Novelist Michael Connelly asks the plaintive question in our headline in a piece in the Los Angeles Times about the downsizing or elimination of book reviews in newspapers across the country.

We've run into this trend a lot lately. Newspapers are relying on wire services for reviews more and more, eliminating book editor positions and shrinking the newshole dedicated to literature. It's a pure business decision motivated by media consolidation and a desire to squeeze the last penny of profit out of each paper. We all know this depressing truth, yet what Connelly points out in his piece is how short-sighted this strategy is, and how, if anything, it is likely to hasten the downfall of newspapers, not make them more robust.

To answer the question in the headline, we'll see more fragmentation, more regional or niche stars and fewer Updikes, Hemingways and Murakamis. The best bet for small presses is to light a fire in a region or a niche and try to fan the flames so that others will hear about your book. Playing on the national scale is becoming more of an insider's game. We'll still try to get on Oprah, get reviewed in the NYT and have our book talked about on "All Things Considered," but unfortunately, it's not worth the time contacting the book editors at major dailies when they are constantly under fire, having their jobs eliminated or their responsibilities truncated. Frankly, newspapers are becoming less relevant to publishers like Chin Music Press and that's a shame.

A brief look in pictures at a decade of evolution of The New York Times's online presence.

1996

2007

See ya, Canada. The Washington Post is closing America's last news bureau in our neighbor to the north.

Sumie Kawakami took a break this week from putting the finishing touches on our upcoming book, Goodbye Madame Butterfly, to take a little trip to Arizona and finish an Ironman competition in 14 hours, 3 minutes and 18 seconds.

The mind boggles. She swam 2.4 miles, cycled 112 miles, then ran a full marathon (26.2 miles) in 14 hours. And this was after long hours finishing the manuscript for Butterfly. Sumie, congratulations!

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. He was our generation's Mark Twain. Here's a taste of his acerbic wit right after we invaded Iraq (thanks, tompaine.com, for the link). And here's a favorite quote of mine, found in an AP obit:

Vonnegut said he wrote novels to "catch people before they become generals and presidents" and "poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world."

I'm thinking of adopting that as Chin Music's mission statement.

Hitotoki.org has just pre-launched. This is a co-lab born collaboration between Chin Music Press and Tokyo based web design firm AQ.

The goal is simple: "to trace a narrative map of Tokyo through personal accounts from curious outsiders."

We've noticed there are these strange pockets of memory one develops in a city like Tokyo. Memories that are wholly linked to a certain place — be it an out of the way convenience store you happened to pass one night years ago, a spot in a park you saw a particularly unusual homeless man and now remember every time you pass it, a seat at a diner you had tea and omelets at after a long night of college drinking, a canned coffee machine down a back-alley you stopped at for a drink a few days after arriving in the city. For whatever reasons, these small, private moments have become linked with those places.

We're all building these memory maps, for better or worse, when we visit or choose to live in a city like Tokyo. Hitotoki is looking to take some of those memories mapped to specific places and present them to readers. Hopefully they'll combine to provide a more intimate, interesting and ultimately deeper view of both the city and the people that choose to inhabit it.

If you've ever been to Tokyo or currently reside here, feel free to grab a submissions form and shoot something over. We're looking for short narratives (200-500 words).

Seattle-based Japanophiles have been having a very active couple of weeks. We had Roland Kelts in town and on the radio last week, promoting his new book, Japanamerica. Then translator extraordinaire Jay Rubin yesterday at Elliott Bay. And there's more to come:

Tomorrow, Sakura Con opens. This is the Pacific Northwest's biggest conference for anime and manga fans, and coordinator Elmira Utz says a record crowd of 10,000 or so is expected over the weekend. They're coming from all over, and many ("Thousands," says Elmira) will be dressed as their favorite anime characters. (Roland noted last week that fans in Japan are discouraged from showing up at comic conventions in costume, so this is really an American phenomenon).

Then, author Natsuo Kirino will be reading at two events. On Sunday at 6 pm, she'll be at the Panama Cafe in the International District. The following evening she'll be at Elliott Bay Book Co. at 7:30 pm. She'll be reading from her latest novel, Grotesque.

The esteemed quarterly Lousiana Cultural Vistas has a thoughtful review of Last of the Red Hot Poppas in its latest issue. Check it out.

One other reason to check it out: Vistas is the first publication I've seen in a long time to use the Nxt Book technology to replicate a paper publication online. I remember how this was billed as the next breakout application for online publishing years ago, and it's kind of fun to zoom in and out and turn the pages of the magazine. But for whatever reason — perhaps it is too stuck in the traditional paradigm of flipping pages and paper-based layout? — we rarely see this application used.

The one thing Nxt Book does that I like is allow the reader to make random connections, like when you read the newspaper and jump from one topic to the next. Online news reading tends to focus you — the more you drill down into a subject, the less likely you are to find something interesting of a completely different nature — and it is difficult to jump from a piece on Keith Richards talking about what he did with his late father's ashes to the influence of the Mormon church on American politics, as I did this morning while reading The Seattle Times. Of course, this may not be an experience readers need to have, and it may go the way of album cover art — fondly remembered but not essential.

Japanese lit fans in Seattle, a great translator, Jay Rubin, will be speaking tomorrow at Elliott Bay Book Co. at 7:30 pm.

Rubin is now living in the Seattle area, so we may be able to see more of him. For those of you who like Japanese literature but may not always notice the translator's name, here's some of what Professor Rubin has brought us: Norwegian Wood and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (not to mention the next Murakami book, After Dark, due out in a month or so), the writings of Natsume Soseki, and most recently, Rashomon and 17 Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (with an introduction from Murakami.

Jonesin' for a Tokyo fix? Check out "Tokyo Love Hello" by Chris Steele-Perkins.