Sagara Sou, the author of the light novel Hentai Ouji to Warawanai Neko, aka “The Hentai Prince and the Stony Cat,” has found himself under scrutiny for the claims of plagiarism.
As per the report by Kadokawa’s MF Bunko J imprint, the author’s new light novel, titled “ Koi to Noroi to Sekai Wo Horobosu Kaiju No Hanashi (Love, Curse and the Story of a Monster that Destroys the World ) published on October 25, in Japan contains a plagiarized piece of content from another novel from a different publisher.
The novel whose written content has been plagiarized goes with the title, ” Inakunare, Gunjou: Fragile Light of Pistol Star ” written and published by the author Kono Yutaka in April 2018. The official statement reads, “there are some texts that coincide between both publications”, although the term plagiarism is not yet added to the context.
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The plagiarized text goes something like this:
- (2022) Koi to Noroi to Sekai Wo Horobosu Kaiju No Hanashi (pp.207, lines 2-4):
“The sun had set long ago. Under the sky, the colour of the sky turned bright red. Red is an artificial colour. It looks much more humanized than blue. The evening sky disappearing overhead was like a ruin built by mankind in a much older and long-forgotten time.”
- (2018) Inakunare, Gunjou: Fragile Light of Pistol Star (pp. 209, lines 7-9):
“The sun had long since set. Under the sky was a bright red. Red is an artificial colour, in my opinion. It looks much more artificial than blue. The twilight sky looked like ruins made by humanity in a much earlier time.”
The English translation of the text contains similar words, given the author (Sagara Sou) has used some synonyms here and there(in the official Japanese translation) to hide the plagiarism apparent in the dialogue.
The statement adds that Sagara Sou was looking for feedback through discussions on Twitter 2 days after the release when he found “three lines of text that could be identical to a novel by Yutaka Kouno. ” Naturally he reached out to Kadokawa publishing to further inspect the matter. The author’s explanation was while he was writing the novel, he picked a few phrases from a book he was reading earlier. He found that the liked texts didn’t attribute to any other source, which was a mistake on his part as few sentences collided with the 2018 published novel by Kono Yutaka.
However, Kono Yutaka said in his statement that as long as he gets an apology and an acceptable explanation of how something like this happened, he would let the case close. But the publisher MF Bunkoj (who owns the publishing rights to Sou Sagara’s 2022 novel) has decided to pull the product and demolish it.
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To conclude, Kadokawa also listed the chain of events leading to this ‘unintended error,’ stating:
“When the phrase was annotated in a text file used by Mr. Sagara for his writing assignment (where he annotated phrases he liked or came up with), he forgot to add the source or accidentally deleted it, and the phrase was used in his novel under the mistaken impression that it was his own idea.”
The statement continues, “After reporting the circumstances to Mr. Yutaka Kouno and Shinchosha Publishing House, they have accepted the apology and consent to disclose this entire situation, considering that the incident was negligent and unintentional. We take the fact of copyright infringement very seriously and have decided to withdraw this book as we believe a strict response is necessary. We would like to apologize again to everyone affected by this situation and will take strict precautions to prevent a repeat, including reviewing future editorials and alerting authors.”
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Source: Kadokawa
