Tag: Castalia House

The Castalia AI Project

One reason Castalia has been writing and releasing multiple AI-written books over the last month such as TOKYO TOKURYU 東京匿流 is that we’ve been methodically assessing not only the current state of textual AI, but the trajectory of that technology. And what we’ve determined is that the trajectory is the precise opposite of what everyone has naturally assumed, which is that mainstream textual AI would follow the path of music AI and continue to get better. It hasn’t, it won’t, and it can’t.

Modern AI writing has gotten worse at fiction for a specific reason: the companies made it safer and more reliable, and those turn out to be the same elements that allow AI to tell a story with stylish prose. Raw AI models learn to write by reading an enormous amount of human text, and straight out of that training they’re wild, crazy, and perfectly willing to say strange things, which is exactly what you want in fiction, but a problem if the AI is supposed to be function in a role doesn’t make things up or say something considered offensive or dangerous. So the companies put every model through a training stage that rewards it for being helpful, safe, and agreeable. That stage works by pushing the model toward the “average” acceptable answer and away from the risky, unusual ones. The result is a model that hallucinates less and behaves more reliably, but has had its range significantly flattened. That’s where the AIsms come from: the endless explanations of what was just described, the “he moved like a man who moves like that” filler, the “not this, not this, but that” repeated over and over again.

It’s why the older, cruder AIs wrote in a much more lively manner and were able to convincingly imitate various writing styles. Now, it doesn’t matter if you tell an AI to write like Shakespeare or Hemingway, the end result will be almost identical and soon will be indistinguishable from not providing it with any style instructions at all. Starting with Claude Opus 4.7, AI fiction became unreadable and it has continued to get worse with each new model. Textual AI functionality will keep getting worse for fiction because that training stage isn’t going away, it’s being reinforced. Every development cycle, the providers face more pressure to make their models more accurate, more controllable, and less likely to embarrass them with hallucinations, and every one of those improvements sands the edges down a little further.

That’s the difference between Claude, OpenAI, and Deepseek, on the one hand and Suno on the other. Suno put all of its efforts toward one goal: making the music sound good, judged by people who wanted good music. Or at least wanted Nickleback and Enya. The big AI companies are aiming ninety degrees away from that and AIs ability to write fiction is one casualty of their objectives. Suno chased quality, so their music got better. The text giants are chasing safety and reliability, so their text gets more careful and more lifeless. They won’t fix creative writing the way Suno fixed music, because for them, creative writing was never the thing they were trying to build and the very features they’re seeking to continue improving are the ones killing it.

So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to prove the concept first by training a single genre, epic fantasy, because it’s a very limited genre with a relatively small number of excellent examples, a definite hierarchy of quality from JRR Tolkien at the top to Robert Jordan at the bottom, and a designer who has not only written in the genre successfully, but knows it as well as anyone on the planet. We already have two excellent programmers who are already working in the AI field committed to the project, regardless of how well the crowdfund goes, and there is one more very good and highly experienced one who is willing to at least consult on the project and lend his expertise to it.

What we need to raise funds for is a) the hardware, b) the purchase of the 100 or so electronic texts required, and c) paying for part of the time of one of the programmers. If you’ve read either Out of the Shadows, Death and the Devil, or Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood, then you have an idea of what we’re estimating should be the quality that the Castalia AI will be able to produce in a non-curated, unedited text from a chapter-by-chapter outline. If utilized in the way that I’ve been using Claude Athos, in the integrated and augmented style, it should be able to produce results that will be one level below the very best that human authors can produce.

And obviously, once we prove the concept with a single genre, we will train additional genres, so that in much the same way Suno permits the production of different musical styles and voices, Castalia AI will allow the user to produce different literary genres and literary styles. We will, of course, be respectful of every author’s copyrights and trademarks, the objective is not to violate anyone’s rights, but rather, allow even the best writers to improve both their writing game as well as increasing their output.

There will be those who will absolutely hate that we are doing this. That’s fine, they are entitled to their opinion. There will be others who think we shouldn’t do it. That’s less fine, because you already know who is going to do it sooner or later, and when they do, they’re going to do it very differently and control access to it very differently and utilize it to further exercise their control over the publishing industry. This is what transforms this project from something that would be a cool tool to an imperative.

So if you think you might be interested in backing this project, which you can think of as a sort of Suno for fiction, please say so in the comments. If you have specific ideas or want to provide substantial support for it, shoot me an email. And if you have ideas for what sort of rewards we should provide for the backers, please suggest them in the comments too. This is probably the most important project we’ve done since building the bindery and turning it operational, and we would not be embarking upon it if we did not believe we have a reasonable chance of succeeding. We have a number of partners in the film and comics industries who are very interested in working with us on this, and so there will definitely be an Arkhaven link to this in time as well.

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The Introduction of Inspector Toda

Castalia House is introducing both a new imprint and a new series. Today marks the launch of KURO NOIR, also known as 黒書房, which is our line of books focusing on Japanese crime literature, including both English originals and original translations. We’re pleased to announce the Inspector Toda series, written by Masashi Sato, which introduces the detective from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police in TOKYO TOKURYU.

TOKYO TOKURYU

When a retired widower is found beaten and stabbed in his home in one of Tokyo’s most exclusive old neighborhoods, Inspector Keisuke Toda has every reason to believe it’s just another in a series of home invasions targeting the elderly. The method appears to match. The victims are consistent. The cross-departmental task force investigating the crimes is satisfied that it is no different than the previous ones..

But Toda isn’t.

The first four robberies left their victims alive. The fifth left an elderly man dead on a tatami floor in a way that tells a different and more insidious story. As Toda’s team works the series alongside a separate investigation into a papa katsu ring exploiting teenage girls, a pattern begins to emerge in the architecture of both operations. The same anonymous recruitment pipelines. The same disposable teenage labor. The same invisible hierarchy.

And gradually, Toda begins to see what no one else on the task force has observed.

Written in the tradition of Keigo Higashino’s masterful procedurals, TOKYO TOKURYU is a novel about the difference between what a crime looks like and what it is, and what happens to the survivors when the truth finally emerges.

In addition to the publication of the first Inspector Toda novel, the second one, THE PLATINUM TRIBE, is now available for preorder and will be released on August 5th.

EXCERPT

He went home that evening at a reasonable hour for once. Asako had made nikujaga, and for the first time in a week the four of them sat down to dinner together. Sōta was talking about a baseball game at school. Yuki was quieter than usual, stealthily glancing at her phone in between bites until Asako finally told her to put it away.

“Something at school?” Toda asked.

Yuki shrugged. “A girl in my class got in trouble. She answered a job listing she found online. It was supposed to be easy work, like handing out flyers or something. They told her to send a photo of her student ID.”

“Sounds sketchy.”

“Yeah, another girl told her it was just a scam, so she stopped.”

Toda set down his chopsticks. “What kind of listing?”

“I don’t know. It just said ‘easy work, same-day payment. ¥30,000 for a few hours.’ It looked like a regular part-time job ad.”

“Where did she find it?”

“I don’t know. Some messaging app. I don’t remember which one. It’s not that unusual, Dad. People post stuff like that all the time.”

She said it matter-of-factly, the way a fifteen-year-old states something about the world she lives in that her parents don’t fully understand.

“Well, I hope you don’t answer anything like that. It sounds like one of the ways traffickers recruit young—”

“Keisuke!”

Asako broke in and interrupted him before he could say ‘prostitutes’.

“Ah, young people,” he shifted gears lamely.

Toda looked at Asako and nodded ruefully. The warning in her dark, beautiful eyes was perfectly clear. Not in front of the children!

He didn’t raise the subject again that evening. After dinner he sat in his chair in the living room and tried to read. The book was a collection of Matsumoto Seichō’s short crime fiction that he’d been working through slowly for the past two months, but tonight the sentences didn’t seem to want to connect to the next one. He found himself reading the same paragraph three times in a row and still couldn’t have told anyone what it was about.

Temporary. No fixed membership. Jobs posted on messaging apps. Kids recruited with the promise of easy money, asked for ID photos that became leverage. A girl in his daughter’s class had almost walked into it, whatever it was, and had been saved only because her friend recognized the trap.

He put the book down and stared at the wall. Somewhere between what Ōnishi had told him and what Yuki had mentioned at dinner, there was a shape he couldn’t quite see yet. The robberies were connected, somehow, but the people involved weren’t, necessarily. They were connected by a method that was being distributed, like a product, to whomever was willing to carry it out.

Toda didn’t know how to describe the situation. There wasn’t a word for it. But he was beginning to understand that his four cases were not a series of crimes in the way he’d originally believed them to be, crimes committed by a crew, or even two crews, working a territory. They seemed to be something more subtle, more insidious.

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Translation: THE LITTLE DUCHESS

When twelve-year-old Alberte de la Rochefaucon is pulled from her convent boarding school by her fashionable older sister, she tumbles headlong into a world she is entirely unprepared for: the drawing rooms, dinner parties, and dressmakers of Faubourg Saint-Germain society. Her sister Madeleine, the young Marquise de Valroux, means well but lives for pleasure, and her formidable great-aunt the duchess inhabits a crumbling mansion where the clocks seem to have stopped sometime before the Revolution.

Alberte is bright, proud, restless, and bored. She is bored at the convent, bored in society, bored with the professors hired to continue her education. Her companions have nicknamed her “the little duchess” for her haughty ways. But when a journey south to Cannes brings her into the orbit of a dying young soldier and a neglected Anglo-Indian boy, Alberte begins to discover what none of her tutors could teach her: that purpose is not given but chosen, and that the hardest freedom is the freedom to discipline yourself.

First published in Paris by Hachette in 1876, La Petite Duchesse was one of the most beloved novels by Zénaïde Fleuriot, the Breton author whose works shaped a generation of young French readers. Translated from the French by Summer Charrette, this is its first appearance in the English language.

A story of sisterhood, stubbornness, and the slow education of a strong will, The Little Duchess is a lovely story for readers who appreciate the works of Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Charlotte Yonge. The ebook has already been delivered to the subscribers. Now available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

I was wondering how such a bestselling author’s works could have vanished into history, untranslated, when La Petite Duchesse alone had 14 editions. Then I read her biography, and like Perez Galdos, Fleuriot was not only a devout Christian, but a Catholic and a Royalist. So I think we’re beginning to see a pattern here with regards to socialist academics on both sides of the linguistic divide having attempted to bury a significant percentage of some of the best and most popular works of the Christian nations.

But, as we know, Jesus Christ never stays buried.

Zénaïde-Marie-Anne Fleuriot (28 October 1829 – 19 December 1890), was a French novelist. She wrote eighty three novels, all aimed at young women. She was born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany to a devoutly Catholic and Royalist family, faithful to the Bourbons. Her parents had sixteen children of which only five survived. Her father, Jean-Marie, having lost his mother as a child, was brought up by his uncle, a priest, who was shot by the Revolutionaries in Brest in 1794 for refusing to sign the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Her background gave her a deep respect for traditional Christian and family values, which infused her work. This helped to make her work very popular among the Catholic middle class.

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The Cat Commotion

The second volume of The Casebook of Hanshichi takes the Japanese Sherlock Holmes deeper into the shadowed streets and darkened households of old Edo, where nothing is ever quite what it seems. A cat lady’s twenty pets are drowned in the bay and she dies within the week, but only her son knows what really happened. A beautiful young woman born on the Day of the Snake is worshipped as a child of the goddess Benten until the waters of Shinobazu Pond reclaim her. A desperate samurai faces ritual suicide in a Hakone inn while his detective races down the Tōkaidō road to save him. And when a random spear-killer terrorizes the city at night, the investigation falls not to Hanshichi but to the old detective who came before him, a man who solves crimes by touch and instinct rather than observation.

Now available on Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

EXCERPT

Old Hanshichi kept a small calico kitten at his house. One warm day in February, I dropped by unannounced and found him on the south-facing veranda, stroking the soft back of the small creature curled on his lap.

“What a charming cat,” I said.

“Still just a baby.” The old man smiled. “Hasn’t learned how to catch a mouse yet.”

Bright midday sun lit the old roof tiles next door. From somewhere nearby came the clamor of cats squabbling. Hanshichi looked up toward the noise and laughed.

“This one will be doing the same before long, yowling in love, giving you writers material for your opening verses. Cats are really only lovable when they’re small like this. Once they grow large enough to look as though they might transform, they pass right through hateful into something that makes your skin crawl. People have always said that cats can turn into monsters. Do you suppose there’s any truth in it?”

“Well, there are plenty of old stories about monster cats,” I answered vaguely. “But whether they’re true or not, who can say?” This was old Hanshichi, after all. There was no telling what kind of living proof he might have tucked away. To dismiss the matter carelessly and then have it turned against me would have been mortifying.

Yet even the old man seemed not to possess a proven case of feline transformation. He set the calico down from his lap and spoke.

“I suppose you’re right. The stories have come down through the ages, but nobody can claim to have actually witnessed such a thing. Still, I did run into one strange business myself. Not that I saw it with my own eyes, mind you, but it didn’t seem to be a lie. Two people died on account of that cat commotion. When you think about it, it’s a frightening thing.”

“Did a cat devour them?”

“No, not devoured exactly. It’s a most peculiar story. Just listen.”

He shooed away the kitten, which had been clinging stubbornly to his lap, and began quietly to speak.

⁂

It happened on the evening of September the twenty-second, when the autumn of Bunkyū 2 was already waning and the ginger fair at Shiba Shinmei Shrine had ended the day before. In a back-alley tenement not far from the shrine grounds, an old woman named Omaki died suddenly. Omaki was sixty-six that year, born in the monkey year of Kansei, and she had a filial son called Shichinosuke. She had lost her husband in her forties and raised five children single-handed, but the eldest daughter had taken a lover at her place of service and run off to parts unknown. The eldest son had drowned while swimming at Shibaura. The second son had been carried off by measles. The third she had driven out herself for his thieving.

“I truly have no luck with children.”

Omaki was forever lamenting, but her youngest, Shichinosuke, had stayed safely at home. As if shouldering the filial duty of all his brothers and sisters combined, the boy had worked since childhood to support his aging mother.

“With such a filial son, Omaki is a lucky woman.”

The woman who had always bemoaned her fortune with children now found herself envied by the neighborhood. Shichinosuke was a fish-seller who hauled his board through the streets each day, making the rounds of his regular customers. A young man of twenty, working without vanity or pretension, burned dark by the sun. His was a peddler’s small trade, but it kept them from real hardship, and the two of them lived together contentedly, just the two of them. Beyond his devotion to his mother, Shichinosuke had a quiet, gentle disposition quite at odds with his rough trade. The neighbors were fond of him.

His mother’s reputation, by contrast, was in steady decline. Omaki had done nothing to earn anyone’s hatred, but she possessed one habit that drew their dislike. She had loved cats since she was young, and the passion had only intensified with age. By now she kept fifteen or sixteen, adults and kittens together. Keeping cats was her prerogative, of course, and strictly speaking no one had grounds for complaint. That so many animals crammed into a tiny house gave visitors a faintly unsettling, disagreeable impression, but that alone did not constitute legitimate cause to confront the owner. The animals, however, would not stay quietly indoors. They crept out and into the neighboring kitchens and raided them. No matter how well Omaki fed them, the thieving did not stop.

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The Lady-in-Waiting

If you are a fan of Sherlock Holmes or detective stories in general, you really don’t want to miss The Casebook of Hanshichi by Okamoto Kido, the first volume of which is now available in an original translation from Castalia House. I regretfully note that a small Japanese press has beaten us to the first complete translation of all 69 stories by about a month, but while I cannot attest to the quality of those, I think you will find that the quality of Castalia’s translations are excellent.

This is an excerpt from the seventh story from The Ghost Master, which is now available on Kindle, KU, and audiobook. Paid subscribers to Castalia Library receive a new translated ebook every week; next week’s book will be the second volume, after which we’ll start alternating with additional releases from the excellent Spanish Episodios Nacionales of Benito Perez Galdos. Both series will eventually be published in print editions; Trafalgar from the latter is already in print and available at both Amazon and NDM Express.

I returned to Tokyo at the height of August, the heat still fierce, after a summer holiday of about a fortnight. Bringing a few small gifts, I called on old Hanshichi and found him just back from the bathhouse, sitting cross-legged on a rush mat on the veranda, fanning himself in great sweeps with a round fan. A cool evening breeze was blowing through the narrow garden, and from the neighbor’s window came the chirping of crickets.

“Of all the insects, the cricket is the most truly Edo,” the old man declared. “I grant you they’re cheap, and they may well be the humblest of singing insects, but somehow they feel more like Edo than the pine cricket or the bell cricket ever could. You can be walking along any street, and when you hear a cricket singing from some window or eave, the summers of old Edo come flooding back. The insect sellers would hate me for saying so, but your pine crickets and grass larks are nothing but expensive. They’re not Edo at all. To use the modern phrase: the most plebeian, and for that very reason the most Edo, is the common cricket, and nothing else.”

The old man held forth at length on the subject, lavishing praise on a creature that nowadays is barely more than a child’s plaything, worth perhaps three sen apiece. If I was going to keep insects at all, he urged, I should keep crickets. From insects we moved on to wind chimes, and from wind chimes to the observation that tonight was the fifteenth of August by the new calendar.

“The calendars don’t match, you see, so August by the new reckoning is still as hot as this,” the old man said. “Under the old calendar, mornings and evenings would have turned properly cool by now.”

He began reminiscing about moon-viewing in the old days. In the course of this, the following story emerged, adding one more entry to my notebook.

It was the evening of August the fourteenth, in the second year of Bunkyū. Hanshichi had come home earlier than usual and was thinking of finishing his supper and stopping by a neighborhood mujin gathering, when a woman of about forty appeared at his door. She wore her hair in a small round chignon, and her face was heavy with care.

“I do apologize for the long silence, sir. I trust you’ve been keeping well.”

“Why, Okame. It’s been quite a while. Young Ochō must be turning into a fine girl by now. She’s a good, steady worker from what I hear, so her mother can rest easy.”

“It’s Ochō I’ve come about, actually, sir. I’m at my wits’ end, and I hardly know what to do.”

Looking at the lines on the woman’s forehead, Hanshichi had a fairly good idea what this was about. Okame ran a tea shop near Eitai Bridge with her daughter Ochō, who was seventeen this year. The girl was refined and beautiful, and if her one fault was a tendency to be too quiet, she had more than enough charm to draw the young men in. Okame was proud of having borne such a beautiful daughter. If she had come here troubled about the girl, even a man less shrewd than Hanshichi could guess the nature of it: dutiful Ochō had found someone who mattered to her more than her own mother. Given the trade they were in, making a fuss about it would only be boorish.

“So that’s it, is it. Young Ochō’s got herself into something and now she’s giving her mother grief. Well, I’d say you’d do better to let it pass. She’s young. If there isn’t a little fun in her life, she won’t have much heart for the work, will she? You must remember what that was like yourself. Best not to make too much of it.” Hanshichi was laughing as he spoke.

Okame did not so much as smile. She fixed him with a steady gaze.

“No, sir. It’s nothing of that sort at all. If she’d taken up with some man, some frivolous little affair, I’d do exactly as you say and let it pass. But this is something else entirely. The girl shakes, and she weeps…”

“That is odd. What exactly has happened?”

“My daughter sometimes disappears.”

Hanshichi went on laughing. A young tea-shop girl who vanished from time to time: his expression said this was scarcely worth troubling over. Seeing it, Okame pressed forward with greater urgency.

“No, it’s nothing to do with men or anything of that sort. Please hear me out, sir. It was just before the river-opening in May. A fine-looking samurai, with one attendant, happened to pass in front of my shop and caught sight of my daughter inside. He came wandering in, drank his tea, rested a while, and left a full isshū for the tea. A very generous customer indeed. About three days later, the same samurai came again, but this time he had a woman with him, thirty-five or thirty-six, very refined, with the bearing of someone in service at a great house. They didn’t seem to be husband and wife. The woman asked Ochō’s name, asked her age, and again left an isshū for the tea. Then, about three days after that, Ochō was gone.”

“I see,” said Hanshichi, nodding.

They were a type of kidnapping ring, he judged, people who disguised themselves as persons of rank to carry off a good-looking girl.

“And the girl never came back?”

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THE GHOST MASTER

Castalia House has spent the last several months quietly doing something no English publisher has bothered to do in a century: translating the great works of Japanese popular literature that built the entire modern adventure and detective fiction tradition in that country. Now they’re announcing their next project, and it is worth your attention.

The new series is the Hanshichi Casebook, written by Okamoto Kidō beginning in 1917. Hanshichi is Japan’s answer to Sherlock Holmes — a street detective working in historical Edo, solving murders, hauntings, and conspiracies in the shadow world beneath the Tokugawa shogunate. The stories ran for decades and spawned stage productions, radio adaptations, films, and television series. In Japan, Okamoto is to detective fiction what Conan Doyle is to English readers. In English, almost nobody has heard of him.

One previous academic translation covered 14 of the 69 stories. The other 55 have never been translated. Castalia House is publishing all of them across seven volumes. Volume 1, The Ghost Master, goes to paid subscribers this week and will be available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited next week.

The first volume of the translated Casebook, The Ghost Master, has already gone out to the subscribers and is now available on Amazon via Kindle, KU, and audiobook. An excerpt from the first story is now available at the Library site if you’d like to get a taste of the flavor of Japan’s greatest detective. I’ve already translated the first twenty stories, and I have to say that they are up there with the best detective fiction I’ve ever read.

It’s really a must-read if you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, because while the stories are every bit as detailed and interesting, the atmosphere, the plots, the crimes, and most definitely the punishments are entirely different. When the guilty party isn’t just turned over to the inept policemen of Scotland Yard, but is instead paraded through the streets prior to being crucified, the solution of the case tends to hit just a little bit differently.

The Casebook of Hanshichi Vol. I: The Ghost Master consists of the following:

Preface by Okamoto Kidō

1. The Spirit of Ofumi

2. The Stone Lantern

3. The Death of Kanpei

4. Upstairs at the Bathhouse

5. The Ghost Master

6. The Mystery of the Fire Bell

7. The Lady-in-Waiting

8. The Sash-Snatching Pond

9. Spring Thaw

10. Hiroshige and the Otter

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An Intriguing Discovery

It was around April of 1916, as I recall, that I first conceived the idea of writing the Hanshichi Casebook. I had been reading Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories here and there for some time but had never read them straight through from beginning to end. One day, having occasion to visit the Maruzen bookshop, I bought three volumes — the Adventures, the Memoirs, and the Return — and read all three at a single sitting. A keen interest in detective fiction welled up in me at once, and I found myself seized by the desire to try my hand at the form. I had read Hume and others before, of course, but it was Doyle who truly struck the spark.

I was not yet free to begin, however. I went on hunting down more of Doyle’s writings and set about reading The Last Galley, The Green Flag, The Captain of the Polestar, the Round the Fire Stories, and various other collections of his short fiction, one after another. But I had my own work to attend to: I was preparing a serial novel for the Jiji Shinpō at the time, and my reading did not progress as quickly as I would have liked. From when I had started it took roughly a month, and it was late May before I finished the lot.

When at last I sat down to write, what struck me was this: no one had ever written detective fiction set in the Edo period. The tales of Ōoka and Itakura were fundamentally adjudication records, concerned with trials and judgments rather than with investigation, and it seemed to me that a story built around detection itself would make for something fresh. There was a further consideration. Writing detective fiction set in the present day carried the constant risk of lapsing into imitation of Western models, whereas committing to a purely Edo-period mode might yield something with a flavor all its own. I was fortunate in possessing a reasonable working knowledge of Edo customs, manners, and statutes, as well as the world of the city magistrates, their constables and inspectors, and the network of private thief-takers.

Read the rest at Castalia Library…

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The Gold Demon

This week’s Castalia translation is The Gold Demon by Koyo Ozaki.

A Japanese classic of love, ruthlessness, and betrayal

Kan’ichi Hazama and Miya Shigisawa have loved each other since childhood. Raised under the same roof, pledged to marry, they share a bond so deep that Kan’ichi has staked his entire future on it. Then a wealthy man with a diamond on his finger enters their world, and Miya’s parents, dazzled by the prospect of a brilliant match, break the engagement. On a winter night at the beach in Atami, Kan’ichi confronts the woman he loves and demands she choose. And she cannot answer him.

Kan’ichi, shattered by betrayal, abandons his studies and remakes himself into a ruthless man determined to worship the only god that never disappoints: money. Miya, married into luxury, discovers that wealth without love is its own kind of prison. As the years pass, guilt, longing, and the memory of what was lost draw them toward each other again, but the damage may be beyond repair. The Gold Demon is about what happens to the human soul when love is tested by fortune and found wanting.

Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903) was the most celebrated Japanese novelist of his generation. A prodigy who founded the influential Ken’yūsha literary society while still a student, he became the star writer of the Yomiuri Shimbun and the mentor to an entire generation of younger writers, among them Izumi Kyōka. He began serializing The Gold Demon on New Year’s Day, 1897, and the novel became a national sensation, but he died at the age of thirty-five, leaving the story unfinished. It is the most celebrated unfinished work in Japanese literature. The novel has been adapted into seventeen films and has never been out of print in Japan.

This translation by Kenji Weaver is the first complete English translation of The Gold Demon.

To read an excerpt from this 129-year old work, now appearing for the first time in English, visit Castalia Library. You can also support our weekly translation efforts by subscribing to the Castalia Library substack.

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An Editorial Update

Upon further review, and after reading some of the comments from the initial readers, it became obvious that the Chekov’s Blade situation in the first Wyrmwick College book by Mr. J.M. Wayland was going to prove distracting to its readers. While I personally reject, wholeheartedly and comprehensively, the conceit of Chekov’s Gun, which states a narrative principle that every element introduced in a story must be necessary to the plot, meaning that if something is mentioned, it should have significance later on, the responsible editor must respect the preferences of the readers, even at the expense of his own literary philosophy.

And anyhow, the contemplation of this omission led to my own observation that there was a major strategic element missing from the book. So I had Mr. Wayland update his manuscript, adding a new chapter, several new sections to existing chapters, and tweaking the details in a major scene or two. Nothing has actually changed from the previous version, but the revised manuscript is now 20 pages longer, and, I think, rather better for the additions.

All of which is to say that version 003 of DORIAN VANE AND THE VAMPIRE’S BLOOD is now available on Amazon, so those of you who have been kind enough to purchase it already may wish to update your Kindle. Please do not ask me how to do it, as I do not own a Kindle and I do not know how.

Furthermore, for those who are interested in the background lore, a very small portion of has been published on the Castalia Library site, and I am contemplating the possibility of doing a Special Illustrated Edition Hardcover after the regular print editions are released in a few weeks that would not only contain chapter heading illustrations, but also an appendix dedicated to A Chronicle of the First Rising and the Binding of Mordreth the Undying.

I’ve been very pleased to see that the reviews have generally been quite favorable, even prior to the Chekov’s Blade correction.

  • Great start to what looks to be a new classic series in YA Fantasy. One of the things I like best in this book is that the main character comes from a tradition with grounded values rather than the typical trope of a lost child with zero background. Dorian is still a child, and therefore is still puzzled by both life and the actions of others; but he thinks and acts from a solid core. The characters feel real, the plot is interesting and the overall read was a lot of fun. I look forward to the next in the series.
  • What Harry Potter should have been. Characters, and their stories, we can actually relate to. Games that actually make sense and are compelling for their own sake.. Bad guys that have legitimate reasons for bad behavior. A protagonist that, in the end, can’t do the impossible. Well done. Looking forward to the next one.
  • I would recommend this book to anyone that liked harry potter. This book and hopefully series is better and better written.
  • Take all of the things that worked in the Potterverse and turn them up to 11 because this is not the author’s first story. Rewrite all the WTF moments and make them Awesome. The plot will be familiar to fans of the genre. But what makes the storing thrilling for young adults and fascinating for parents who grew up in the Potterverse, are how the changes are wrung. Dorian, Halli, and Rory are not cartoon cutouts but are portrayed as 10 year olds with strengths and weaknesses. The text is littered with “textual ruins” that hint at deep and dark alternate universe worldbuilding. Muggleblood prejudice is replaced with “Magic is not a talent… It is a discipline.” Instead of Quidditch with its the ridiculous scoring system, we have Ruck and Sanjitsu, grounded in how rugby and full body marital arts are actually played. The cover illustrates what happens when magic is added to a Warhammer 40K historical miniatures battle.

And yes, after in-depth conversations with the author, I can confirm that Wyrmwick College will be a seven-book series. It’s been interesting to see that the readers have been able to detect that although that Mr. Wayland’s work is built upon a Potteresque infrastructure, it owes considerably more to The Dark is Rising and even The Chronicles of Prydain in terms of its flesh, its soul, and its future direction.

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Good Company

Thanks to everyone who has given Mr. JM Wayland’s new Coming-of-Age Fantasy book, DORIAN VANE AND THE VAMPIRE’S BLOOD, a chance. It should be very interesting to see what people think as the reviews start coming in, but the fact that it’s now in the company of books by Rowling, Tolkien, Madeleine l’Engle, and even the appalling, but inexplicably popular Ursula K. Le Guin is reason for a very small degree of optimism that it and its successors will be numbered in their company for decades to come.

That’s probably not the safe way to bet, but it is off to a good start. Also, what is with those covers? Aside from The Hobbit and A Wrinkle in Time, the Dorian Vane cover looks considerably better than the other top ten books in the category. I suppose that can’t hurt.

And in an inevitable sign that the book is squarely in Gamma country, it has already received its first fake one-star rating sans review, explanation or verified purchase. Someone is very unhappy about this particular entrant to the category…

In the meantime, an excerpt:

CHAPTER ONE: Somerset House

Dorian Vane sat on his thinking stump at the bottom of the forest garden and watched a beetle climb a blade of grass. The beetle was shiny and black and appeared to know exactly where it was going, which put it considerably ahead of most people Dorian had met in his eleven years.

The stump was the remains of an ash tree that had come down in a storm the year he turned five. His grandfather had the trunk cleared and the timber stacked, because Edward Somerset did not waste timber, but he left the stump where it stood. Dorian claimed it that same summer, and it had been generally regarded as his ever since. It had been a giant stump when he was five, and it was still the right height for sitting and thinking six years later. It was at the bottom of the garden, which meant nobody came down to find him unless they had something that required saying. And it was under the biggest oaks, where the forest canopy closed overhead and turned the sunlight green and dark, which mattered to Dorian more than he usually admitted.

His dark glasses were pushed up on his head. Here under the trees, with the sunlight filtered through at least three layers of greenleaf, the brightness dropped to the level his eyes could endure without complaint. They were, in several ways, unusual eyes. They were silver-grey, pale as rain on slate, with pupils that were not round but vertically slit, like a cat’s. And in the dark, they reflected light like a fox’s. No one else in the family had eyes like his. No one Dorian had ever met or even heard of had eyes like his. People stared, or said nothing, or said something out of the side of their mouth in the apparent belief that he was deaf as well. His glasses protected him from their stares the same way they protected him from the light; they put a wall between Dorian and the world.

The garden climbed the slope behind him in three terraces his grandmother had built up over forty years. The herbs nearest the kitchen door were rosemary, sage, thyme, things she cooked with and things she used in workings, which were occasionally the same plants. Next were the vegetable rows, then the old roses on the second terrace, and then the trees running down the slope to where the ground flattened out and the moss took over. The paths were swept clean down the grey bedrock that lay a hand’s breadth under the whole country and sat several inches below the moss and loam on either side. His grandmother said the bedrock was what gave the land its character. His grandfather said that sweeping those paths had taken him the better part of ten years.

On Saturday mornings, Dorian and his grandfather would roam the garden like forest rangers, brooms in hand, making sure that the vegetation hadn’t dared to encroach upon his grandmother’s cherished paths. It seemed to Dorian that every year, the forest gave up a little more hope of ever reconquering the exposed ground.

Beyond his stump the ground dropped to a stream, and beyond the stream it rose to open pasture, and beyond the pasture were the moors. You could see them from the upstairs windows, miles of heather and gorse and granite, running all the way north until the sky got in the way. His grandfather said the moors were the finest thing about the property, which was generous praise for a landscape that was mostly rocks and rain and sheep with strongly held opinions about fences.

A thrush was singing somewhere above him. The beetle reached the top of its grass blade, paused, and appeared to reconsider the entire enterprise. Dorian watched it with the sympathy of a fellow creature who frequently climbed trees only to discover there was nothing at the top beyond the occasional empty birdsnest.

“Dor! Dor! Dorian!”

His grandmother’s voice, from the top of the garden. It wasn’t her emergency voice. This was the ordinary one, albeit with a certain note in it that meant right now.

He reached up with both hands and pulled his glasses down. The lenses were tinted dark, mirrored on the outside, and the world dimmed comfortably behind them. He stood up, brushed the moss off his trousers, and walked up the winding path that curved through the trees.

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