Tag: Honkaku Mystery

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.

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!