Twitter friend @hatbooks pointed out over the weekend that a number of contemporary Japanese poets are being featured this month at Connotation Press. Guest edited by poet and professor Alan Botsford of Kanto Gakuin University, the assemblage of poets include Tanikawa Shuntaro, Nomura Kiwao, Takahashi Mutsuo, and seven others (!), and it includes an...
Read more →The Literary Saloon pointed out this morning that the finalists for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards were announced, a prize I didn’t know existed and yet am entirely thrilled does. Making the discovery ever more sweet, it turns out that congratulations are in order for Neil Nadelman and his translation of Kambayashi...
Read more →After what seems like an eternity (since the competition first opened over a year ago in January 2011), the winners of the JLPP International Translation Competition were announced today. First place goes to Polly Barton of England in the English translation category, and Sebastian Breu of Germany takes the German translation prize. Second place...
Read more →Back in December, we reported that seven major authors, including Higashino Keigo and Asada Jiro, filed a lawsuit against two jisui proxy services for violating copyright law. This week, the authors withdrew their lawsuit stating that they had “essentially won,” as one of the two proxy companies they were filing against dissolved at the...
Read more →Why haven’t you bought this already? It’s great!
Read more →Speaking of Edogawa Rampo, the Asahi announced last week (still playing catch-up here folks, my bad) that 45 year old Takano Fumio has won the Edogawa Rampo Prize for her submission カラマーゾフの兄妹 (“The Siblings Karamazov”). Presented by the Mystery Writers of Japan, the award is given to a previously unpublished or little published mystery...
Read more →I’ve been slowly working my way through publisher catalogs the last two weeks, and I had nearly given up hope, but just when it seemed all was lost, I ended up with four additional titles for the List, and even a few that don’t technically satisfy the List but which I’ll tell you about...
Read more →Last Saturday the winners of the Mishima Yukio Prize and the Yamamoto Shugoro Prize were announced, reports the Asahi. 33 year old Aoki Jungo won the Mishima Prize for his novel 私のいない高校 (“High School Without Me”) and 49 year old Harada Maha won for her novel 楽園のカンヴァス (“The Canvas Paradise”). They each will receive...
Read more →The future is now! Haikasoru’s sci-fi anthology The Future is Japanese: Stories From and About the Land of the Rising Sun is now on sale.
Read more →The Asahi reports Horie Toshiyuki has won this year’s Ito Sei Literary Prize for Fiction for his novel なずな (“Nazuna,” or “Shepherd’s Purse”). It tells the story of a young man taking care of his two month old baby girl.
Read more →So last night my copy of Monkey Business, the yearly literary journal of “New Writing From Japan,” arrived and though I haven’t had a chance to read anything, the table of contents alone makes it look like a must-have. And since I haven’t been able to find the contents listed anywhere else, I thought...
Read more →A simple question to start off the week: What are you reading?! I just finished Kawamata Chiaki’s Death Sentences (see our review!) and so today I’ll either start the book we’ll be reviewing next—Ikezawa Natsuki’s The Navidad Incident—or catch up on a classic that I regrettably have not read yet, but am very excited...
Read more →