Recently I announced the release of my latest ebook, “Tales of the Disturbed”, a collection of short stories I have translated from the classic Japanese author Yoshio Toyoshima (豊島与志雄).
As part of the editing process I was reading parts of the stories out loud, and after doing this for a while I realized that it might be fun to try and record a voice narration myself for one of the stories.
I picked “The Allure”, the first story in the book (as well as my personal favorite), and decided to record myself narrating the first page or so and make a Youtube video of the result, which you can see here.
While I consider myself to have a lot of experience with Japanese and doing fiction translations, this is the first time I’ve done any serious voice narration where I have actually recorded the result (I’m not counting reading to my son at bedtime).
To try to improve the quality I bought a reasonably good microphone and even looked up some hints for improving my voice narration skills. I also listened to some professional voice narration of fiction.
Having said that, I think the result is far from professional and could still use some work. If you have any suggestions or feedback please feel free to write a comment on this article, or email me at selftaughtjapanese (at) gmail.com.
While one of the main purposes of this exercise was to give a little free content for those who are interested in the book (in a way that is arguably easier than downloading the free sample from Amazon), if there is enough interest in a full audio book I would consider making one––though I can’t say whether it would be personally me doing all the stories or whether I would try to hire someone else. From what I’ve heard, it’s pretty expensive to get an audio book made.
I don’t want to give away the story too much, but I’ll just say it is about a mysterious man who not only “disturbs” the main character to no end, but also has a special “ability” that alters the very nature of reality.
I hope you enjoy it!