I seem to have become known as “Uketsu’s English translator,” which is certainly not a bad thing to be. But it does mean I get quite a lot of questions about the works, some of which I can’t even answer. Like, no, I don’t know how Uketsu got his ideas. No, I haven’t seen under his mask.
The Japanese cover to Henna Ie 2, coming soon in English as Strange Buildings.
But some questions, I can answer. And the most common of those is: Are you translating more Uketsu?
The answer? Yes, yes I am.
Uketsu currently has four books in print. Henna Ie (Strange Houses), Henna E (Strange Pictures), Henna Ie 2 (Strange Houses 2), and Henna Chizu (Strange Maps). Obviously, the first two are out and selling like hotcakes.
Henna Ie 2 is currently in editing and is scheduled for release in February 2026 under the title Strange Buildings. It’s quite an ambitious book that takes the core idea of Strange Houses in totally wild new places. It is also extremely dark, and there are some disturbing elements that are a departure from the first two books.
Henna Chizu was just released in Japan and the plan is certainly in place, but work hasn’t started yet. I have read the book, though, and it strikes me as the closest to a conventional “mystery” of all Uketsu’s work. It’s kind of a Kurihara memoir, talking about a puzzle in his family history, and he gets to play the great detective, solving not only his own family mystery but a couple of other murders. It should be a fun one to translate, with a very neat little trick. It also delves into Kurihara as a character and makes him quite human.
So, yes, there are more strange Uketsu books coming in English. I hope you all enjoy!
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…
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.
There’s this… I suppose “content creator” is the right term, though I hate it, in Japan called Uketsu. Uketsu is a mystery. He (it seems they’re a he, or at least the agencies involved have confirmed that for international sales purposes) writes articles for websites, creates narrative and music videos on YouTube, and publishes books, all in this very strange overlap of creepy, humorous, and cute. Uketsu appears in a black body suit and white mask, and uses a voice changer set to a rather cute, high pitched tone.
My first hint that Uketsu should be a “he.” Internet Writing Man…
My wife started out watching the videos in late 2021, I think, and got me hooked. Then I found the articles, and soon came the books, and my translator sense started tingling. I wanted to bring this very odd, very unusual ouevre to English audiences, and I thought it would sell. So, around the end of 2022, I put together a little sample of the debut book Strange Houses (変な家) and author intro for Pushkin Vertigo, with whom I had just finished working on Seishi Yokomizo’s The Devil’s Flute Murders (available now wherever you buy your books!). I sent it—as well as my strong personal recommendation to get on this very new, very original author—to Daniel Seton, the editor I’d worked with on that previous book. I made sure to mention my belief that, while Strange Houses was a fascinating book, Uketu’s second Strange Pictures 変な絵, was perhaps a more solidly structured, more confident work. Pushkin started doing their whole thing.
The video that started things off, Strange Houses 変は家, with English subtitles.
I’ve only seen the process from the outside, so I can’t say exactly how it works. I’m assuming there was some kind of internal meeting and review process, and they probably asked someone else to read the books and give impressions. I know for sure that last does happen because I’ve done it for other works. Anyway, sometime in the spring of 2023, Pushkin told me that they had made a successful offer on Uketu’s two books (these have since been announced officially, so I think I’m safe to say that much) and Daniel asked if I would be available to translate them.
Of course, of course, of course.
At that point, it was simply a happy outcome. I had set my sights on getting a project through, and it had been successful. I could get about my work as a translator, like I had so many times before.
Then, things began to change. It started to feel like this was going to be a big deal.
Earlier this year, right around when I finished the initial draft for Strange Pictures—which Pushkin (rightly, in my opinion) decided to release first, despite it technically being Uketsu’s second book—I heard that the author had become “the” hot topic at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, the largest international book event in the world. Someone from a major international author agency contacted me because they were handling international rights for all the languages except English (since Pushkin had beaten everyone else to the punch on that…) and wanted my help putting together PR material. Pushkin asked me for quotes to use in their press releases and promotional materials.
I’d never experienced that sense of being “plugged in” with anything before. My previous translations for publication had been much more subdued, even with the Yokomizo book. It’s all very unexpected, and I don’t know what might be coming next. There’s this silly little part of me that’s like, “Movie deal when? Netflix series next?” but of course, I’m just the translator. None of that has anything to do with me.
Still.
It feels new. It feels exciting to be part of a thing that makes a splash. I’m glad I could help share Uketsu’s very weird but very fun work with a broader audience and I hope it brings him more well deserved success. Whatever comes, I think it’s OK to feel a bit of pride that I helped get Pushkin and Uketsu together before anyone else.
When the time comes, I plan to post something a bit more detailed about the books as they come out, but for now, take this as an announcement, too. Strange Pictures is scheduled for release in January 2025 from Pushkin Vintage, translation by me. Jim Rion. Strange Houses will follow. Both have also been sub-licensed to an American publisher, but I don’t know their schedule.
Jim Rion - Translator & Writer 