Chain Mail: Advance Review

A while back I did the English adaptation of Chain Mail, a Japanese psychological suspense novel by Hiroshi Ishizaki. It's forthcoming from Tokyopop in January, but it just got its first advance review.

"English adaptation" means that I was given a literal English translation from the Japanese, and asked to adapt it into a fluid, readable, literary translation which captured the spirit of the book as I saw it. This turned out to be much more of a challenge than I had anticipated, because the novel is about four Japanese schoolgirls who collaborate on an online novel/role-playing game by each choosing a persona and writing chapters from that character's point of view.

So not only did I have to give the schoolgirls distinct voices in the sections taking place in their real lives, I had to write four different distinct voices that were convincing as having been written by those particular teenagers, all of whom had different writing styles. For example, portions of the book-within-the-book had to sound as if they were written by a talented and bright but somewhat sheltered Japanese schoolgirl who is trying to imitate American hard-boiled detective novels.

It was clear that in the original Japanese, all those voices were distinct. It was also clear what sort of voices they were supposed to be. But in the literal translation I was working from, they mostly sounded the same. So though I had a good idea of what the original read like, it wasn't actually there-- and so was up to me to reconstruct/create all those different voices.

The book that Chain Mail most reminds me of is Miyuki Miyabe's Shadow Family, a police procedural/thriller about the murder of a man who role-played a normal family life online. There are thematic similarities apart from the plot ones, but it would be spoilery for both books to explain what they are.

Chain Mail: Advance Review

A while back I did the English adaptation of Chain Mail, a Japanese psychological suspense novel by Hiroshi Ishizaki. It's forthcoming from Tokyopop in January, but it just got its first advance review.

"English adaptation" means that I was given a literal English translation from the Japanese, and asked to adapt it into a fluid, readable, literary translation which captured the spirit of the book as I saw it. This turned out to be much more of a challenge than I had anticipated, because the novel is about four Japanese schoolgirls who collaborate on an online novel/role-playing game by each choosing a persona and writing chapters from that character's point of view.

So not only did I have to give the schoolgirls distinct voices in the sections taking place in their real lives, I had to write four different distinct voices that were convincing as having been written by those particular teenagers, all of whom had different writing styles. For example, portions of the book-within-the-book had to sound as if they were written by a talented and bright but somewhat sheltered Japanese schoolgirl who is trying to imitate American hard-boiled detective novels.

It was clear that in the original Japanese, all those voices were distinct. It was also clear what sort of voices they were supposed to be. But in the literal translation I was working from, they mostly sounded the same. So though I had a good idea of what the original read like, it wasn't actually there-- and so was up to me to reconstruct/create all those different voices.

The book that Chain Mail most reminds me of is Miyuki Miyabe's Shadow Family, a police procedural/thriller about the murder of a man who role-played a normal family life online. There are thematic similarities apart from the plot ones, but it would be spoilery for both books to explain what they are.