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[personal profile] elfs
Haikasoru is a publishing house that is translating into English a number of popular science fiction novels written in Japanese. Someone on my F-List has been touting Haikasoru, after John Scalzi briefly mentioned it, and I decided to jump in with both feet.

This was harder than it sounds. There were no copies of anything from the publishing house at Barnes & Noble, or at Borders. Desperate, I made a trek over to Kinokuniya, which once upon a time was an awesome bookstore for native readers, and has now become an interesting bookstore for locals with a hidden upstairs section for native readers.

I looked through the "Translated Japanese Novels" section of the bookstore, and found only one Haikasoru novel, Battle Royale, the back cover of which reads a little like The Truman Show meets Lord of the Flies. Not the title I was interested in.

I took it up to the front and asked the woman at the counter, "Do you have any other books from this publisher?" She asked another employee to help me, and he led me to the translated manga section. "They're not manga," I protested. "See?" I flipped through The Lord of the Sands of Time to make my point. "They're novels. Shouldn't they be over there?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. You'd have to ask the manager. They're distributed by Viz, so, that's where we put them, with the manga."

Yeah, they're manga. Only with just words and stuff. No pictures.

Anyway, I bought The Lord of the Sands of Time, The Stories of Ibis, and Usurper of the Sun. I've been reading the second, and coming away with mixed feelings, the cause of which may be the translator, may be the writer. The first story can best be described as Star Trek fanfic; the second, a predictable tell-don't-show Twilight Zone episode. I'm more interested in seeing how the writer handles the contextual story of Ibis herself.

Date: 2011-05-16 07:24 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com
May I link?

Date: 2011-05-17 06:47 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com
Up here, Chapters does a good job of stocking the Haikasoru books and they shelve them with the rest of the SF novels. The catch is that their e-catalog lumps them in with the rest of the VIZ manga so unless you know titles and author it can be tricky to look for them that way.

Date: 2011-05-16 07:30 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] rick-bannerman.livejournal.com
Have you looked at J-List?

Date: 2011-05-16 07:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] elfs.livejournal.com
Yeah, J-List doesn't have them. I could mail-order them through Viz, but for some reason I actually like visiting bookstores and buying from human beings with faces. So I started looking locally.

Date: 2011-05-16 07:43 pm (UTC)
ext_58972: Mad! (Default)
From: [identity profile] autopope.livejournal.com
I bounced hard off Stories of Ibis, about a quarter of the way in. Stylistic quirks of the translator, I think, but I'm not 100% sure.

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