You see this kind of thing with Manga Authors too, except in those cases the authors editor comes to their residence and stares daggers at them until the manuscript is ready.
That being said the most often place I have seen this is within manga itself, so this maybe the incidence rate is actually low and the authors who draw this into their series are either traumatised or just passing along a story!
I’m sure it’s a real thing, not only with manga but also with literary writing. Like manga, a lot of novels in Japan are first published in serial form in weekly or monthly magazines, and publishers count on being able to run installments in each issue in order to keep their readers loyal. I subscribe to the monthly literary magazine Shinchō [1, 2]. The 364-page edition for May 2022—yes, it is still published only in paper form—contains chapters from eight different serialized novels as well as a half dozen serialized essays.
I’ve written for several Japanese publishers, including, for a while, a regular essay for a monthly magazine. While I don’t think my essay was drawing a lot of readers, in my interactions with the editor I could feel the pressure he was under to get my manuscript on time each month. He had a fixed number of pages to fill, and he didn’t want to have to substitute something else for a regular feature.
The Hilltop Hotel in central Tokyo used to be famous as a place where publishers would have their popular writers stay while finishing up novels [3]. The hotel is near the headquarters of several major publishing houses, and there used to be a lot of typesetting shops in the neighborhood. Apparently the editors would more or less camp out in the lobby or hallways of the hotel to pressure the writers to stay in their rooms and keep writing—a process known as kanzume. When a writer had produced ten or twenty pages of manuscript, the editor would take it directly to the typesetter to start the process of getting it into print.
The writer Hisashi Inoue [4], while prolific, was famous for putting off writing and missing publishers’ deadlines. In 1997, he was commissioned to write the first play to be performed at the New National Theatre, Tokyo. I happened to attend the opening performance on October 22, and I was surprised that the actors, all experienced performers, flubbed their lines and exits several times. I later read in the news that Inoue had finished writing the play at the very last minute and the actors had not had enough time to memorize the script or rehearse.
That being said the most often place I have seen this is within manga itself, so this maybe the incidence rate is actually low and the authors who draw this into their series are either traumatised or just passing along a story!