Japanese stocking
- By : Nat
- Category : Classic finds
Over a month after I got a shipment of a handful of Peanuts books from Japan, I am finally getting around to chronicling the last of these. This was one which came as a surprise to me, because I had been under the assumption that the translation of Charles M. Schulz: The Art and Life of the Peanuts Creator in 100 Objects was going to be the first time that my work, Peanuts or otherwise, had been translated for the Japanese market. When I came across the Amazon listing for the Japanese edition of A Charlie Brown Christmas Stocking, therefor, this came as a shock. This is a book that I conceived of, did key formatting for, and wrote the text material in. I had never heard of there being a foreign edition of any sort for this book, and a Japanese edition was particularly unexpected. While Christmas is celebrated in ways in Japan, it is very much their adaptation of it — the American version of the holiday does not involve Kentucky Fried Chicken nearly so much, for example.
But this Japanese edition — which by the way keeps all of Schulz’s text in English, just adds a translation in smaller type below — turns out not to be the only time my work had previously had a Japanese edition. Their edition of The Complete Peanuts had become much more complete than I had been aware of, as I realized when I found a listing of a Kindle edition of volume 26, the outside-the-strip collection which I had had a significant hand in.
Now here’s a little secret about Complete Peanuts 26: it doesn’t exist because all that Peanuts material should be collected (although, yes, of course, it should be.) It exists in good part because Fantagraphics was making good money off of selling the boxed sets of two volumes that came out at the end of each year. Ending the series at 25 would mean one fewer boxed set.
The Japanese edition was sold as sets as well… but not sets of 2. They had sets of 5…. which means 25 volumes worked out just fine.
As best as I’ve been able to tell, the Japanese edition of 26 was never physically printed. It was offered for Kindle, both stand-alone and as a two-pack with volume 25, but neither of those are still available. So as one of the folks behind the book and someone who likes having copies of all editions of his work,I can only say “good grief!”
