Japanese publishing major Kodansha announced Wednesday that it will team with Dai Nippon Printing to buy a 93 percent stake in the New York City-based American publishing startup Vertical, best known for publishing Japanese fiction and manga in English.

Founded by former Nikkei editor and reporter Hiroki Sakai in 2001, Vertical has made ample additions to the English canon of Japan’s “God of Comics” Osamu Tezuka, including acclaimed works like Black Jack and Buddha, which will be released as an animated film in Japan this May.

As one of Japan’s biggest publishers, Kodansha is following the lead of Shueisha and Shogakukan, which co-own the North American manga and anime distributor Viz Media. Kodansha once licensed its manga to a series of North American publishers, including Viz, Dark Horse Comics, Tokyopop, and Random House's Del Rey imprint. After those license agreements expired, Kodansha moved on to the Vertical deal.

Kodansha also has a separate company, also based in New York, called Kodansha International, that in 2008 licensed the rights to Hollywood film adaptations for the manga and anime classics Akira and Ghost in the Shell. The films are currently in development for live-action release by the production companies of both Leonardo DiCaprio and Steven Spielberg.

In other news, Wednesday also saw Penguin reissue two classics from Natsume Soseki, Japan’s preeminent author of the Meiji period (1868-1912) and the face of the 1,000-yen note from 1984-2004.

Translated by Jay Rubin with an introduction by Haruki Murakami. Soseki's only coming-of-age novel, Sanshiro (1908), depicts the eponymous 23-year-old protagonist as he leaves the sleepy countryside to attend a university in the constantly moving "real world" of Tokyo. Baffled and excited by the traffic, the academics, and—most of all—the women, Sanshiro must find his way among the sophisticates that fill his new life. An incisive social and cultural commentary, Sanshiro is also a subtle portrait of first love, tradition, and modernization, and the idealism of youth against the cynicism of middle age.

No collection of Japanese literature is complete without Soseki's Kokoro (1914), his most famous novel and the last he complete before his death. Published here in a new translation by Meredith McKinney—the first in more than fifty years—Kokoro (heart) is the story of a subtle and poignant friendship between two unnamed characters, a young man and an enigmatic elder whom he calls "Sensei." Haunted by tragic secrets that have cast a long shadow over his life, Sensei slowly opens up to his young disciple, confessing indiscretions from his own student days that have left him reeling with guilt, and revealing, in the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between his moral anguish and his student's struggle to understand it, the profound cultural shift from one generation to the next that characterized Japan in the early twentieth century.

For more information, visit Vertical at www.vertical-inc.com, Kodansha International at www.kodansha-intl.com, and Penguin at www.penguin.com.

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