Translating Strange Buildings

My English translation of Uketsu’s third, and longest, novel is out now worldwide.

Strange Buildings expands and improves on the core concept of Strange Houses, creating a multilayered narrative around the designs of 11 different buildings, which all end up woven into a much greater, and darker, story.

It reads to me as a much more mature, more assured work and I think it’s Uketsu’s best.

There was a lot to deal with in this one, as the many different chapters, or “Files,” take on different approaches and tones, giving me room to play with a variety of voices.

For example, in the excerpt from the old book in File 3, “The Watermill in the Woods,” I aimed for an old fashioned, somewhat stilted style, while File 7, “Uncle’s House,” called for the voice of a clever, if unschooled, boy.

It was a satisfying challenge to work on.

There is one big issue that arose in the translation that I would like to discuss, but it’s a bit of a spoiler. If you haven’t read the book yet, go do that now and come back when you’re done.

So, be warned:

MINOR PLOT SPOILER AHEAD

In the File 9, “Footsteps to Murder,” Hiroki Matsue reveals that he believes his father, who happens to be a Christian, murdered his mother and set fire to their house.

Later, our “great detective” Kurihara reasons this accusation away. Now, in the original Japanese version, his entire argument is basically: Mr. Matsue was not only Christian, his crucifix pendant indicates that he is Catholic, and the Catholic religion strictly forbids murder.

In Japan, where readers are by and large only vaguely aware of what being a Christian actually entails, that might fly. But not in any Western country, that’s for sure. I mean, come on, watch The Godfather. The climax of the movie is proof enough that it’s a flimsy idea.

Anyway.

My editor at Pushkin and I brought this up to Uketsu and proposed a couple of changes. We recommended adjusting the Christian angle to include pacifism and activism, but most importantly, we wanted to add an actual logical argument that helped take Mr. Matsue off the suspect list.

Uketsu agreed, and the story was changed.

I am generally uncomfortable with the idea of changing actual story points, and would never do so without active input from the author, but seriously, that particular idea struck me as nearly fatal to the story. I could see quite a few readers in the West refusing to take the book seriously after an argument like that. But, again, most Japanese readers wouldn’t even bat an eye at it. Only about 1% of the population is Christian here, so most people here don’t even know a believer.

So, we had a very successful book in Japan that we were pretty sure needed more than just words changed to really succeed in English. It needed structural changes, too. I think it worked out pretty well, and the core of the story remainss exactly as Uketsu intended it.

Translation: it ain’t just switching out words!

2026 Photo Club Exhibition

I’m a member of a photo club, the Hikari Shayukai, and we have a public exhibition at a local park every spring.

This year’s just finished, so it’s time for a bit of reflection.

Unlike past years, the exhibition this time was held the week after the annual ume blossom festival, so we knew from the start that attendance would be lower than usual. Oh top of that, we had heavy rain three days out of five. The Saturday and Sunday were sunny, luckily, but still we had less than half the 1,000 or so we usually get.

Still, people did show up, and I had some very interesting interactions with guests over my pictures.

Here are the pictures I showed, and stuffed of the thoughts I have on them now.

This picture was taken atop a local kofun, or ancient burial mound. I like the colors of the clay haniwa against the blue sky. The biggest reaction to this one was surprise at the location. Even people who live in the town where it was taken didn’t seem to know the mound was there.

This is a bit of a miracle picture. I had my son hold a lit sparkler-type firework and move it while I took a long exposure, and this is the shape it took.

Reactions to this were mostly bafflement. What is it? How did you take it? But there was a lot of wonder about it, which is mostly what I wanted.

This seemed to have a lot of impact. The vibrance of the colors and the banding of the sky, along with the sunstar, really caught people’s eyes. But what got me was how many people wanted to know exactly where I took it, down to the name of the little island at the right edge of the photo.

I don’t know the name. I’m not sure if it matters?

I’m not even sure how to explain this. I took it through the window of a double decker sightseeing bus rolling through Roppongi, Tokyo. I wanted to catch the chaos of the night lights and the feeling of the big city at night. I mostly just wanted to play around with light.

Most people just ignored it, but some seemed almost entranced by it. I got a lot of guys with cameras asking how I took it, and why. They got up close and seemed to try to decipher each pixel.

I’m ok with that reaction.

It’s always great to get the reactions of non-photographers to my pictures. It gets clarify my successes and failures.

And it just feels more meaningful to show prints like that

Translating The Ark

I do, in fact, translate more than just Uketsu books, and on February 12th the latest such was released in the UK.

The Ark by Haruo Yuki.

The Ark is a mystery/thriller in the honkaku mode. It tells the story of a group of seven friends from university who meet up and hike to an old abandoned underground facility one of them found. They end up deciding to stay the night and a family of three also show up, rather mysteriously, then they all get trapped when an earthquake blocks the door.

Complications start piling up, and then bodies start piling up, and the whole thing becomes a tense, claustrophobic journey into pitch-black nihilism. This is a book where the ending hits like a punch in the gut.

Translators often talk about the linguistic challenges of the job, of trying to find the right way to convey the author’s message and so on.

It’s less common, I think, to talk about the emotional element.

The act of translation starts (and proceeds, and ends!) with reading. Reading deeply. Reading repeatedly. Eking out all the nuance and meaning I can from a work. I can’t speak for everyone, but when I translate a book I get emotionally invested in a way I rarely do otherwise. I have to, or the whole thing falls flat.

Which means that in translating a dark work like this, I am immersed in all that bleakness and cold-blooded murder for literal months.

It was hard to translate The Ark. Unpleasant. It weighed on me.

Which is not to say there is anything wrong with the book. It’s tight, clever, and written from a place of real care for the genre. It’s a good book. Very good.

But it’s not a happy one. I was glad when I was finished with this one.

And now it’s out there for readers to experience for themselves. There are some who will love the weight of the tension, like a mountain hanging above your head. Others will hate the breathless atmosphere of creeping doom, like water slowly rising up to steal your breath. But for fans of deduction-focused mysteries and darker tales, I think this one will satisfy indeed.

Six (?) Months Without MS

My growing disgust with the tech world’s grotesque insistence on shoving LLM/GenAI down our throats finally reached a fever pitch last year, and I began divesting myself of all as many ties to those companies as I could. The worst offender in my own professional workflow was, of course, Microsoft.

I cancelled my Office 365 subscription and, hardest of all, switched to the Ubuntu operating system in August or September of last year. I didn’t write it down, exactly, but.. Around six months ago. So, here we are, half a year later, and I wanted to do a review on how it’s going.

I started off with a “soft switch,” double booting my laptop with Windows. I had to make sure that I could still handle all my professional tasks, after all. But since I had been using LibreOffice for all my document work since spring, and LibreOffice comes bundled with Ubuntu from the start, I was pretty confident.

And now, roughly six months later, how’s it going?

Fine. Better than fine. Great. I have replaced everything I needed on Windows for work with either free or one-off purchase accounts. Not only have I broken away from broken LLM bullshit, but I’ve stopped paying licensing fees for software!

I use a lifetime subscription to PCloud for cloud storage, which has a native Linux app. I use the Free and Open Source (FOSS) Evolution email app for all the different accounts I’ve amassed. I use FOSS OmegaT for my translation tool, one I’ve used for years anyway, and again it has a Linux app.

In that time I have had zero problems doing my work, which includes creating and editing enormous documents with multiple rounds of edits using track changes and comments. Edits on Strange Buildings? All done in LibreOffice Writer on Ubuntu (And The Ark was all done in LibreOffice on Windows…). In fact, I get the feeling that Writer on Ubuntu handles those big jobs a bit more smoothly than Word did on Windows. No issues with compatibility, no terrible formatting issues, no muss, no fuss.

Other work tasks, like generating and editing PDFs or writing presentations have gone well, too. I did have one mishap making a presentation in PowerPoint then editing it in LibreOffice Impress, but I have worked out a backup and autosave system since then and have had no issues. I run my work tracker/to do sheets and invoices in LibreOffice Calc (Excel compatible).

Right now, there is only one single task that I have to sometimes perform (maybe once a year) to make my job easier—but is not essential—that requires software I can only find on Windows. So, I have used Windows exactly ONCE since last October.

Otherwise, I simply don’t need Microsoft, and I’m still investigating ways around even that one little use.

There is a certain intimidation factor to Linux, I will admit. Many app installations have required me to use the terminal instead of the clear GUI interface that Windows users feel most comfortable with. But all of that is copy/pasting commands, anyway. Not like I have to memorize code or long-winded user manuals or something. Honestly, the only real frustration I’ve had is that one work client has set up a special email address for me and their security settings are odd so lots of email clients won’t even connect to it. That’s not Linux’s fault, that’s the client. But even then, I found a way around it.

Ubuntu just works, for me. Absolutely every bit as well as, if not better than, Windows 11 ever did.

I’m not going to tell anyone they should do what I did. We all have our own comfort levels with technology and our own bullshit thresholds. But I can say that I see absolutely no reason to ever move back to any Microsoft product, and if you have even the slightest tolerance for non-GUI software tinkering, you might give Ubuntu a try. It’s probably simpler than you fear, and it’s as functional as most people probably need.

The pain of Pedantry

The city I live in, Hikari, was into last year home to Yamamoto Akira, a master of chōkin metal chasing and what is known as a Living National Treadure. He passed away just over a year ago, and the city has finally managed to put together an exhibition of his work.

It’s incredible to see. Vessels of metal or lacquerware etched and inlaid with intricate designs both abstract and representative. Each one not only representing hours of painstaking with, but a lifetime of dedication to the art.

Beautiful.

The exhibit opened today and I stopped by unaware that it was the day for the media and various dignitaries to get a guided tour. I hung around the periphery, avoiding the camera and enjoying the beauty my own way.

Then, I overheard the guide talk about a piece I had yet to see, a small vessel inlaid with a “kingfisher.” She described how Yamamoto had wanted to create an image of the rare bird but couldn’t find one to use as a reference, so consulted with the head of the local birdwatcher’s association to track one down.

I was intrigued and confused. Intrigued because I love kingfishers. Confused because they’re not at all rare and it would take maybe a day to find one reliably.

When the crowd moved on, I made my way to view the piece. It was, as I feared, not a common kingfisher, kawasemi in Japanese, but a crested kingfisher, or yamasemi.

The piece was named wrong.

Yamasemi, crested kingfisher (crest lowered)

A large black and white bird with a crest and long beak perches at the tip of a bare bamboo branch. It looks out to the left. — Yamasemi (crest raised)

And that one little discrepancy damaged my enjoyment of the event. Which is silly, because it’s probably just some tiny miscommunication that has no bearing on the beauty or mastery of there piece. But man, it really bothers me. Because it’s a lovely depiction of a yamasemi, but kawasemi it ain’t.