Review – The Night That Finds Us All

I think I have to finally admit it. I’m a John Hornor Jacobs fan.

The first book of his I read was Southern Gods, a sweaty, gritty myth of music and cosmic horror that I think I picked up in a bundle not long after its 2011 release. I remember enjoying it, and when I revisited it in later years it’s held up.

But I didn’t really plug into him as a name to watch for until I read The Incorruptibles, his alternative history/dark fantasy book of an infernal-powered Roman Empire in the Old West that he into a trilogy.

Since, I’ve enjoyed all the books of his I’ve read (which is all of them but The Twelve-Fingered Boy trilogy), especially A Lush and Seething Hell. There is something about the weight of his prose that makes it feel rooted deep, in history and myth and humanity, while still just being fun.

And so we come to his 2025 ocean-going cosmic horror The Night That Finds Us All.

It’s about Sam Vineworth (known affectionately as Sam Vines, which I would have bet was a Discworld nod but would have lost, according to the author), an alcoholic fuckup but he’ll of a sailor, recruited by a friend to help crew a century-old sailing ship from California to Britain.

The ship is, of course, much more than it appears. It has a shadowed history with more than a bit of blood, and it soon starts to prey on the crew.

Once again, Jacobs brings unpretentious flourishes of near-poetry.

I found myself thinking this voracious ocean came before mankind’s puny endeavors and will remain after, in some near future, eroding the shores and drowning the land and taking all our works with us, dragging them down to the bladderwracked mansions beneath the sea.

The bladderwracked mansions beneath the sea. God, what an image. Or…

The sky kills all the sea’s dreams.

This masterful imagery is matched by what I can only a scholar’s depth of nautical knowledge. Mizzens and reef sails and knots… It’s all here, and I’m not sure I understood it but I also duct think not understanding hurt at all. Because nothing hinged on those details, they only added in establishing that Sam, drunken mess that she is, knows her shit on a boat.

But be not afraid, this isn’t Moby Dick, with page-long paragraphs and endless digressions on marine wildlife. It’s a journey into a dark, cursed netherworld that’s full of dread and scares.

Another banger, in other words.

Listen to me talk!

The Japan Association of Translators Book special interest group has invited me to speak online about my budding career as a literary translator and my work translating Uketsu.

I plan to lay out how I got started on this path, the luck behind the Uketsu translations, and perhaps find some advice for those looking to get into the game themselves.

The schedule is April 18th from 3:00-4:30, Japan time. It’ll be on Zoom.

You can get the details and tickets here:

A Strange Turn of Events

I look forward to seeing lots of folks there!

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.