NYC's Atom Cafe: Noodles, Tea and Manga
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Dec. 13, 2005 Sign up now!
By Kai-Ming Cha -- Publishers Weekly, 12/13/2005
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The Atom Cafe, New York City's first manga cafe, has amassed a collection of 20,000 manga titles in Japanese and 1,000 translated manga for English readers. In Japan, manga cafes abound, and have developed into 24-hour destinations. New York's Atom Cafe is equipped with sofas, tables and cubicles for reading. Readers may choose coffee or tea and a selection of noodles and onigiri (seaweed-wrapped rice balls) to enjoy with their comics.
For a $5 hourly fee, customers are free to choose from a selection of Japanese comics, like Touch, the first sports manga to appeal to a female audience, or Heat, a yakuza manga that takes readers deep into the violent Japanese underground. English readers have the option of reading Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind or Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub.
Just like its Japanese counterparts, New York's manga cafe does not pay royalties to publishers or manga writers and authors for the manga they offer to readers. Daisuke Sasano, Atom Cafe owner and president of Takken America Company, says he "wouldn't mind paying a royalty if the product is a very popular product. But for the ones that aren't mainstream, it's a great place for exposure." Sasano thinks of his cafe as akin to a used bookstore where readers can discover classics. "Even for the popular product, a reader may find a manga-ka's [manga artist and writer] old work. They are rediscovered through the popular."
Ultimately, Sasano sees many similarities between Atom and American retailers like Borders books and Barnes & Noble. "Look at American bookstores," Sasano says. "You're allowed to read; a cafe is attached. People can read for free and then choose what to buy." Sasano notes that bookstores in Japan are beginning to incorporate the American model—allowing shoppers to relax and read. "To show readers a wide variety of books, the exposure is doing great things for the industry."
