Social media is a dumpster fire. BlueSky is increasingly anxiety inducing. Facebook is essentially hell on earth. Mastodon is OK but the social fractures are really something else.
So, I’m trying to spend more time posting here instead of there. And putting up more photos, too—See my revamped page here—because what’s the point if no one sees them? I’ll still use the autopost feature on BlueSky and Mastodon so people can find me, I guess. And some interactions still can’t be replaced so I’m not going cold turkey.
And I also want to follow more interesting blogs via RSS. So, while you’re here, throw me some good ones to follow. I’m into books (reading, writing, and analyzing), photography, horror, philosophy, folklore, and sometimes random stuff that surprises even me. Comment me, baby. Let me know what you’re reading! And if you’ve got a blog, give me that sweet, sweet RSS feed.
I pre-ordered Neil McRobert‘s Good Boy from Wild Hunt Books and apparently they take the “pre” part very seriously, because I got it quite a while before it was officially published.
The cover to Good Boy by Neil McRobert.
I’ve been a fan of McRobert’s horror-focused podcast, Talking Scared, for a while now and one of the biggest reasons is the host’s sincere passion for his subject. He matches it with insight and damned good questions to create simply one of the best interview shows around.
So, when he announced he was finally taking the plunge into authorship, I was there for it.
I am pleased to say that it was the right choice.
Good Boy is a novella/short novel about a man and his dog who team up to keep a small northern English village safe from an ancient evil that feeds on local children. There are obvious touches of classic Stephen King, especially It but also a touch of non-horror work like The Body, but the voice is pure McRobert and above all, it is so obviously rooted in love.
I cannot overstate what a relief that is. Horror as a genre is going through what they call a “moment,” with a flood of lauded authors and works getting big all over the place. But a major element of that is a glut of stories centered around trauma and grief. Not simply in the the obvious way—horror has always been about people experiencing traumatic events—but in ways that center traumatized people experiencing horrific events that seem to grow from that trauma. This is a perfectly fine trope, but as it becomes dominant I find myself wondering, what about people who are live their lives without being haunted by the gaping spiritual holes of lost children/horrific accidents/guilt over terrible mistakes etc.? Don’t they get horror stories anymore? Isn’t there some other emotion we can ground our stories in besides grief?
Of course there is, as McRobert shows us. Love is also a fundamental part of the human condition, and it can also serve as a foundation for horror stories. This is a story about love saving people, despite the frustrations and stresses and doubts that assail all our choices, even when made out of love and the desire to do good. And it feels so genuine. Anyone who listens to Talking Scared knows how much McRobert loves his dog, Ted, and the honesty of that emotion comes through crystal clear in the work.
And the horror is still real. The antagonist in Good Boy is a nasty thing indeed, and well worth Jim, the protagonist, making the difficult choices he does.
I read Good Boy in a single sitting and enjoyed every last page of it. Thanks for bringing the love back to horror, Neil.
Despite the risk of getting a little bit too personal, I’ve been feeling kind of lonely lately. Lately being, like, the past five years. Maybe even ten? I don’t know. I’ve lived in Japan, in a relatively small city, for over two decades. The difficulties of socializing as an adult have been compounded by my basic nature as an eternal outsider in Japan and by the fact that I’ve not had an office/company job since 2015.
So, to combat the increasing isolation, I’ve been trying to get out more. I joined a photo club, took Aikido classes (which didn’t work out), started going to book club meetings, and attending more events. But an underlying and ongoing issue is, even when I meet people with similar interests, like books and photography, I’m not really meeting a lot of people who feel the same way about those particular things.
Kotoda Mana “translates” alien poetry into Japanese.
I am more than willing to admit it’s a “me” issue. I’m increasingly hard-headed as I age, and less open to entertaining nonsense. It’s hard to open myself up.
The salespeople at Bungaku Free Market are enthusiastic, to say the least.
So, that’s what I tried to do last weekend. I went to the Bungaku Free Market, a roaming event for people who make books—primarily private, self-published, homemade dojinshi stuff—and other art to sell directly to customers in a communal space. I went to meet passionate creators. I went to talk to people who probably don’t think like I do. And I just went to be around books and other book lovers, because I have been one for as long as I can remember.
It was great. Lots of people with lots of interests just bathing in an atmosphere of passion for creating. I talked to people who I never would have ever met otherwise. I saw books I never would have picked up otherwise. And I let myself just get into it. I bought things and discussed things and took pictures that made me nervous.
And I came home with some stuff that I’m really looking forward to reading.
The treasures I brought home.
I think a opening myself up a bit more is going to take some time, but book events certainly seem to be a relatively painless way to practice. I just wish there were more of them around here!
It has been a couple of months since Strange Houses, Uketsu’s debut novel in Japan and second in English translation, came out in both the US and UK. I figure it’s about time to address some of the particular issues translating this one, given that people have probably had a chance to read it.
The UK cover of Strange Houses by Uketsu.
Just to warn you, this is not a spoiler free effort. I won’t go out of the way to include hidden details, but I’m going to go where I’m led.
So.
To recap a bit, I first encountered Uketsu as a YouTuber. My wife became a fan during the height of the pandemic and introduced me in 2022. I shared her interest, but being more interested in books than videos, I was pleased to see that he was also publishing books. Strange Houses actually began from a long-form video and a simultaneous story published on the fiction site Omokoro. An editor at the publisher Asuka Shinsha then reached out to Uketsu and said it would make a great novel if expanded. The existing story became the first chapter of the novel, and I think this helps explains some of the roughness that people might notice in Strange Houses as a whole. Don’t get me wrong, I love the mood and characters it introduces, but in terms of storytelling it is a little loose. And the ending is… Eh. It has its flaws, though I honestly believe the charms outweigh them.
That story is about a friend reaching out to Uketsu about an odd house he was thinking of buying. Poking into the house’s design, Uketsu’s other friend, Kurihara, speculated that the house had been designed for the purpose of murdering and dismembering people. The original friend ended up not buying the house because a dismembered body was discovered in a nearby wooded area and it just felt like a bad omen.
Now, here is where we get to the “translation issue.” In the original publication, that first dead body—the dismembered body missing its left hand, which becomes a significant plot point as other bodies missing hands are discovered—is never mentioned again. The conclusion seems to wrap up all kinds of plot points, but no one even says “Hey, what about that one guy.”
The English editor and I were both rather nonplussed by that. It seemed a rather significant plot point, indeed the instigating incident for the whole book, to just let fade into nothing.
We reached out to Uketsu about this, and about the possibility of adding something, even some simple comment like “It’s crazy that the first body was just a coincidence” so it didn’t feel like people just forgot about a whole dismembered body.
His response was initial surprise, since, as he said. “In the two years since publication not a single person has even asked about that.” But then he said that there was a new mass market paperback edition (or bunkoban) coming out in Japan with a new Afterword “by Kurihara,” which added some doubts and twists to the story as recounted by the fictional Uketsu. Real world Uketsu proposed both adding the Afterword to the English version and making some adjustments that would incorporate the initial body into the doubts Kurihara expressed, which was both a rather neat solution to our doubts and a very cool idea in general.
What this also means is that the English version of Strange Houses is in a very real way a different story from either version in Japanese—and I want to emphasize, it was made so by Uketsu himself. This wasn’t some rogue decision by the editor and I.
I think this should tell you something about the “literary” translation process. On top of cultural/linguistic issues, translators are some of the closest readers you’ll ever find. We dig deep, deep, deep into the stories we translate because, honestly, most of us are terrified of missing something important. We get confused. Sometimes it’s because we do miss things. Sometimes it’s because the author missed something. And sometimes it’s because of a gap in values, world-view, or cultural assumptions. And that’s where we, as translators, start to dig and clarify so we can ensure that the readers of the translated story have the best experience possible.
It also speaks to the role of editors. I think many people assume that in publishing, the author is some kind of towering, monolithic talent whose words are inviolate. It just isn’t true. Editors have enormous power to shape a story and even an author’s voice, and almost always for the better. You think it’s a coincidence that F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway all just happened to be discovered by the same editor? Look up Maxwell Perkins. It is an edifying example of how editors can influence literary output. The same is true of translation, perhaps even more so. See my review of Who We’re Reading when we Read Haruki Murakami for more on that.
So, yeah, it turns out that published stories are far more collaborative than is often believed. That’s not a bad thing! It makes the experience better for readers, if a bit stressful for writers…
Jim Rion - Translator & Writer 