A bit of a foot problem has cut down my walking range quite a bit, but I still managed to get out to the river yesterday afternoon to see the ducks flocking in. Mallards, Teal, Pintails, the gang’s all here. I also spotted a blue rock thrush for the first time this season, and my constant companion the kingfisher also made an appearance.
The Exes, by Leodora Darlington. Releasing Feb 3 2026 from Dutton.
I connected with Leodora Darlington a few months back through my translation work, and she recently asked me for a comment on her upcoming debut novel, The Exes.
I was surprised and honored by the request, my first ever such. I was also a little nervous, because I’ll be honest: I’m kind of an opinionated old guy and I have increasingly little patience for books that don’t grab me. I was a bit worried I’d have to diplomatically dodge the comment.
It turns out that I had no need to worry. This book was a blast.
The Exes is the story of Natalie—Nat—a young woman who has had a very troubled history with men: namely, all her exes end up dead under slightly shady circumstances.
Now, she’s met a new man with whom she really wants things to work out, despite her promise to herself and her estranged sister to never let her heart go again. As you might expect, things take some rather unhappy turns.
So, right off the bat, you think you see where this one is going, but really: you don’t. This book had more twists than a Chubby Checker album. More turns than a rally race. More surprises than a… You get it.
Yes, it’s a thriller, so you know people die and you will look for suspects and try to suss out what’s a red herring and what’s not, but this one kept the guessing fresh to the end. I think I remember at least three “Holy shit, really?” moments. The turns do tread a little close to the excessive at times, but everything is just so well structured that it keeps well within the “just go with it” safe zone.
There were two things about the writing that really stood out to me: the depth and reality of the main character Nat, and the way Darlington handled current social issues and trends (modern sexual politics, toxic masculinity, trauma as a driving force in fiction, etc) in a natural and smooth way.
Nat is a mess, but she’s trying, and the way she handles herself and the crazy shit that happens to her just works. She’s aware of her issues and how they exacerbate things. She works to deal with her weaknesses, and falters like all of us, but doesn’t give up or beat herself up when she does. She fights on through the self disappointment and fear and most importantly does not let her mistakes and her trauma define her future. It’s a refreshing way to handle the increasingly heavy reliance on protagonist psychology that is so common in literature today.
Similarly, Darlington deftly weaves in timely social observations in a way that keeps them from dominating the plot and also avoids any hyperspecificity that could date the story in the future.
For example, one of Nat’s exes was a red-pilled manosphere type. Rather than referencing easy identifiers like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate, who will one day surely die and fade into obscurity, Darlington just mentions, “[Nat] should have paid more attention to the podcasts he listened to.” A perfectly light touch to offer context without too much restriction.
I have to admit, it’s really hard to believe that this is a *debut novel.* The writing is so tight and smooth, the characters so alive, that it feels like an old hand was at the pen.
In the end, all I can say is that it was a great ride. Clever, fun, and yes, hard in places. There is grief and suffering and cruelty here, too, but also satisfaction. Loved it.
It releases next February, and I really think thriller fans are in for a treat.
As 2025 comes to a close and the retrospectives begin, I admit to being influenced to take a look back at how things have gone, and how they are going. One of the dominant topics in the entire translation industry is, of course, AI and its impact. But this post is not, specifically, about that. Rather, I am looking at a trend and just… Wondering. Because my career has changed *dramatically* in the last few years, and 2025 has been perhaps the biggest display of it.
I became a translator full time in 2016. From the beginning, I was a generalist in the sense that I was desperate. A full time career which had let me support my wife and still very young son had just run out its lifespan, and my given skills were such that, basically, words were all I had.
I took all kinds of work. Corporate websites, newspaper articles (for, ugh, right wing papers), tech manuals, restaurant menus, games, manga… Anything. The first year or two were pretty hectic as I learned about what I was and was not capable of handling. I also learned the basic arithmetic of rate setting (As described in this 2020 post) and by 2019 or so, my trajectory seemed a slow, stable upward growth. I was able to regularly raise rates and was earning enough that my wife could quit her job to manage the house and the business side (bank accounts, tax documents, etc.) of my translation. We even founded a company to make this simpler.
It was a very piecemeal kind of business, but it worked. It kept us solidly middle-class comfortable.
Then, well, things started to change. Let’s look at some numbers from my invoice records.
In 2022, I had 30 clients to whom I sent invoices. Some were big, some were small. Some new, some old. One thing to note is that from April of 2022, I raised my rate one whole yen across the board and immediately shed some translation broker/company clients. That was actually fine with me, because they were all lowball clients. 2022 is also the year I signed my first contract with Pushkin Vertigo, for The Devil’s Flute Murders.
Income ended up being higher than the previous year, as it had every year to that point since 2016.
In 2023, though, the number of clients I invoiced dropped to 12. 30, to 12. Again, though, my general level of income stayed relatively stable, even slightly higher than 2022. The explanation for this stability is that 1) I have a client that keeps me on “retainer” for checking work and pays a stable monthly income and 2) I got more Pushkin Vintage contracts. Novels do not pay a *lot* in general terms, but a couple of big payments, particularly in British pounds, really boost the bottom line. This is when we began working on Strange Pictures and Strange Houses, which have basically changed my life… But I didn’t know that then.
In 2024, the total client number fell to 11, with some older clients replaced by new ones in the publishing world—Japanese rights agencies and publishers, who heard my name after my role in the deal to get Uketsu published in English. So, again, fewer overall clients and individual jobs, but income has remained safe. I finished a couple of translations for Pushkin contracted in 2023, and signed one new contract. (Note: I get half an advance on signing the contract and half on turn in, so payments can get scattered across years.)
And then came 2025. I invoiced five clients in 2025, not counting Pushkin (for completing Strange Buildings). FIVE. One is Nippon.com, who sends me basically an article a week to translate and has done so for several years now. Another is the same client that keeps me on checking retainer and occasionally sends me translation work. And the other three are literary agencies/publishers asking for samples and synopses.
I’m currently waiting for two book translation contracts that will hopefully come in by the end of the year, but who knows? Publishing is a slow moving business, it seems.
Anyway, I think it is safe to say that my “generalist” translation career is dead and buried.
No more corporate websites, no more menus, no more sake breweries. All gone.
The work that kept my family housed and fed from 2016 to 2023 is no longer the work I am doing. It’s questionable if I would even call this the same career. I no longer have to keep on top of invoicing all the time, or fine-tune every schedule to see if I can fit another job in today, or keep a running list of all the different client contacts.
Now, if we are totally honest, it’s not all that missed. I like the actual jobs I get now basically across the board, which has not always been true. Hell, I get to work in publishing! Making books! How blessed am I? Young me would be ecstatic. But it also makes me nervous, because my current income is basically luck based. I mean, yeah, the book contracts are still coming in and Uketsu is selling like a house of hotcakes on fire and whatever other metaphors you want to throw in there, so thank GOD I get royalties. Also, I am getting contacted by new publishers about new projects. But if the market for Japanese lit in translation tanks next year, I’m cooked. (Please keep buying books in translation!)
Now, of course I wonder about the death of my generalist work. The drop is just so drastic, so clear and undeniable. The natural thing is to blame LLMs and corporate insistence on using them, leading to end clients leaning on the kinds of translators and translation companies that embrace the technology. I am not that kind of translator and make no secret of it. But it’s surely not the only reason. As I said above, I increase my rates regularly and that leads to client turnover. I also am in agreement with Chris Pearce on Bluesky that there is some inevitable influence on the demand for English due to the collapse of the United States as a desirable place to do business. So, for any given client, it’s hard to pin down the precise reason they’ve stopped sending me work.
They just, have.
And so we come to the future. Who knows what will happen? At the very least, I can count on a couple more books from Uketsu to sustain my family short term. Given the long turnaround and single, annual payment of royalties, if sales keep up they might even secure us until my son gets into college, which is pretty much my bare minimum ambition at this point. And maybe I’ll win the lottery again and find another international bestseller to translate. Wouldn’t that be a pisser?
I am not actually anxious about my career at this point, which is odd given how anxious I am about basically everything, all of the time. But good luck has got me this far, and I’m trusting in it for just a little while longer. I think the general abysmal state of the world is the greater concern, as far as anxiety goes.
But, yeah. Now that I look at it, it’s pretty extreme how much my job has changed this year. I am deeply grateful for the remaining clients I do have, and for the fact that I have income that is no longer dependent on “number of times I hit my keyboard per day.” I am so, so lucky. There’s really not much else to say.
I hope your luck, wherever you are out there needing it, also holds out.
The December sun was setting over the quiet inland sea as I walked alone along the river, slowly approaching the nearby mouth. I call it a river, but it’s more of a stream. Not even ten meters wide, a meter deep at most, rolling with reed-covered sandbars and clumps of trash washed down from the towns dotting its length. This town was the last of those, standing where the river flows into the sea.
Here, it met the beach and flowed over it in a winding curve that changed with every rainstorm as the sand shifted in its own fluid way. Above the beach, there was a massive plate of riveted steel on hydraulic pivots—a floodgate to block the river in case of tsunami or storm surge in the autumn typhoon season.
I visited this place nearly every day. The river mouth was a prime spot for birds, especially kingfishers. They streak over the water like flying jewels, all turquoise and sienna and keen eyes and sharp beaks. Too beautiful to be so common.
I approached slowly, not wanting to spook any birds that might be there, which was silly because the passing cars and bikes took no such pains. Still. It is always better to go slowly when seeking beauty.
It was late in the day, and the setting sunlight flowed heavy and golden over the calm river surface, like honey. There were two bridges near the gate, one a bit upstream for cars and a pedestrian bridge downstream just inside the floodgate, and the bridges framed a section of river like a painting.
I moved to the middle of the upstream bridge to watch a handful of eastern spot billed ducks approaching from under the gate. I took a few shots as they passed beneath me, then noticed the silhouettes.
Beyond the gate, the beach had encroached on the river mouth, leaving a long tongue of sand that nearly blocked it entirely. A narrow channel let the water out at one side, but the near-total blockage meant you could essentially walk across the whole width of the river. Someone was doing that now, I assumed, because though they were hidden by the far bridge and the gate, the sun revealed their shapes.
The sun approaching the distant horizon cast their wavering silhouettes on the golden water. Children, from the size and the way they seemed to take such glee in movement. Running, chasing, leaping, the ground they tread casting a pool of shadow to be their stage.
I focused and shot, trying to capture the frantic motion. I was mesmerized by the shimmering dark forms, their limbs stretching and fading into the wave-dancing light.
Soon, the children ran off along the beach. Their whoops and screams faded into the distance.
The light was fading by the moment as the sun sank lower. I took one more fruitless look around for birds, then decided to simply enjoy the play of darkening color across the water. But when I looked again, there was a single shadow there, standing, still.
The figure seemed to reach out. The distortion of the waves made it seem almost to be waving at me. Beckoning. Whoever it was had no way to even know I was there, of course. The gates and bridge blocked me, and I could cast no shadow. But, still, I was drawn.
I once more followed the river toward the sea, climbing a gentle slope up toward the stone and concrete walkway that lined the beach for most of its length. When I reached the top, and the sandbar came into sight, I saw no one. The sand was empty.
I looked to each side. No one in sight. No figures running, no children hiding. I descended from the walk toward the river and checked for any nooks or crannies along the gate where someone might hide. Nothing
Where could they have gone? No one had come past me on either side of the river. No one lurked in the shadow of the bridge.
But there had been someone.
I walked to the sand bar. It was pocked with footprints, a meaningless jumble left by who knew how many feet.
I stood where I thought the beckoning figure must have been. I looked toward the sea, where the sun was just beginning to edge the horizon. I turned back to the water. The patch of golden light was staining red in the dusk, and the pool of darkness at my feet grew upward, swallowing my legs. But, no. Not just mine. There were two silhouettes there. Mine and…
A still figure, dark on the water, stood to my right. Where I had walked just a moment ago. The warmth of the sun on my back could not dispel the chill that ran down my spine. The hairs on my neck stood tall. I was frozen in place, the camera hanging from my neck, my arms limp.
The dark figure on the water’s surface reached out. Toward me.
A cold hand slipped into mine as the sun finally sank and darkness spread upon the surface of the water.
It pulled me forward, and I found no resistance within me. Together, we stepped forward into the cold dark. It was deeper than it looked. Than it should have been.
But no. I opened my eyes to find I still stood on the sand, dry and alone. The sun had set, and the sky was masked in streaks of purple and scarlet. The water was dark and bare.
I began my way home along the dusk shrouded river and through streets now lit in islands of white light, but I could not help but feel that I no longer walked alone.
(Story and photographs © Jim Rion 2025. No unauthorized use or reproduction. No AI was used in the creation or editing or anything else of this work because AI is the devil. If you liked this, let me know. If not, don’t.)
In between all all various and sundry ways I find to use my time, I’ve recently been taken by the urge to write stories around pictures I’ve taken (in addition to the novel I’m still plugging away at. And the nonfiction book that still calls weakly for attention. Oh, and work. Work is still there, for the most part). It’s a fun little diversion, but then I find I’m kind of at a loss as to what to do with them. They end up short and, I dunno, kind of more like a mood piece than anything.
I suppose I could submit to one of the many flash fiction sites out there, but that entails a lot of details crap that, frankly, sounds like more trouble than it’s worth. I am what the Japanese call a mendokusagariya.
So I figure, what the hell, why not post them here? That way I can pair them with the pictures and not worry about waiting for acceptance dates and such. It’d be nice to get a bit of spending money for them, but that’s secondary. It’s just fun to write and be read.
In the coming days. Weeks? Months? I guess you can expect to see a bit of fiction work its way onto the blog. Not sure how it’ll go, but that’s part of the fun. Seeing how things work themselves out.
Hell, the only reason I’m taking the time to write this post is to halfway convince myself it’s worth it to even try. Kick the idea around and see if it doesn’t break apart under the tiniest bit of cognitive pressure.
No crumbling apparent yet, so I guess that’s a go for now.
Jim Rion - Translator & Writer 