To get at the elemental truth of the novel - and why it resonates so strongly during this pandemic - I spoke with four fellow readers around the world. I wanted to know how people might react under a crisis like a pandemic, and whether they can find any hope under lockdown. Why eagerly pick up a roughly 450-page existentialist classic about a plague in a French Algerian city when you could simply zone out to the latest on demand? These numbers are extraordinary for a novel written over 70 years ago, especially when you consider the easy access to streaming services and other forms of entertainment people have had under lockdown.
And in France, the book also experienced a boom, peaking at more than 1,600 copies sold in the last week of January. In Italy, sales tripled, rocketing this 1947 classic to the country's top 10 bestsellers. UK book publisher Penguin said that sales of the book were up by 150% in the last week of February compared to the same period last year. In March, South Korea's largest bookstore chain said copies of The Plague were sold 18 times more than during the same period in 2019. It's not just Japan, judging from foreign media reports. In the last two months, The Plague has been the top seller for paperback literature at major Japanese bookstores. In my home country of Japan, printing presses churned out 360,000 extra copies starting in February. That was the day when I started reading The Plague, but I was far from the only one seeking lessons from the past.
On February 13, the Japanese health ministry reported the first death in the country. On January 23, the Chinese city of Wuhan was put under lockdown as the virus spread.
During my commute to NHK in Shibuya, normally one of the most popular and packed districts in Tokyo, all I noticed were the quiet streets. The novel portrays the dilemma of the human existence – and it hits very close to home in 2020. City authorities bungle the messaging around the plague and as the days go on, people feel more and more despair and begin to question the value of their lives. It depicts the reactions of everyday people in the city under lockdown. The novel depicts citizens fighting against the titular plague, an invisible enemy sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran in the 1940s. Japanese booksellers struggled to keep The Plague on shelves as demand grew in the early days of the pandemic. As the coronavirus outbreak developed in Asia, I found myself turning to one book for a strange sort of solace - The Plague, known as La Peste in French, written in 1947 by French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus.
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