I’ve translated Masao Yamakawa’s “The Gift of Loneliness” and released in full as a free ebook that you can download. It’s a short piece of classic Japanese literature about a couple struggling to recover from a devastating loss in their lives, which is made that much more poignant during the holiday season.
These days I generally don’t put aside that much time for reading manga, but I came across this interesting-looking manga called “Slime Life” by Megasawara so I decided on reading a few pages. I got hooked and ended up finishing it that same day. “Slime Life” is a story about a black sorceress named Daruru… Read More »
I’m happy to announce Arigatai Book’s first ever end-of-year sale, with discounts on two ebooks and one paperback.
In this article I’d like to go over the expression “darou ni” (だろうに), which can be a little difficult to understand the first time you encounter it. As usual, before we look at this expression’s meaning let’s see what the individual parts mean. First we have “darou” (だろう), a word used to express the speaker’s… Read More »
Compound words are very common in the Japanese language, and these can be especially nice for learners since it allows guessing the meaning and pronunciation of a word you have seen for the first time (assuming you are familiar with the component words). For example, let’s take this word: 売り物 (urimono) If we know that… Read More »
If you’re read this blog much in the last few years you probably know that I have been gradually publishing a series of ebooks containing translations of works by Mimei Ogawa (小川未明), an important figure in Japanese children’s literature. I also recently released an audiobook of Volume 1 earlier this year. This series of books… Read More »
I reviewed Yuu Nagira’s novel “My Beautiful Garden”, a story about the interconnected lives of a few people facing various problems.
The Japanese language is known for its heavy omission of all sorts of words when they can be inferred from context: objects, subjects, and even particles (tiny words that act as grammatical glue in a way similar to prepositions). Even simple everyday sentences like “食べた” (“I ate it”) can have multiple omissions (in that case,… Read More »
I’m proud to announce the release of a new translation of two of Kyusaku Yumeno’s works, published in both English-only and parallel Japanese/English formats.
When exploring the spacious Kinokuniya in download Portland the other day, I couldn’t decide what to buy so I ended up picking up on a whim the first episode of “Oyasumi Punpun” by Inio Asano. It has a pretty simple cover that is pure yellow, except for an embossed image on the front that I… Read More »