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 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.

Upcoming Translations

2026 is well under way. January has blurred by, and as February approaches I am stunned to realize that I have two translations coming out next month.

First up is a title that has probably flown under the radar for many. The Ark by Haruo Yuki is a dark mystery about a group of university friends and one hapless family trapped in a bizarre underground building after an earthquake. Not only are they in danger of drowning as water floods the building with no way out, one of their group begins murdering the others for unfathomable reasons.

This one was, if I’m honest, very difficult to translate. Not on a technical level, but on an emotional one. Translation is an act of reading. The deepest kind of reading. As a translator, I try to wring every bit of nuance out of a book, plumb the depths of every reference, and to do that I have to read the book repeatedly. And this one is bleak. Almost nihilistic. But at the same time, it is a deeply clever book, and compelling in its exploration of how people behave in the most extreme of situations.

The UK cover to The Ark by Haruo Yuki. It shows an underground passage with a ladder to the right side, rising water, and the title reading top to bottom.

I think this one will appeal particularly to hard-core mystery fans. It comes out February 12, 2026 from Pushkin Vintage Press.

And later that month comes the long awaited Strange Buildings by Uketsu. This is his third novel, and the follow-up to Strange Houses. It is an entirely new story, but once again features “The Author” and Kurihara looking into secrets hidden within floor plans. This time, the chilling mystery spreads across Japan and goes into some of the darkest places imaginable.

It really feels like a bit step up for Uketsu as an author. More ambitious, more confident, and more skillful. If you liked either of his other books, you will LOVE Strange Buildings. But do be warned: it includes frank discussion of the exploitation of women and children, and heartbreaking descriptions of child abuse.

The UK cover for Strange Buildings bu Uketsu.
A yellow background holds a crude house cutaway including many pictures of scary things, like a figure in a barred window, and a bloody knife.

Strange Buildings comes out February 26, 2026 from Pushkin Press in the UK and March 3, 2026 from HarperVia in the US.

And, of course, I have not been sitting idle in the meantime. I have two more translations underway, with another two in contract negotiations. Keep your eye on this blog for updates!

Book Review – Olyoke

Olyoke, by Vincent Endwell. Coming in March 2026.

The cover to Olyoke by Vincent Endwell. It shows a landscape with a distant town and amusement park amid green hills. In the foreground, an amorphous figure that is vaguely human floats in the sky.

This was another ARC from Tenebrous Press, which is doing lots of cool things with horror in the weird mode. Many of the books they put out fall outside my personal taste zone, but I always appreciate the creativity and drive behind them. But this one fell well within that zone.

I am going to struggle to summarize this one because it is… Nebulous. I think it qualifies as a collection of short stories, but all of the stories fit together to create a much bigger story, which is probably why Tenebrous lists it as a novel on the website. The stories are, or the novel is, all set in and talk about the town of Olyoke, built on a swamp in Tennessee, but the Tennessee is arguably not the one we know. Because things happen in Olyoke that do not happen in our world, and no one really seems to question that.

The swamp is full of gray-eyed worms and gray-eyed people who have lived there since long before. Ghosts of people who never died haunt the religious/music theme park. The men who drained swampland to build the town vanished in the night or went mad because they drank the water flowing from a mysterious girl trapped in a tree. And people in the town dream of other worlds where they have other faces, and an approaching cataclysm that is either a cleansing flame or an unstoppable titan was foretold by one of several prophets who founded cults in the town.

It is all capital-w Weird.

And it is not just the subject matter that dodges easy grasp. The way Endwell approaches the writing is squirmy, too. Things are simply left unexplained, such as who the hell “Holly” is, the subject of the theme park that dominates the town’s center. Or why the town is overrun by red-frogs, which also seem to carry a plague?

Then there is the language use. Endwell approaches language in a not-too-unusual manner, except for the (very “now”) flexibility of pronoun use, which comes across at first as quite gender-aware until you meet someone who goes by “it” who might, actually, not be a someone?

Now, I will say that things come together. There are lots of unanswered questions but they are of the sort that really don’t need answers. And the ending, as such, does not leave the reader dissatisfied so much as… In a state of wonder. Dazed, even. Because this collection, or novel, or whatever it is seems to be swirling somewhere above mere storytelling, much as the figure on the cover swirls above the world.

This was a fascinating book. An eminently readable book. And, dare I say, an enjoyable one, if a bit outre. For those who look for stories that avoid pat explanations and neatly tied-up ends, this is definitely one worth pre-ordering.