A Lot’s In A Name

My name is Jimmy Dean Rion. That’s what’s on my birth certificate. It’s official. Written in stone. Of course, in daily life, I made the common American choice to use a short form. Jim. Jim Rion. Nice to meet you. (By the way, if you google “Jim Rion,” there are really only two that come up: Me and my cousin, who is a pastor at a Texas mega-church.)

Jimmy Dean Rion does not strike me as a particularly difficult-to-read name for an American, at first glance. Sure, “Jimmy” as a legal name is a bit unusual. And the spelling of my last name isn’t super common. But it’s all of five syllables. No apostrophes. No extended consonant clusters. Nothing that, in my opinion, should give the average native English speaker pronunciation trouble.

Oddly, even with such an apparently simple name, has been shockingly difficult for so, SO many people all my life that I just don’t even know what to think about it.

The most common problem is pronouncing my last name, which, OK. I could see people assuming (wrongly) it might sound like the French, /rii-ON/. But I’ve had people read it /rein/ or even /roon/.

It’s /RAI-on/. Like “lion” but with an “r.” Like the common Irish name Ryan.

Oddly, my first name has also been an odd source of confusion. My high school principal refused, point blank, to believe my real name was “Jimmy” and not only called me “James,” he wrote it on official certificates. Which is incredibly frustrating because there are points in life when official high school documents are actually important.

Luckily, I left all that behind when I went to college.

But then I came to Japan. HOO BOY has my name been a pain in the ass since then.

First, to give some background to those who don’t know: Japanese name order is Family name – Given name. Which is the reverse of English speaking countries overall. Also, Japanese people do not traditionally have middle names, so official documentation doesn’t have space for them.

When I came to Japan, I did so under the wing of a large English-language education company. My official documentation was all done under their auspices, and they didn’t ask my input. Which, fair enough, I knew nothing about how Japanese bureaucracy worked nor did I read or write the language. But they messed up when they did it.

Somehow, in the official government systems that dictate my insurance, residence cards, etc., my name became Family name: Jimmy Dean, Given name: Rion.

Also, they decided the katakana spelling of ライオン /raion/ which is, honestly, what I would have done but for Japanese people sounds like a fake name because it’s how they write the name of the animal, lion. My wife wishes it was ライアン /raian/ which is usually how Ryan is transliterated. A fair point.

Anyway, I was able to somewhat remedy this order issue by registering the correct order as an alias (something government offices make oddly easy here) so for later documents, like my driver’s license, I can use the correct order.

Because it IS the correct order in Japan. Rion Jimmy Dean is OBVIOUSLY the correct order when living and working in Japan. I know there are those who think that names are some kind of monolith that should never be adapted to fit any context, but to those I say: My wife took my name when we married. Do you think her name should be Jimmy Dean T— ? OF COURSE NOT. We are the Rion family. Family name is family name, regardless of whether it comes first or second.

And so, I use ライオン　ジミー /raion jimii/ in all my Japanese correspondence.

Which brings us to what instigated this little rant. My translation of Strange Pictures has made the shortlist for the UK Crime Writers Association Dagger awards for Crime Fiction in Translation. This has become a big deal, to the point that the Asahi Shimbun newspaper printed an article about it… And in that article, called me ジム・リオン /jimu riion/.

On the one hand, it’s how someone might well assume it is written in Japanese just by looking at my name. But on the other hand, a professional journalist for a major newspaper didn’t even TRY to check. No emails, no reading my company website (which lists my name in Japanese). They just winged it. Which is lazy journalism. (NOTE: the article has been corrected and the reporter apologized, so all is OK now.)

Oh, and by the way, yes. Strange Pictures is shortlisted for a Dagger!

The UK cover to Strange Pictures by Uketsu. It looks like a stylized bento box with a piece of octopus tentacle sushi dripping blood, along with the book and author's name in English and in Japanese. — The Strange Pictures UK cover.

The results will be announced July 2. It’s a very tight list, so who knows what the chances are, but it’s quite exciting to see my work being so well-regarded.

Strange Maps – State of the Translation

I am increasingly fielding questions about the fourth Uketsu book, tentatively titled Strange Maps in English, so I figured I should put up some kind of fixed point of reference.

So, here it is:

As of today, 6 May 2026, the current state of Strange Maps is “in editing.”

The initial translation was completed in April. The first round of edits is underway. Next steps are: correction, copyedits, then proofreading. Then comes the US version edit. Each of these take at least a month, sometimes longer.

Then there are the publishers’ business schedules, which of course influence release dates.

So, there is no announced release date yet. I do not know any more than you do on that front.

I can guess that it will probably be next spring, given past releases, although this winter is a possibility.

For release dates, keep an eye on the Pushkin Vertigo site (although Amazon has been known to beat the official announcement…). The US release date will likely be around the same time, but for confirmation check the HarperVia site.

So, I am sorry to keep you waiting, but thank you for your patience. The strange journey will continue!

Listen to me talk!

The Japan Association of Translators Book special interest group has invited me to speak online about my budding career as a literary translator and my work translating Uketsu.

I plan to lay out how I got started on this path, the luck behind the Uketsu translations, and perhaps find some advice for those looking to get into the game themselves.

The schedule is April 18th from 3:00-4:30, Japan time. It’ll be on Zoom.

You can get the details and tickets here:

A Strange Turn of Events

I look forward to seeing lots of folks there!

Strange Translations

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.

A gray cover with red line drawings of building plans. It has a picture of Uketsu in one corner. — 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!

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.