Some announcements about “Final Days of Summer” by Masaki Hashiba

One the translation projects I’ve been working on the last few months is the story “Final Days of Summer”  (残夏) by Masaki Hashiba (ハシバ柾), which is a set of short, interrelated fiction stories . So far, I’ve completely translated the first story “Stargazer” which you can see in full here.

The other day I was doing some searching around and I discovered that this story actually won a literature award in February this year (2017). It was selected as a “First Kino Kuni Literature Prize Excellent Work” (“第一回Kino-Kuni文学賞佳作”)

Shortly after I found out, I sent a congratulatory email to the author, who was very humble about it.

Having selected this story myself to translate out of many other free novels posted online, this gave me a little smile to know that something I thought was great was recognized by one or more judges (presumably native Japanese people) who selected this work. While this is no “Naoki Award” or “Akutagawa Award” (arguably the two Japanese biggest literary prizes), and there was a few others who won at the same time, it is nonetheless an honor to be given to the privilege to translate this story.

You can see the full details of what the judges said about this story on this page (search for “残夏” near the bottom).

On a related note, the author of the story created an image to represent the first short story as a token of thanks to me translating it. Turns out he is a pretty skilled artist as well. You can check it out below (look closely at the last ‘R’ to see a cool finishing touch he added).

As a result of these two things, the translation of the second short story (English title TBD) has jumped to higher priority for me, so hopefully I’ll get to it pretty soon. But in the meantime, you can check out the first story, which is a bit longish so I broke it into four chapters.