I am translating the Japanese fantasy novel “The Rainlands” (雨の国) by Haruka Asahi (朝陽遥), and gotten the author’s permission to put the translation on my blog. You can find the entire original Japanese text for the story here.
It’s a fictional, fantasy/adventure tale (the genre is officially listed as “alternate universe fantasy”), and because it is a longer work I’ll be presenting it in a series of unnamed chapters. The original work was published as four longish chapters, but I’ll be breaking these down into more bitesized pieces.
Update: This series has been translated in its entirety.
Synopsis
There were rumors of a place where the rains never ceased. Half of the month was a deafening, torrential downpour, and the other half a drizzle, at best slightly overcast. The sky was clear at most once or twice a month.
How could people actually live in a place where it rained constantly? Was it some sort of divine protection, or simply the raw power of the human mind? Driven by a burning curiosity, I departed on a journey to the mountainous region known as The Rainlands.
What I would discover was nothing like what I expected–a culture at times oddly familiar and yet disturbingly foreign.
Chapters
- Part one (original Chapter 1): original text
- Chapter 1: translation
- Chapter 2: translation
- Chapter 3: translation
- Part two (original Chapter 2): original text
- Chapter 4: translation
- Chapter 5: translation
- Chapter 6: translation
- Part three (original Chapter 3): original text
- Chapter 7: translation
- Chapter 8: translation
- Part four (original Chapter 4): original text
- Chapter 9: translation
- Chapter 10: translation
Translator’s Afterward (with a note from the author)
Note: “Edgelands” is another story set in the same world as “Rainlands”. It was not translated by me, though I did help with editing. You can read it here.
(Featured image of a bridge in a forest taken from Pexels.com)