Juza Unno (海野十三), born Sano Shouichi (佐野 昌一), is a Japanese author from the early 20th century who used his real-world technical knowledge and experience to write a great number of science fiction works, including novels and short stories.
This author holds a special place for me because not only were my first and last E-books to date translations of his works, but I was the first to publish this author in English (at least as far as I know). Being a big fan of dystopian novels, it was also greatly satisfying, and fun, to translate and publish his short novel “Eight O’ Clock Music Bath”, which I believe was one of the first Japanese dystopian novels.
I’m generally pretty bad at remembering birthdays, but Juza Unno’s is pretty easy to remember: December 26 (born 1897!).
While it’s still a few days early, before I forget I wanted to wish a happy birthday to Juza Unno, and also wish Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to all my readers (I may still do a year-in-summary type post, but we’ll see).
Since releasing my first two E-books of translations of this author’s works, I had kept the price to $2.99 due to how profit is shared through Amazon. However I’ve decided to reduce these books to $0.99 at least until the first week of January, and perhaps for the long term as well. Even if I technically will make a little less money this way, I’ll be happier if more people can experience what this great classic author has to offer.
I’m still toying with translating some more of Juza Unno’s stories (there is a lot out there!), but haven’t decided which. If you have any suggestions feel free to let me know. By the way, if you want to see some good background content about this author, check out this entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia.
While I haven’t published these books in parallel-translation format, you can find the original Japanese texts for all these stories on Aozora Bunko, so Japanese learners can use the books as a reference to check their understanding.
Update: I published a collection of Juza Unno’s stories as “Fast Forward Japan”, which you can find below (or see this link to jump to your nearest region.)