We are always accepting trial translations from people interested in translating for Kurodahan Press. For more information, see http://www.kurodahan.com/mt/e/faq/translators.html.
In addition, we are seeking translators for a number of books in progress.
Review
by Brian Stableford
The Black Lizard and Beast in the Shadows
by EDOGAWA Rampo
Translated by Ian HUGHES
With an introduction by Mark SCHREIBER
Hirai Tarō (1894-1965) adopted the pseudonym Edogawa Rampo because it sounded like a Japanese mispronunciation of "Edgar Allan Poe" and he was ambitious to be a writer of detective fiction. He was not the first Japanese writer to build a career in that genre, but he was a member of the first generation that was able to grow up reading crime fiction eclectically. Poe's detective stories were first translated in Japanese in 1887, and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear there in 1899. Hirai's mother was a fan of the writer and translator Kuroiwa Ruiko, who adapted early French mysteries by such writers as Emile Gaboriau. By the time Hirai began writing in the 1920s there was a crime fiction magazine, Shin Seinen, to serve as a convenient marketplace. He continued to produce work in the genre for forty years, under various different influences.
Introduction
by Mark SCHREIBER
The Black Lizard and Beast in the Shadows
by EDOGAWA Rampo
Translated by Ian HUGHES
In March, 1984, a team of criminals abducted Ezaki Katsuhisa, president of confectioner Ezaki-Glico, from his home in the Osaka suburb of Nishinomiya. After Ezaki escaped his captors unharmed, the gang embarked on a string of audacious blackmail attempts against food manufacturers in the Kansai region. In a stream of sarcastic letters to local newspaper bureaus, the criminals taunted the police. Their typewritten notes were signed Kaijin Nijūichi Mensō (The Mystery Man of Twenty-one Faces) — an unmistakable allusion to Edogawa Rampo's fictitious criminal mastermind, Kaijin Nijū Mensō (The Mystery Man of Twenty Faces), nemesis of detective Akechi Kogorō, whose exploits first appeared in an eponymous 1936 magazine serial.
Lairs of the Hidden Gods, Volume 1
Night Voices, Night Journeys
Rush Hour of the Old Ones
Introduction by Robert M. PRICE
It is a privilege to be able to introduce you to a number of highly talented horror writers from Japan, and not just horror writers, but Lovecraftian writers! As any American fan knows by now, the Old Gent has attracted quite a following internationally. A few specimens of the Lovecraftian scholarship of other countries have straggled into print here in the USA, but the fiction spawned in Lovecraft-infected imaginations around the world has been slow in proving the adage: “What goes around comes around”! But now it has come round at last! And we are the beneficiaries. I will comment on each of the stories in turn, as you get to them, but for the present, I want to think with you about the cultural significance of Japanese Lovecraftian fiction.
Herbert A. Giles and China:
Introduction
Introduction
by Joshua A. FOGEL
Herbert Allen Giles (1845-1935), the author of the two works which comprise this volume, was in his day, as now, an extraordinarily erudite scholar of Chinese history and culture. His long life spans the era from the Taiping Rebellion through the early years of the second Sino-Japanese War. He was the son of John Allen Giles (1808-1884), an Oxford University-trained minister, translator from the Greek, and author of a Latin Grammar. After serving in the Chinese consular service for twenty-six years (1867-1893), Giles fils became professor of Chinese at Cambridge, where he taught until 1932. Over the years, he penned a long list of books, scholarly and popular, which attempted to make sense of the great complexity of Chinese history and culture to a literate Anglophone audience.
Introduction to Kuunmong: The Cloud Dream of the Nine
by Susanna FESSLER
The Cloud Dream of the Nine (Kuunmong) is a seventeenth century Korean novel set in ninth century China. On the surface it is an entertaining tale of a young man who travels through two lifetimes accompanied by eight beautiful maidens; at its core, it is philosophical novel about Buddhism and Confucianism. The author, Kim Manjung, wrote the novel while in exile, reputedly to console his mother. The result has pleased thousands of readers in the following ages.
A Literary Analysis of Kuunmong
by Francisca CHO
Comparing Kuunmong and the Modern Novel
The Cloud Dream of the Nine is a pre-modern Asian novel, and as such, does not conform to the model of the novel as it formed in the modern West. For contemporary readers, both Western and Asian, the cultural challenge of Kim Manjung’s (literary name: Seop’o) work lies not in its remote historical setting – which happens to be ninth century China – but rather in its literary qualities, which reflect the world of seventeenth century Korea.