![]() ![]() You have requested "on-the-fly" machine translation of selected content from our databases. No detail is left out as Tsurumi coldly and precisely takes. ![]() What is it about this infamous book that so divides people? Put simply, it is a methodical, chillingly explicit, step-by-step guide to certain death. In practice this will mean that it will become an offence for bookshops to sell the manual to anyone under the age of 18. Now, nearly eight years after its initial publication, the most powerful of them, the Tokyo metropolitan government, is planning to follow suit. Since its publication in 1993 with a print run of only 8,000 copies, it has been reviled and scrutinised in the media, deplored by psychiatrists and counsellors, and has sold more than 1.2 million copies.Ī number of local governments across Japan have officially classified the book as "fukenzen" - literally "unwholesome". Īnd there - sealed in a cellophane wrapper and emblazoned with a warning - is the most notorious and successful of the Japanese self- help guides: Wataru Tsurumi's Complete Manual of Suicide. Other life-enhancing guides in the 'subculture section' include Secret Techniques of Maniac Stalkers and the Manual for Making Unreasonable Claims. There is The Perfect Manual of Fraud and another entitled How To Borrow Money and Run Away, with the cheery subtitle: "If you borrow something, don't pay it back - the only way to live in a credit card society!" Much of the material here is familiar to book browsers all over the world - advice for the depressed or bereaved, to those in troubled relationships or stuck in dead-end careers.īut in among them, along with the Japanese translation of Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps, are titles which would never make it into Waterstones or WH Smith. GO INTO any large Tokyo bookshop and, like similar stores in big cities everywhere, you will find a well-stocked self-help section. ![]()
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