Hiro Mizushima's highly anticipated debut novel KAGEROU was published on December 15, and Oricon has now released some sales data for the book. In the five days following its release, it sold 351,000 copies, reaching #1 on the weekly book rankings!
Oricon started tracking book sales in April 2008, and this is the first time that an author's debut work has been #1 on the book charts (over all categories).
In the two and a half years of Oricon's book charts, KAGEROU has the 3rd highest first-week sales, behind J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with 1.191 million and Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 Book 3 with 398,000.
KAGEROU was chosen as the winner of the 5th Poplar Publishing Grand Prize for Fiction in October, and it was quickly approved for publication. Reports at the start of this month indicated that the book had received more than 400,000 pre-orders, as of two weeks before the release date. Poplar had initially printed 430,000 copies for the launch on December 15, but with many stores selling out that same morning, Poplar placed an order the next day for another 250,000 copies to be printed. As of December 22, 760,000 copies have been printed.
Poplar revealed several days ago that it has already received offers for a movie adaptation of KAGEROU.
Source: Tokyograph