suzuki listened, her eyes gradually widened.
"Oh right, that night he seemed to want to talk to me about something, but then Kobayakawa called..."
"Is it because you've seen me busy these past few days that you haven't spoken up?"
Thinking back to the past few days when Shuichi Kambara had always made her late-night snacks and listened quietly to her complaints with a calm and gentle expression, Suzuki Honami's eyes gradually changed as she compared this lonely yet stubborn figure sitting by the flowerbed eating a boxed lunch.
At that moment, his colleague had already parked the car and returned.
"Is there anything else, Honami?"
"No. By the way, wasn't Editor-in-Chief Kanai transferred back to headquarters at the end of last year?"
"It seems so. I'll ask later. Let's go up first; the minister is waiting."
"it is good."
Without greeting Shuichi Kambara, Honami Suzuki glanced at him from afar before quickly following her colleague into the side entrance of the building. As she turned around, a relieved smile appeared on her lips.
Only the security guard saw this scene.
He glanced at Kanbaru Shuichi's back again before closing the window, taking out a brand new pack of cigarettes with a convenience store sticker from the drawer, tearing open the packaging with a "rip," and lighting one with a delightful flick of his wrist.
"Blue Seven Stars..."
"This kid, he's not very old, but he knows a lot about cigarettes."
.
The workplace is hell.
The workplace in large corporations is like the deepest hell.
Takako Tokiwa, who has been working at Asahi Shimbun Publishing for three years, understands this deeply.
However, despite her gentle and quiet nature, she still found it difficult to accept this high-pressure workplace environment after three years of work, but she finally breathed a sigh of relief today.
—A senior editor in the editorial department retired early due to health problems, and she was successfully promoted to the position by virtue of her hard work and dedication accumulated during her three years of rotating through various departments.
"From today onwards, I am a respected editor."
"Mom would be very happy to see that I have a stable job."
In the editorial office, at the desk near the door, Takako Tokiwa gently stroked the framed photo of her mother, a tender smile appearing in her eyes.
Normally, most new editors become very busy after being promoted to editors. After all, unless the resources of writers left by senior editors are of very high quality, new editors who want to achieve results and earn performance bonuses can only sift through submissions from new writers that senior editors don't even consider, like playing the lottery.
Asahi Publishing receives thousands or even tens of thousands of these submissions every day, and most of them are completely worthless self-indulgent articles by newcomers.
The whole process was agonizing and desperate, but if you wanted to get ahead, you had to do it, because what if you won the jackpot?
But she was different.
Under the helpless shaking of several senior editors behind her, Takako Tokiwa took out her lunch break bento box with a bow from her fabric bag and happily ate it in small bites, like a little hamster that had found a ear of corn.
"That girl, Guizi, is so well-behaved and gentle, like a pure little yellow flower."
"She was a typical good girl, the kind who would do things diligently if asked to, but she had absolutely no ambition. I heard that if it weren't for her deceased mother wanting her to work for a big company, she almost became a bookstore manager back then."
"Graduating from a prestigious art school like Japan Arts Center and wanting to become a bookstore manager? Really?"
"Isn't that great? This way, we older folks don't have to worry about being swept away on the beach."
"Haha, otherwise why do you think she was the one who was voted up to fill the vacancy?"
Several veteran editors were chatting and laughing when the office door opened, and a serious-looking man in a suit walked in. He was probably in his fifties, with some pockmarked acne scars on his face, and had a very serious demeanor; he looked like a leader.
"Editor-in-Chief Jin Jing".
Good afternoon, Editor-in-Chief Jin Jing.
Several veteran editors stood up to greet them, and Tokiwa Takako stood at attention like a primary school student being called on by the teacher.
Editor-in-Chief Jin Jing's gaze swept over everyone until they all tensed up before he said, "Does anyone here have an old book that's about to finish?"
Upon hearing this, all the editors present were taken aback, but soon, a look of surprise appeared on everyone's face!
The former editor, Nakajima, has retired, but the authors he was originally responsible for haven't been assigned to their positions yet. Although most of them are ordinary authors, there are one or two big names among them. However, these big names are generally given priority to the "successor" editor.
Is the editor-in-chief going to distribute those big fish?!
Several editors who happened to have old books nearing completion were overjoyed, while the others either sighed or racked their brains.
Before being published as standalone books, serialized novels in this era were all published in print literary magazines.
However, the layout and capacity of print magazines are fixed; each page affects printing costs and retail pricing, so the number of novels that can be published in each issue is also fixed. Unlike later online platforms, which can expand infinitely, with as many books as there are bookmarks.
Therefore, magazines only make an exception and issue a special supplement when a nationally renowned author suddenly decides to publish a new work. Normally, when a magazine releases a new work, it will usually discontinue an older work that is not popular to make room for it; otherwise, there would be no place to publish the new work.
This is why many comics in this era are forcibly canceled by editors. On the one hand, those comics don't make money, and on the other hand, it's to make room for new and innovative works.
The same applies to the world of novels.
In their editorial department, the number of editors is fixed; one can only be replaced if one leaves. At the same time, the number of pages each editor gets in the fiction magazine "Bungei Asahi" is also fixed.
Several ruthless veteran editors are already considering cutting their own authors' older books in order to snatch this big fish.
Just then, Editor-in-Chief Kanai said, "It seems you all have vacancies. I have a draft that's easy to write. Uemura, what do you think? Want to give it a try?"
"Huh? A publicity stunt?"
Upon hearing this, all the editors shrank back, no longer daring to meet the eyes of Chief Editor Jin Jing, especially the middle-aged editor named Shangcun, who immediately lowered her head to drink water.
— A "favoritism manuscript" refers to a manuscript that is submitted through connections or back channels.
While it's not to say that these kinds of manuscripts are 100% bad, the problem is that if the author of these manuscripts has even a little bit of fame, or is even a skilled writer, there's no need for them to go through such back channels.
The probability of a completely new writer achieving success is extremely low. Moreover, whether it's rejection or potential subsequent cancellation, it's easy to offend people.
No one was willing to take the seat, and everyone sat down without making a sound. Only Tokiwa Takako, the newbie at the front of the office, couldn't see what was happening behind her and stood there like a primary school class monitor.
"Excellent! Tsukai-ko! You have a great spirit of dedication!"
"The organization won't forget you! This manuscript is now entrusted to you!"
"Huh? Huh—?!"