My reasons for purchasing Takahiro Ueda’s novel “Nimrod” are pretty typical: I liked the cover, liked the title, plus I liked the vague but significant-sounding marketing description on the obi (paper band used for marketing). Also, the book was relatively short, and (last but not least) the book was a winner of the Akutagawa prize,… Read More »
I was fortunate to talk with translator and author of “Cash Crash Jubilee”, Eli K.P. William on a bunch of interesting topics including translation, Japan, and studying Japanese. Find out why Eli doesn’t particularly like the term “augmented reality” –– and what he prefers instead.
The other day I wrote a post about how one of the science fiction stories I translated was published on a site that deals with various historically-relevant pieces of literature and other historical information. But it turns out that the main focus of that website is actually a radio station which streams historically relevant content… Read More »
One of the perks of learning to read Japanese is that there is a huge body of diverse literature going back many hundreds of years. Furthermore, much of this is available to read for free on Aozora Bunko. Once you get comfortable enough reading modern Japanese literature from the last few decades, you may decide… Read More »
This it the eighth chapter of a novel I am translating and publishing on this blog. See this post for the first chapter and more details about the novel. I want to thank the author, Yuki Hoshizaki (星崎ゆうき) for giving me permission to translate and publish this chapter here, as well as Yeti san (from… Read More »
In this article I’d like to go over the Japanese word “katte”, which is almost always written in kanji as 勝手. It’s a pretty common word and you’ll likely hear it once in a while in spoken Japanese, with perhaps a bit less usage in written Japanese (excluding dialogue lines which are essential spoken language).… Read More »
This it the seventh chapter of a novel I am translating and publishing on this blog. See this post for the first chapter and more details about the novel. I want to thank the author, Yuki Hoshizaki (星崎ゆうき) for giving me permission to translate and publish this chapter here, as well as Yeti san (from… Read More »
I can’t think of too many Japanese movies that become popular enough in the U.S. to the extent that they come up in casual conversation. “Shoplifters”––written, directed, and edited by Hirokazu Kore-eda (是枝裕和)––is one exception. In fact, it has grossed over $2 million dollars in the U.S., making it one of the most popular foreign… Read More »
In this post I want to focus on two common Japanese words that sound similar but have very different meanings––in fact opposite meanings. These words can have a few different usages, but I will be focusing on the following usage, where だって or だから begins a new sentence. 「sentence A」。だって「sentence B」 「sentence A」。だから「sentence B」 Besides… Read More »
I’ve translated and published the full text of the Japanese fairy tale “The Life of a Musical Instrument” (楽器の生命) by Mimei Ogawa (小川未明)