Translating Strange Houses

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. It is a pink-colored house layout against a blue background. Inside the house diagram is a bloody meat cleaver, a severed hand, and the caption "The chilling Japanese mystery sensation." It also has the Japanese title. — 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…

A Tale of Two Horror Movies

Much like (from what I hear) the English speaking world, Japan is having a bit of a horror “moment.” In print and on the screen, what has always been a pretty solid side-branch of the entertainment mix has begun to blossom into something bigger and more mainstream. We can point to new authors like Uketsu or Nashi, and older ones bringing out new work like Koji Suzuki’s new novel Ubiquitous, as signifiers in the publishing world. On screens, though, I think the most interesting examples are to be found in shorts, like the YouTube creepfest My house walk-through or (hands down my favorite horror shorts) Fake Documentary Q.

I am not a scholar of the cinema or Japanese horror or anything, but I do keep my eyes open, and I stumbled on a collection of horror shorts on Amazon that were apparently all entrants in a biennial competition sponsored by Kadokawa, the Japan Horror Film Competition. I watched, and there were some real bangers in there, including one called みなに幸あれ/Best Wishes to All. Lo and behold, I later saw a full feature length version with the same name—Ah! I realized. The winner of that competition got their short made into a full-length feature film!

And it was well worth doing. Best Wishes to All—which apparently now has an English release—was a creepy, surreal, original, and ambitious movie. Excellent acting, excellent screenplay, the whole shebang. It also presented an approach to horror that stood outside the usual ghosts and curses of “J-horror” with the kind of social edge that makes good horror great.

The story, essentially, is about a young nurse in Tokyo going home to visit her grandparents in the countryside and discovering a dark secret–one that redefines her entire understanding of life and the world. It also touches on how Japan’s young people are almost seen as fodder for older generations’ expanding lifespans, and the sacrifices of some that society demands for happiness for others. And also, it has old people acting like pigs. Pretty wild.

And when I saw that the second contest collection was out, *and* that the winner movie was also coming, I was hopeful indeed! Shorts were clearly fertile ground for original horror, and Kadokawa et al. were throwing money at it, so I was eager for more. The winner of that round, and the film that came from it, was ミッシング・チャイルド・ヴィデオテープ/Missing Child Videotape.

I think I’m not alone in the eagerness I felt for this one. It seemed to combine some of the same ambition and originality that BWtA had with beloved tropes of cursed videos, haunted mountainsides, and family trauma. The short was a quiet, brooding story with a hefty dose of chilling menace.

The feature film, though… Well, that was something else. I should say here that, while I’m not planning to out-and-out spoil the story, I will be looking at elements that might end up ruining the movie for you. So, if you are hoping to watch Missing Child Videotape—or Best Wishes to All, for that matter—save this to read for later. And watch the latter IMMEDIATELY.

So. Just like the short, Missing Child Videotape is about two young friends, Keita (Kyosuke in the shot) and Tsukasa (Hiromu in the short). Keita gets a package from home which includes a VCR tape. It is one he made as a child, when out playing with his younger brother. The two boys stumble on some vaguely industrial looking abandoned building and play hide-and-seek. The younger brother goes to hide, despite his fear, and is never seen again. The child is, well, missing.

Tsukasa is apparently a “spiritual sensitive” and can see ghosts. He reacts strongly to the tape… Oh! It must be cursed.

Soon after, the film truly diverges from the short. They both deal with the emotional trauma of a lost child and brother, but while the short is all about suggestion and menace and dread, the film veers toward folk horror and weird mountain towns and a reporter running from ghosts… With a dose of time loops and places that don’t exist… Well. Lots of stuff. It never goes wacky with it. It always maintains its slow, heavy, almost emotionless tone. But honestly, from a purely plot-based perspective, it shares more with Shiraishi’s Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! series than with its spiritual companion, Best Wishes to All.

Let’s just say, I have problems with the movie version of MCV. It tries to be too many things and fails at most of them. It takes the “unexplained” much too far, such that it becomes almost nonsensical. Individual elements are fascinating and worth exploring, but they are left behind to fade into background noise, and rather than leaving the fear of the unknown, they left me with the dissatisfaction of the seemingly unconnected. I mean, there was this whole story about how the mountain was a garbage heap for kami that basically went unmentioned for the rest of the movie?! Come on! And the reporter was running from some kind of ghost. Why? Who is she, actually? What is she muttering under her breath when she’s scared? Why is she essentially set dressing most of the time?

I can only assume that the demands of turning a twenty-minute short into a 100-minute feature put too much pressure on the story, and the production team struggled to find effective filler. So, the end result feels like they just started throwing things at it to see what stuck.

Meanwhile, Best Wishes to All seems to avoid that pitfall by taking some of the surreality of the short and leaning into it. Even as it sometimes borders on the absurd, it’s an absurdity that remains rooted in the qualities that made the short work so well, creating a kind of incomprehensible view of reality that is as confounding for the protagonist as for the audience. In expanding the short, the filmmakers preserved its essential nature, just writ large.

Anyway, what does all this signify? I think what I’m getting at is, the value of the horror short today is clearly difficult to translate to long form media, but not impossibly so. I just hope that the pressures of making bigger budget, larger-scale works don’t harm get in the way of the vibrance of the smaller scale scene.

Strange Houses is Out Today in the US

The cover of the US edition of Strange Houses by Uketsu. It is salmon colored with an image of a house floor plan. In the bottom right corner is a picture of the author, Uketsu, wearing a white mask. In the bottom left it reads "Translated by Jim Rion." — The US edition of Strange Houses from HarperVia.

June 3rd is the official release date for the US edition. It is June 3rd in Japan, so I’ll go ahead and announce it now, but your time zone might demand you wait a bit. Apparently the UK pub date has been listed as July 3rd? That strikes me as odd… Anyway.

Confusingly, the original Henna Ie was Uketsu’s debut work in Japan, while Henna E was his second. Anyway, both are now out in English and I hope people like this new addition. I have mentioned this before but I feel like Strange Pictures is a better written, better structured novel, which is natural as Strange Houses is a debut work written as an extension of a short video (basically the first chapter of the book) at the behest of a publisher.

Still, I really like this one. There is such creepiness in it, such oddness, that I find myself drawn back to it sometimes.

I’ll write something a bit more in depth about the translation process later, when people have had a chance to read it, but for now, just know this is a shorter work, with a weirder climax, than Strange Pictures, and worth investigating for people who like dark, bloody secrets and weird family histories.

If you’d like to buy this one, here’s a UK link (releasing July 3rd. WEIRD): Strange Houses on Blackwell’s

And here’s a US link: Strange Houses on Bookshop.org

Book Review – 6 by Nashi

The cover of the book 6 by Nashi. It is in Japanese, and features a white base with many figures like mannequins falling through space.
In the background you can just glimpse the pink face of the video game character Kirby. — Kirby likes this book.

As I become more and more a “literary” translator, I find myself beginning to approach reading as a professional duty, even as I remain steadfastly fixated on choosing books that I think will actually be interesting. This book, a collection of horror stories by a single author, was solidly on both sides of that equation. Japan is in the middle of a bit of a horror story boom, due in no small part to Uketsu’s success, and given my own connection to Uketsu now, I’m kind of in a horror boom, too. With publishers on both sides of the Pacific now plumbing the genre for the Next Big Thing, I am trying to keep up myself to see if I can spot something interesting.

Nashi is an author often associated with Uketsu in the media, it seems, along with Sesuji. One reason might be that they all use pseudonyms with seemingly random meanings. Nashi uses the Japanese character for “pear,” 梨, although there is a stated nod to another character with the same pronunciation, 無し, which means “nothing.” Which would be suitably “horror-esque” on its own, but having read 6, I wonder if there isn’t some other meaning.

This anthology is, in its own way, utterly unique while also being part of a tradition of literature that goes back basically as far as literate goes. In short, it is religious allegory as entertainment fiction. Yes, this thin tome of horror stories follows in the footsteps of Milton and, um, C. S. Lewis? Anyway.

Let’s pull back a minute. 6 comprises six stories, of course. They appear, at first, unconnected, but much like other recent horror hits, there are threads that join them that only become clear as you read further. The story names are all in the Roman alphabet, and contain hints to both their individual content and to the larger meaning of the book. The stories are ROOFy, FIVE by five, FOURierists, THREE times three, TWOnk, and ONE [sic, sic, sic after sic]. Now, I would say the pattern is clear except for ROOFy, which I can’t for the life of me connect to “six.” Even in Japanese, it would be roku or ro. But hey, the world is a flexible place.

ROOFy is a nightmare fairy tale, a story in the first person about a young girl who visits a little amusement park on the rooftop of a department store. She wishes she could play there forever without all the other people in the way and, when she comes out of the bathroom, it seems her wish has come true. Her parents are gone, as are all the other children. She has the park to herself… But then it begins to change. It is filled with decay and corruption, and… Well, no spoilers.

FIVE by five presents the story of a magazine writer who disappears and leaves behind stories with odd changes, and the editor who is tracking the reporter’s steps to see what might have happened to him. His investigation takes him to a mountain town with odd stone towers bearing metal antennae along the road, and glimpses of an eerie truth.

As the other stories progress, we find more connections to this disappeared writer and the impact on the editor, but what comes even more clear is something… Other. Because these aren’t just horror stories skirting around the pseudo-documentary style that has grown so common now. They are clear, open Buddhist allegory. The six stories address the Six Realms of Samsara: the realm of gods, the realm of demigods (or asura), the realm of humans, the realm of animals, the realm of hungry ghosts, and the realm of hell. It is a trip through the realms, woven with a story about an impossible death (really. Not, like, in the mystery sense), and a break in the order of the universe. The stories themselves openly mention Samsara and the six realms, so the allegory is pretty on the nose, but for someone who grew up outside the Buddhist tradition, it’s fascinatingly unfamiliar ground.

It is, in other words, heavy, heady stuff. It is also properly “horror” in the traditional sense, but the way this book haunts me is not in the scary stuff. No, it’s the way it presents an almost nihilistic (nihil meaning, of course, “nothing”, which is also one way of understanding liberation from worldly desires in Buddhism, or becoming “Nothing”—See?) view of the Buddhist cosmology. Because the core of Buddhist belief is freedom from the wheel of samsara, of escape from eternal rebirth in a cycle of suffering, but this story offers a counterpoint: a way of escape that breaks the wheel itself, upsetting the order and questioning the very possibility of liberation.

It deserves reading, in my opinion, and is worth it for both horror seekers and those interested in meatier, chewier problems like “What does living even mean if death is not just inevitable, it is inevitable an infinite number of times?”

I’m feeling like this isn’t so much a review as me just meandering about the book. But I am glad I read it, and I will read it again, and it was pretty creepy and chilling in parts, so I think it’s a recommendation for those who like reading that sort of thing. Maybe I’ll even try to see if someone wants to pay for it to be translated?

Translating Strange Pictures

Strange Pictures, my translation of 変な絵 by Uketsu, was published January 16 in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The two versions are the same translation but tweaked for local audiences a bit. Interestingly, the UK version is being marketed as a mystery, while the US is leaning more towards horror. Both are perfectly correct, because Uketsu calls himself a horror writer while clearly using mystery styles and tropes in the books.

The UK cover for Strange Pictures from Pushkin Vertigo

With the release of this book a bit behind us, I’d like to discuss a couple of issues that I dealt with in the translation. Before we go on, let me just say that some of these are spoilery, so PLEASE. If you haven’t read the book yet, save this post for after that.

US cover for Strange Pictures from HarperVia

**Spoilers for Strange Pictures Ahead! You have been warned!**

The first tricky issue that comes to mind when I look back on translating Strange Pictures deals with the second chapter, centered on young Konno Yuta. Within the story, Yuta is learning to write his name in Japanese characters, “kanji,” for the first time. That stirs a memory of seeing his mother’s gravestone, and he starts to draw that gravestone, but changes his mind and converts it to a picture of the apartment building where he lives now with his grandmother—his “mama.” That picture starts out with a large rectangle in which he begins to draw his family name in Japanese: 今野. A fellow student later tells the teacher she saw him draw “A triangle inside a rectangle.” Looking at the first character, of course, you can see the triangle at the top.

Now, how do do all this in English? Well, I kept the Japanese. Indeed, since the reader doesn’t need to READ the Japanese, only see the shape of the character, it seemed obvious. Particularly since the child wrote his name in crayon on the picture, so it’s already evident to readers. I’m hoping that it doesn’t confuse anyone. But we shall see!

The second issue was, well, trickier. It involves the name of a blog that comes up in the very first chapter, and gets a call back at the end. The blog in Japanese is 七篠レン　こころの日記, Nanashi Ren kokoro no nikki. It translates to something like “Nanashi Ren’s Diary of the Heart.” The problem is the personal name: Nanashi Ren. This is both a pun, as “Nanashi” can also mean “No-name” AND it turns out very late in the book to be a little trick related to the core mystery.

The trick is complex and based on the fact that in Japanese, there are three writing systems. Kanji are Chinese characters, complex figures that can have both a meaning and a number of “readings,” meaning the pronunciation attached to them. Then there are hiragana, a phonetic system used to write out the readings of words, without the kanji there to carry extra meaning. Finally, there are katakana, a similar system to hiragana that is visually different and used for, well, various purposes to stand out from hiragana.

Hiragana themselves are made of up a few strokes that come together to form characters, but can also sometimes resemble other characters.

It works like this: In the original Japanese, the actual author of the blog is Konno Takeshi 今野武司、or こんのたけし in Hiragana. He creates a pseudonym by breaking the elements of those hiragana up into parts that resemble other hiragana or katakana, mixing them up, and making a new name to which he matches a kanji. There’s a diagram in the original that makes it easier to parse, but it’s super complex and OBVIOUSLY impossible to do in English.

I mean, to be honest, it barely works as a “trick” in Japanese. No one would ever figure it out without being told, because it’s just too complex and arbitrary. It also only fits part of the actual title in Japanese. It’s one of those things that seems incredibly clever after the fact, but nothing within the book itself could guide readers to it.

So, after hours, days, weeks of going back and forth over it, I finally decided with the editor at Pushkin, and Uketsu’s blessing, that we should just use an anagram. Then, having decided that, we couldn’t find any satisfactory anagram using Takeshi Konno. At which point, the editor at Harper Via chimed with with the idea of using some other Japanese name, and with Uketsu said OK. So, that’s how Nanashi Ren Kokoro no Nikki written by Konno Takeshi became Oh No, Not Raku! written by Haruto Konno.