Battan · Japanese · josei · manga

Fatale Game: Battan

brainLeave a comment
Image

The new year! We made it! I hope you had time off to relax and do the equivalent of watch the Kohaku Utagassen, eat mochi, and lie about under a cosy kotatsu! I did two of those things and I would have done the third if only I had a kotatsu to lie about under. But alas! I have only my mini electric carpet, and while the heat it provides keeps my tootsies toasty, nothing can beat the indulgent lazy heat of the table with the duvet over it.

I also spent my New Year’s reading because of course I did. My job is essentially reading, so I am forced to read many, many things for work. And I enjoy it! Reading things as a translator is different from reading simply for pleasure, and books I would not necessarily enjoy as a reader are fun as a translator because of the different linguistic challenges they pose. But when I take off my translator hat, I can go full holiday mode and wallow in the books I love without wondering how I would translate any particular line. And skip over tiny asides in terrible handwriting (ahem, Nakamura Asumiko) or the details of recipes for food I cannot eat (I’m looking at you, What Did You Eat Yesterday).

Continue reading “Fatale Game: Battan” →
Japanese · manga · Sakata Yasuko · SFF · shojo

Tantei Game: Sakata Yasuko

brain1 Comment
Image

How can it be the end of the year already? Didn’t we just have an end of the year last week?? My head is spinning from the dizzy whirlwind of the last two months (that whirlwind also being the reason for the much more sporadic posting on these pages), and just when I think I can take a deep breath and get myself sorted, it’s time for the New Year holiday. Which means I have to go out and do more running around to stock up for when all the shops are closed (although that period seems to get shorter every year. Hooray capitalism?). There are also New Year cards to write, which I’m sending out to readers who want one this year. There’s still time to put your address in my address book and get your name on the list! (Unless you are reading this after December 28. Then there is no time left. Sorry. You’ll have to follow me on Bluesky if you want more of a heads-up when I do giveaways and fun in the post.)

One part of the dizzy whirlwind that has kept me going full throttle since the end of October is a trip I took down south, where attentive readers will remember I went to the extremely cool mystery bookstore in Nagoya. I noodled through its carefully curated shelves in the shape of books, sat in its little murder mystery corners, used its spooky all-black washroom complete with black toilet paper (for extra murder mystery vibes, I guess), and bought a small stack of books. They also gave me a grape juice box and a sticker of their mascot character when I bought those books, strange bookstore bonuses, but welcome nonetheless. Plus, I saw a fox wedding in the same shotengai as that bookstore, so it turned out to be a pretty great rainy night.

Continue reading “Tantei Game: Sakata Yasuko” →
Aya Kanno · Fantasy · Japanese · manga · Mythology · shojo · Shonen

Meiou no Zakuro: Kanno Aya

brain2 Comments
Image

I have a strange sort of soft spot for artists I’ve translated. We created this translation baby together (technically since they are artist and I am translator, but in practice, we have never spoken or had any direct communication) and now I am forever invested in their success and happiness. I keep an eye on the socials, look out for their new babies, admire them even if I’m not the target audience, and generally wish them well. It’s a weird one-sided relationship. Even if I do actually know them in person, they’re not keeping an eye on my translations in the same way because, well, they probably wouldn’t need me if they could read and write English well enough to follow my work.

I guess we call this parasocial now? Although I’m only invested in the book side of these artists’ lives, so maybe it is just straight up fan behaviour. Whatever it is, I care about these artists as the co-parents of my translation children (am I pushing the translation baby metaphor too far??) and will pick up at least the first volume of anything they put out to check and see how they’re doing. Artistically. In the publishing industry. (I’m not stalking anyone. I’m not that kind of weirdo.)

Continue reading “Meiou no Zakuro: Kanno Aya” →
English · Japanese · manga · shojo · Tachibana Oreko

Hotaru no Yomeiri: Tachibana Oreko

brainLeave a comment
Image

One of the great pleasures of travelling for me is—unsurprisingly—finding cool bookstores and checking out the books inside of them. Most bookstores are more or less along the same lines, a balanced selection of fiction, non-fiction, and comics with some calendars or a stationery section thrown in if there’s space. But the balance between all of those elements is always different, and the tastes of the bookstore staff always reveal themselves in the particular books they keep in stock.

Plus, many bookstores outside major urban areas will have some kind of a local author/topic section, which is my absolute favourite. Many of the books in these sections don’t get national distribution, so this is the place where you can really get a deeper understanding of wherever you are travelling to. I came across a book of essays on Sasazuka today at a Sasazuka bookstore, and on a recent trip to Okinawa, I found an autobiography of a yuta (an Okinawan priestess of sorts), a manga of local spooky stories, and a mystery written by an Okinawan set in Naha. I would never have found these books in Tokyo!

Continue reading “Hotaru no Yomeiri: Tachibana Oreko” →
Boys' Love · Ichiho Michi · Japanese · manga · Takako Shimura

Only Talk: Ichiho Michi/Shimura Takako

brainLeave a comment
Image

Don’t worry! I didn’t forget about you and my brain’s mission to battle all the books. My brain and I have simply been preoccupied with a little something called a vacation. Yes! I took one! I may have the worst work-life balance, but even I will take a vacation every ten years or so. And having taken my once-in-a-decade vacation, I have to admit holidays are pretty great and I really should take them more often.

But I didn’t take a break from books. You can rest assured on that front. Even as I travelled around Japan with my sister, showing her my life on the other side of the ocean and weirding her out by suddenly becoming incomprehensible to her with the whole Japanese thing, I was popping into bookstores and seeing what they had on the shelves. Thanks to my diligence/obsession, I even managed to find the coolest bookstore ever in Nagoya. (I posted pictures over on Bluesky if you’re interested.) I will never stop bringing you the books! (Well, I mean, the internet might eat itself with the whole plagiarism machine situation, so who knows really?)

Continue reading “Only Talk: Ichiho Michi/Shimura Takako” →
Akutagawa Prize · Anniversary · Brain · Cats! · Celebration · Chisato Abe · English · est em · Fantasy · Fiction · Fumiko Fumi · Japanese · Kumiko Saiki · manga · Minami Q-ta · SFF · Takase Junko · Tamekou · Tsujimura Mizuki

Random Anniversary 9: My Brain

brain2 Comments
Image

I realized not too long ago that I’ve been scribbling away on these pages for almost fifteen years now, and I nearly crumbled to dust on the spot. Fif. Teen. Years. This blog is almost in high school. You must understand my distress at this realization. I have no human children, just all my precious translation babies. But those books aren’t all in my face about how big they’re getting and how the years are passing. I don’t need to buy them new clothes when they grow out of their old ones or take them to the doctor to get vaccinated every year. I mostly just put them in my bookcase of translations and forget about them. (Sorry, sweet children!) And then I continue to live the way I have lived for oh these many years now.

So when a real, actual touchstone of the passing of time pops up and makes me feel my mortality in my very bones, it hits me hard. A visceral reminder that I am in fact not thirty anymore, and that I have been doing the same shit for decades now. Decades! Just holed away in my little apartment on one side of the ocean or the other, translating my little books, reading my little stories.

Continue reading “Random Anniversary 9: My Brain” →
Boys' Love · Japanese · josei · manga · Sachiko Takeuchi

Zutto Ikemen o Oikaketeitakatta Kedo, Somo Ikanai yo Genjitsu wa (Burachin 6): Takeuchi Sachiko

brainLeave a comment
Image

I have happily devoured the Burachin series, in which artist Takeuchi and her editor M-ta devour hot guys in more or less interesting ways, because Takeuchi is an incredibly expressive artist. She has a real gift for drilling down into the raw emotion of a scene and distilling it into an image, like the panic attack she has in this volume at a hotel while on a trip with friends. She pokes the gentlest of fun at fandom from an insider’s perspective, making her manga always extremely hilarious but never, ever mean.

But I’ve never really gotten the central point of the Burachin series: the hot guys and the chasing of them. I appreciate eye candy as much as the next person, but I am not a fandom person. I think I could have been if I had managed to come into contact with cosplay or boy bands or slash fiction when I was younger because I have an obsessive personality, and it would have been easy to switch the focus of my obsession from mathematics to making fictional characters kiss in story. But the internet didn’t happen until I was already basically a grown-up, and I never got the chance to encounter any real-world weirdos (complimentary) as I moved from place to place in Canada as a child.

So I honestly couldn’t relate to Takeuchi and M-ta pouring significant amounts of time and money into the pursuit of the eye candy, despite how much I enjoy reading this report of them doing so. But then! I was interpreting at TIFF again for the first time in a few years and working with a bunch of famous people. Naturally, I am a professional. I’ve been doing this interpreting thing for a long time now, and I’ve worked with loads of famous people. And even before I was interpreter to the stars, I was interviewing my favourite bands and authors for my fanzine and other projects. Starstruck is not a thing that happens to me. I mean, famous people are still people.

Continue reading “Zutto Ikemen o Oikaketeitakatta Kedo, Somo Ikanai yo Genjitsu wa (Burachin 6): Takeuchi Sachiko” →
Eguchi Hisashi · Japanese · manga

Eguchi Hisashi no Bakuhatsu Dinner Show: Eguchi Hisashi

brain2 Comments
Image

After Peow2 announced at Anime NYC last summer they had licensed the classic eighties’ romantic comedy Stop!! Hibari-kun!, the reaction was split between normal people rejoicing that they would finally be able to read a manga they thought would never get licensed and complete weirdos who were outraged that Peow2 had “transed” this boy who simply wanted to dress like a girl. And have breasts. And be a daughter.

To be clear, this latter category of people are transphobes who are entirely unhinged from reality, sprinkled with a smattering of purity nerds who insist that Japanese art is inherently apolitical and it is us translators injecting our “woke agenda” into their beloved manga and anime. So you can imagine the kind of garbage they were spouting in outrage about this licensing announcement. And naturally, given that I was included in the announcement as the translator of the series, I caught some strays.

Continue reading “Eguchi Hisashi no Bakuhatsu Dinner Show: Eguchi Hisashi” →
Fiction · Japanese · Yuzuki Asako

Nejimaki Kataomoi: Yuzuki Asako

brainLeave a comment
Image

It’s been a good couple years for Japanese fiction in translation. Ever since Ginny Tapley Takemori brought us Murata Sayaka’s Convenience Store Woman in English, we’ve been getting more and more cool books by people not named Murakami Haruki. (Although that has not stopped the Murakami Nobel Prize watch. I look forward to returning to Japan this autumn and watching yet another breathless news segment on the fans betting on this being Murakami’s year for the prize for literature.) Literary superstars like Murata and Kawakami Mieko have already had a number of books translated into English since the current J-boom began, but non-superstars like Saou Ichikawa are also hitting the shelves in surprising numbers.

Surprising because the English fiction market does not really like work in translation. It’s the three percent problem you’ll hear about if you spend any time in the world of literary translation. A mere three percent (give or take) of the books available in English are translated from other languages. Three percent! Compare that to the twenty-ish percent of translated titles in Japan or Germany, and you can see how it’s a minor miracle that we’re getting this many Japanese books on our shelves.

Continue reading “Nejimaki Kataomoi: Yuzuki Asako” →
Japanese · josei · Kohinata Marco · manga · Prison

Hei no Naka no Biyoshitsu: Kohinata Marco, Sakurai Mina

brainLeave a comment
Image

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working with the MINT project to bring cool and/or underappreciated manga into English. My role in the project has basically been to translate manga since that is more or less my thing. I got to work on chapters from Higashi Tokyo Machi Machi by Katsushika Keita from which I learned there is an Ethiopian restaurant in east Tokyo, and I plan to hit that place up as soon as I get back to Tokyo this fall. The manga is filled with loads of other cool stuff like the literal history of east Tokyo, but I mostly just want to eat injera so this was my takeaway.

I also got to translate a chapter of battan’s Soshite Hiroin wa Inakunatta, which yes, dream come true. We all know how much I love battan’s work! But Hiroin was especially fun to do because I never get to translate characters like Tora, a sassy older woman who has lived a whole life and knows what she wants and how to get it. Translating her was such a joy! It honestly renewed my love for this work at a time when I was feeling burned out because I have no work-life balance. I spent so long considering the perfect deployment of every single “hon” and had a blast doing it. (Someone please license this series and hire me to translate the rest of it! You will not regret it!)

Continue reading “Hei no Naka no Biyoshitsu: Kohinata Marco, Sakurai Mina” →