If an author who has lived in Australia for 35 years sold over 100 million books, you would be aware of them, right? Tim Winton is a household name, and he’s sold just over two million books. Liane Moriarty, the Sydney-based writer of Big Little Lies, has sold over 20 million books, as did the late Bryce Courtenay. Mem Fox’s beloved children’s book The Magic Possum has sold over five million copies. No Australian author has come close to 100 million yet.
But there is one author who has called Australia home since 1988 whose book sales have surpassed that number.
Tetsuya Totsuka, who writes under the pen-name of Tetsu Kariya, wrote Oishinbo, a Japanese manga series about a food journalist who is tasked by his boss to travel Japan to find recipes to submit to his magazine’s ‘ultimate menu’. Running from 1983 to 2014, Oishinbo (Gourmet) has sold more than 135 million volumes, making it one of the highest-selling manga of all time.
Oishinbo combines comedy, romance and competition with an educational look at Japanese cuisine. The hit manga produced 111 volumes, plus 136 episodes of a successful animated series. While the majority of manga is written and drawn by one person, Oishinbo is created by a two-man team: artist Akira Hanasaki and writer Tetsu Kariya.
Sitting down with Kariya in his Castlecrag living room surrounded by shelves of books, jazz records and truly impressive vintage audio equipment, I ask how many people have been as annoying as I have since he moved here, bugging him for interviews and fanning out over his work. “Not so many.”
Kariya’s son Tak, who generously offered to act as translator for the interview today, bursts out laughing. “Nobody knows him!” he says. “He’s just some random Asian guy!”
Tak and his three siblings were the reason Kariya moved to Australia.
Tetsu Kariya was born in Beijing in 1941, and moved to Japan in 1946. The writer spent most of his life living in Tokyo before moving to Sydney to prevent his children from being exposed to the rigid Japanese education system.
Kariya’s plan was to stay in Australia for a few years then move elsewhere, but he fell in love with Glenaeon Rudolf Steiner School, which is as much focused on developing students’ creativity skills as their intellectual skills. Not only did the school keep his family in Australia, they even moved to Castlecrag to be closer to it.
Kariya spent much of the 80s and 90s travelling the world researching for Oishinbo. Pre-internet, his manuscripts would be faxed back to his editor in Japan. It was a particular challenge in France, where fax machines were probably considered to be c’est affreux.
While it seems like it would be a challenge to write a manga comic about Japanese cuisine and Japanese restaurants from the other side of the world, Kariya made it work. The writer would come back to Japan twice a year for several months to collect material. ‘Writing stories, you can do it everywhere,” he says. “If you have the material and a typewriter or computer, it’s OK.”
This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Swill. Want more? Order issue 4 today
