It is a wet Thursday morning and Michiharu Kase is stamping impatiently in the doorway of the Aoyama bookstore in Shibaura. Behind the counter, the shopkeeper carefully slices the plastic strap off a large bundle of books. Michiharu, his 600 yen (£3) ready in his hand, snatches the November edition off the counter, bangs down the coins and dives into the coffee shop across the road to devour his prize.
Globally speaking, Michiharu is hardly unique in his Su Doku obsession, but he is something of a rarity in Japan, where the addictive number puzzles are by now an accepted part of life. In Japanese Su Doku terms, Michiharu is an evangelist in a land of lapsed Anglicans.
To think of Japan’s love of number puzzles as something almost religious does not go too far. More than 45 million puzzle books and magazines are sold in Japan each year, of which about 10 per cent are devoted to Su Doku. Every month, 15 Su Doku magazines and around 30 books are published and consumed by legions of devotees. The Asahi newspaper, with a daily circulation of 8.2 million, has been running Su Doku in its Saturday editions for nearly a decade. And yet the Japanese resolutely refuse to describe themselves as being in a “Su Doku boom”.
“These puzzles are part of the fabric of Japanese life,” explains Yukihisa Honda, who works in a Tokyo leisure centre and is a long-time puzzle devotee. “I think Su Doku must enter the Japanese consciousness quite young — I remember that our teacher gave us a tough Su Doku puzzle when she wanted us just to shut up, or when we couldn’t play outside on rainy days.”
Recently, though, the quietly obsessive world of Japanese puzzling has been feeling unsettled. People who travel to the UK or US have started noticing Su Doku books lining the airport bookstands. In Japan, there are suddenly eager-looking foreigners in the puzzle sections of their bookshops buying armfuls of Su Doku loot to take home. Two weeks ago, three major Japanese newspapers revealed — one on its front page — that Japan’s humble Su Doku was, everywhere else in the world, at the centre of a “boom”.
“Yes I read that in the Mainichi,” says Honda. “I don’t really believe it myself. Su Doku is just a puzzle, isn’t it?I think it is a little bit like the history of tobacco. The native Americans had been smoking tobacco for years before the Europeans arrived and took it back to their countries. Suddenly the whole world was addicted to tobacco and the native Americans didn’t know what all the fuss was about.”
Leo Lewis
DELHI
Less than six months after its arrival on the subcontinent, India is in the grip of Su Doku fever. “I’d sit and do it all day if I could,” Neeraj Sanjeet, a clerk in one of India’s unproductive government ministry offices, confessed. “It’s even made me get into work earlier so I can grab the papers first.”
Su Doku arrived in India in May, when the Hindustan Times published the puzzle after numerous press articles about the craze sweeping Britain. After the paper attributed its rise in circulation to the puzzle, a slew of other dailies followed suit until almost every English-language paper now carries Su Doku.
In the gleaming call centres and outsourcing companies employees are forbidden to bring pens, papers and mobile phones into the office. But that doesn’t stop the puzzle from interfering with productivity. “I’ve been late for work because I couldn’t get the puzzle finished over breakfast and I just knew I wouldn’t be able to wait all day until my shift was over to do it,” Shanti Syal, a call centre worker said.
While Su Doku drives some mad, others credit it with preserving their sanity. Amitabh, a software engineer three years into an unhappy arranged marriage, disappears into another room with the paper every evening when he arrives home to pore over the puzzle. “It’s the best excuse I have not to have to sit and talk to my wife,” he said. “Otherwise we’d drive each other nuts.”
Even writers have caught on, with the word Su Doku now entering the colourful Indian lexicon as an analogy for the knottiest of subcontinental conundrums — viz, “the Kashmir Su Doku”.
Catherine Philp
JERUSALEM
Observant Jews addicted to Su Doku in Israel have overcome Judaism’s strict religious laws by developing a kosher version for use on the Sabbath.
The game arrived in Israel in July, first appearing in the mass-circulation Yediot Ahronoth newspaper and quickly being taken up by other papers and magazines. But the ancient Sabbath rules frustrated Sara and Tsvika Prizant, Jewish settlers living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank who, as ultra-Orthodox Jews, are forbidden from writing between sunset on Friday and Saturday.
Their solution was thick plastic sheets used by Mr Prizant, a carpenter, to fit double-glazed windows into houses near their home in Shavei Shomron. They created 81 squares, avoiding the Sabbath prohibition by moving numbers on plastic squares instead of writing them in boxes.
“It became an addiction for us and we started looking for a solution to let us do it on Shabbat. First we tried wooden cubes and magnets, which didn’t work out, and then we thought of the double-glazing material,” said Mrs Prizant. Their Sabbath-observant version is now on sale in bookshops, has been translated into seven languages and they have begun distributing it in the US, Japan and China.
Yonit Farago
SYDNEY
In Australia Su Doku is viewed as an outdoor sport. With endless sunny days people like to tackle the morning puzzle on the beach, at the park or at outdoor cafes.
The puzzle arrived in Australia only in May but already it has a loyal following. The major newspaper groups, Fairfax and News Ltd, carry it in more than 20 papers nationwide and the passion has spilled over into books. Borders, a Sydney bookstore, says that the books are set to be among its biggest sellers this Christmas, with 30 titles already on the shelves.
At the Manly ferry terminal in Sydney, 54-year-old deck hand Geoffrey Welch says he has been completing the puzzles since Su Doku first arrived. He now spots commuters folding their papers to start their puzzle as they queue to board the ferry and find a seat. “Some of them see my paper open at the puzzle page and they give me a nod or say, ‘Ah you do Su Doku’. It is like a secret club — ‘You are one of us’.”
But for some it is much more than just a past-time. Dr Paul Abbott, a physicist at of the University of Western Australia, was so taken with the puzzle that he posed an online challenge to write a programme to solve it. He says: “It was a great intellectual challenge. The puzzle is beautiful. It is simple in design yet creating a program to solve it was no trivial matter. I had responses from all around the world.”
Alison Cameron
PARIS
Unknown in France until last summer, Su Doku mania exploded in July within days of Le Figaro publishing it and explaining that its “nouvel jeu cérébral” had come by way of the English Channel.
One drawback for French publishers was the name. Pronounced in French, the game sounds like “sue du cul”, which translates politely as “sweats from the bum”. Publishers were relieved when the name was adopted with a Japanese-sounding stress on the middle syllable. A month after First Editions put out the French version of Su Doku Volume 1, the HarperCollins bestseller, it reached No 1 in the French nonfiction table. “Now we have published three books of puzzles, selling 200,000,” said Olivier Prenassi, publisher of the Wayne Gould puzzles at First Edition.
Gallic enthusiasm for Su Doku became a media event, with fans singing its praises on air and in print. “I do them all, I buy them all, I rip pages out of the newspaper,” Mathilde, a 25-year-old Paris sales executive, said.
France, a country with low newspaper readership, prefers crosswords and other language-based puzzles, which are published in separate format. Le Sport Cerebral group, which publishes popular crossword and puzzle booklets, said its Su Doku customers were different from its traditional ones, who tend to be women and pensioners. “This game interests IT workers and engineers and they quickly become addicted,” said a spokesman for the group. “We are bringing out Su Doku magazines twice a month. We are up to 40,000 copies for each print. People like the speed of them, the implacable logic.”
Charles Bremner and Marie Tourres
NEW YORK
John Reusing got hooked on Su Doku in America after reading about the new Times puzzle on the internet. Soon the 24-year-old medical researcher from Baltimore was devising his own grids and posting them on his website, www.number-logic.com. “I enjoy making them more than solving them, and seeing how many people I can stump with them,” he says. “It’s more accessible than a crossword because you don’t need a large vocabulary.”
Wayne Gould, the Times Su Doku guru, estimates that the puzzle is now featured in 80 US newspapers since its US debut in the spring. The Times’s sister paper, the New York Post, this month organised America’s first Su Doku national championship at New York University. It received 5,000 entries.
At one point, six of the top 50 books on USA Today’s bestseller list were Su Doku titles. They included Su Doku for Dummies, which shot to the top slot in the 900-title catalogue within two weeks.
As the frenzy speads, toy-makers are rushing to get board games and electronic versions to market in time for Christmas. Toys ‘R’ Us plans to set aside space for a special Su Doku section inside the games department of its 700 shops across America.
James Bone
