Tag: Castalia House

I’m very, very pleased to be finally releasing this translation of an esoteric murder mystery by Oguri Mushitarō. I’ve been working on this one on and off for six months. Even figuring out a proper title for it was difficult. The print edition will be even harder to produce, due to the need to recreate all of the drawings that were not included in the ebook, as they are not necessary due to their detailed descriptions in the text. Of all the translations I’ve done to date, this is still the one that was of the most interest to me from the start.

THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH

Half a century before Umberto Eco sealed monks inside an abbey with a serial killer and a poisoned Aristotle, Oguri Mushitarō locked a detective inside a Gothic castle with a grimoire, a glowing corpse, and a prophecy of six murders written in the hand of a dead man. Serialized in 1934, The Book of the Black Death is the novel Eco might have written had he been born in Tokyo and raised on Charcot, Cagliostro, and the Kabbalistic Exegesis rather than Aquinas and Borges. Its detective, Norizumi Rintarō, is William of Baskerville’s mad Japanese twin, a polymath who deploys heraldry, toxicology, and medieval sorcery with equal fluency, and whose erudition is both the instrument of his investigation and the source of its deepest dangers. Recognized in Japan as one of the four greatest mystery novels ever written in the language, it has never before appeared in English.

In the Celtic Renaissance château known as the Hall of Black Death, a family descended from the Medici through the sorceress-consort Bianca Capello has kept four foreign musicians sealed within its walls for forty years. When the first violinist is found dead with her corpse glowing with an unearthly phosphorescence and the locked room undisturbed, a document surfaces in the hand of the mansion’s long-dead patriarch. It is a prophecy naming six members of the household and the method by which each will be slain.

As Norizumi races to prevent the next murder, he finds himself contending not only with a killer of extraordinary cunning but with the accumulated sorcery and science of four centuries, encrypted in a grimoire that was old when the Inquisition was young. The translation, by Vox Day, is the first-ever English translation of Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken. Now available on Amazon for Kindle and audiobook.

You can probably see why I was so interested in making it available to the English-reading world after reading this description from Athos, which it produced when I first started delving into Japan’s library of untranslated texts for books that would be particularly interesting for me to read. At that time, I had not really thought about Castalia putting out translations into English, I was just in search of something new and different to read.

In Japan, Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken occupies a position for which there is no precise Western equivalent. It is counted as one of the three great “strange books” — the sandai kisho — in the entire history of Japanese detective fiction. The designation is less an honorific than a warning: these are the novels said to “cause mental disturbance upon reading,” works so structurally peculiar and intellectually dense that they have generated their own mythology. The novel is often described as the only true Gothic romance ever written in Japan, and Edogawa Ranpo, the father of Japanese mystery fiction, publicly praised it — writing an introduction to the 1935 first edition that helped establish its reputation as a landmark.

The novel’s defining characteristic is its gengaku shumi — pedantry elevated to an architectural principle. The disciplines deployed across its pages include theology, demonology, pharmacology, astrology, botany, cosmology, religious studies, physics, medicine, heraldry, psychology, criminology, cryptography, and history. Japanese critics describe the effect not as decoration but as structural inversion: the vast pedantic apparatus overwhelms the mystery itself, producing what one reviewer called a “reversal of subject and object” — the erudition becomes the point, and the murders become its occasion. It has been called a “grand temple of detective fiction,” a novel that satisfies not only the mystery reader’s appetite but a voracious intellectual hunger across every field it touches.

That Shinchōsha, a publisher not especially known for detective fiction, issued the first edition in 1935 speaks to how much attention Oguri commanded at the time in the Japanese publishing world. The novel has been continuously republished since the end of the Pacific War, appearing from Kōdansha, Chikuma Shobō, Shakai Shisōsha, Tōkyō Sōgensha, Kawade Shobō, and Kadokawa in editions spanning seven decades, a publishing record that testifies to its enduring hold on Japanese literary culture. It remains famous as the novel most readers abandon after the first chapter, and the one that those who finish it never forget.

There is a very good chance that THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH will one day be a Library book. It certainly deserves a place next to THE NAME OF THE ROSE, FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM, and THE ISLAND OF THE DAY BEFORE. It’s the sort of book that you either never finish reading, or that you read repeatedly, again and again, and never entirely put down.

You can read an excerpt on the Library site, which won’t tell you anything that I haven’t told you already, but will let you see the cover as well as today’s other release, a very well-regarded Italian work of psychological fiction by Luigi Capuana.

A word of warning: there WILL be formatting issues, without any shadow of a doubt. A book of this size and complexity needs many eyes upon it to catch all of the issues; it wouldn’t surprise me if we ended up beating the record set by A THRONE OF BONES with 10 digital versions. So you know the drill, keep a list and send it to me if and when you finish the book.

UPDATE: THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH is the #1 bestseller in Japanese language fiction.

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Keeps the freaks, creeps, and Zero Historians at bay. Actually, it’s more like two books a day being released, and three or four are being translated. Since I don’t want to a) keep changing the sidebar or b) annoying readers with constant announcements, I’ve restored the book carousel on the right sidebar, so as new translations are released on Amazon, I’ll add them to the sidebar where you may happen to notice them within a day or two. There is also a little arrow icon underneath that allows you to flip through them and see if there is anything new if you wish; the displayed book will only change every five minutes because I can’t stand excessively active pages.

Now, here’s the question. Is it more annoying to have a second daily Castalia Library announcement of the day’s new books in addition to the daily book excerpt – currently we’re collectively reading through Machiavelli’s DISCOURSES ON LIVY – or would it be more irritating to have the new book announcements on the same email at the bottom? I’m just curious to see what people’s general preferences are.

And if you hate all email announcements, that’s fine, but then don’t subscribe to email lists and keep your opinion to yourself. That’s not an option for us, because people actually do want to know about these things.

On that note, today’s new books are SOREKARA by Natsume Soseki and KING JOSEPH’S BAGGAGE by Benito Perez Galdos, the 11th in the Episodios Nacionales and the first of the Second Series. This is the first time El equipaje del rey José has ever been published in English.

I completely understand the tidal wave of translations is going to rapidly become tedious for many readers here, but this is absolutely necessary for the Alexandria project, and the more people read, rate, and review the new books, the more the algorithm will support it and the more people are going to hear about it and take part in it.

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About six months ago, I attempted to automate my translation process. It’s not full automation, because every book is different and requires an amount of personal attention at various stages of the process, but the biggest problem was that the process required regular attention, so my ability to provide oversight was the bottleneck. That first attempt failed for technical reasons far beyond my ability to address, and since getting a translation or two a week was all that was necessary, I didn’t bother attempting to work around the problem.

Now that the infrastructure for Byron AI has been assembled and we’re building the training corpus, it occurred to me that it might give me a way around the translation bottleneck. After a little experimentation, this, in fact, proved to be the case. Over the weekend, the brand new Book Star spent its inaugural flight translating the six remaining novels of the Sangokushi, the extremely popular Japanese version of the famous Chinese book known as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms written by Eiji Yoshikawa.

What this means is that instead of translating one or two books per week, I can translate two or three books per day. And not only is has the speed been increased, but the quality of the translations are arguably a little better, since the possibility of copy-based mistakes has been significantly reduced. Consider how Grok regarded the first-ever English translation of a chapter from the ninth volume:

This is an outstanding literary translation of the “改元” (Change of Era Name / A New Reign-Name) section from Yoshikawa Eiji’s Sangokushi. It sits well above solid professional work and approaches the highest tier of literary historical fiction translation.

Strengths

• Prose quality and narrative voice: The English has genuine literary rhythm, cadence, and controlled irony that closely mirrors Yoshikawa’s elegant, slightly detached, occasionally wry classical-Japanese narrative style. Passages such as the commentary on phoenixes, qilins, and “momentum of the times,” the description of the emptying court, the Empress’s quiet departure, Zu Bi’s defiance and death, the forced abdication ceremony under a cold red sun, and the final image of the former emperor dwindling on a donkey are particularly fine—vivid, economical, and emotionally precise without overstatement.
• Dialogue and register: Court speech, ministerial pressure, the Emperor’s restrained dignity and later fury, Hua Xin’s insolence, and the private exchanges (Sima Yi’s silent look, Jia Xu’s choreography of refusal) feel natural and differentiated in English while retaining a formal, period-appropriate tone.
• Historical and cultural handling: Reign-names (Yankang → Huangchu), titles, omens, the Yao-Shun precedent, the Terrace of Abdication, and the ritual of repeated refusal are rendered accurately and gracefully. The translation neither exoticizes nor flattens the Chinese historical framework as filtered through a major Japanese novelist.
• Pacing and atmosphere: The slow, inexorable tightening of pressure, the shift from rumor to open coercion, the theatricality of the abdication rite, and the bleak coda are all sustained with excellent control. The text reads as literature, not as a “faithful” but stiff rendering.

Comparison to the scale anchors

• Clara Bell’s solid, serviceable 19th-century translations of classical fiction are competent and readable but often flatter, more Victorian-domestic in texture, and less attentive to stylistic nuance or ironic distance. This work is substantially more sophisticated in voice, imagery, and narrative intelligence.
• William Weaver’s best work achieves near-miraculous fidelity to Eco’s layered erudition, linguistic play, and structural complexity while remaining fluid and pleasurable in English. Yoshikawa’s text is more straightforward historical narrative with a classical Japanese literary overlay; it does not demand the same extreme virtuosity. The present translation comes very close to the ideal for this particular source—elegant, faithful in spirit and detail, and highly readable as English prose—but does not quite reach the rarefied height of Weaver at his peak with Eco.

Minor reservations (why not higher)

• Occasional slight smoothing or heightening of Yoshikawa’s already polished diction (common and usually beneficial in literary translation of this material).
• A few title renderings and minor phrasing choices are debatable (though none are inaccurate or damaging).
• The translation is so polished that a reader unfamiliar with the Japanese might not feel the underlying classical-Chinese allusiveness quite as sharply as in the original, but this is an almost inevitable trade-off and is handled with taste.

Overall, this is excellent work: accurate, stylish, atmospheric, and fully successful as literary English. It would stand up very well in a published edition of Yoshikawa.

Another Red Team member, Gemini, concurred:

This is an exceptional translation. It effortlessly captures the register of classic historical narrative—crisp, authoritative, yet engaging—matching the high-literary standard set by top-tier English translators of East Asian and European historical fiction. It reads like original, published English prose while preserving the precise tactical pacing of traditional Chinese/Japanese historical accounts. Overall, this is a polished, publication-ready piece of work that comfortably surpasses standard translation work (easily clearing the Clara Bell benchmark) and flirts with master-level literary prose.

This raises the obvious question: what on Earth is Castalia going to do with 700+ annual translations? We obviously can’t turn all of them into leatherbound editions. And the answer is simple: we’re going to create a limited form of something that could be described as Castalia Unlimited, which would be a misnomer since there will be limits. Starting whenever we get it going, so sometime between November and January, paid subscribers to the Castalia Library substack will not only receive the weekly ebook as they do already, but they will also be given access to the Castalia Digital Library and permitted to download up to three additional free ebooks per month.

It won’t just be translations available there either. The Castalia Junior Classics will be there, in English and other languages. A number of Library works will be there. Most of my own works in foreign languages will also be available there, as well as those of any Castalia authors who a) aren’t on Kindle Select and b) give us their permission. It won’t be quite as good a deal as Kindle Unlimited in sheer volume terms, but the quality is absolutely assured to be considerably higher. So, if you’d like to assure yourself access to the Castalia Digital Library, consider subscribing to the Library substack now.

And speaking of translations and the Library site, this week’s book has been sent out to the subscribers and is now available on Amazon as Kindle, KU, and audiobook. The title is THE HAUNTED FLAME and it is the second volume of Japanese literary great Naoki Sanjugo’s The Chronicle of the Southern Kingdom, the 1930 novel that made its author the most popular historical novelist in Japan and gave his name to the illustrious Naoki Prize. It is a dark story of faction and inheritance in which the weapons are patronage, rumor, marriage, arson, and occult curses, and in which the men responsible for the Meiji Restoration are still young, poor, and powerless.

The old lord has a legitimate heir and a favorite concubine, and they are violently opposed to each other. Shimazu Nariakira is forty years old and still waiting to inherit Satsuma. Oyura wants the domain for her own son. Between them stand the samurai of the Otame faction, who have chosen their side and will pay for it in exile and in blood. Not even their graves will protect them; the angry lord’s fury even reaches down into the earth to exhume what is buried there.

And in a sealed room, a sorcerer grinds his brush in his own blood mixed with that of a dog’s, and paints a demon-god onto white silk. One after another, Nariakira’s children sicken and die of causes no physician can explain.

Far below the great houses, the ruin spreads outward. A sister sells herself to a man who is using her for advancement. A brother comes to Osaka to find out why. A street singer, a disgraced storyteller, and a woman with nothing left to sell are pulled into a conspiracy that was never meant to include them. And in Kagoshima, two low-ranking young men named Saigo Kichinosuke and Okubo Toshimichi begin to understand that the fight over one domain is the first tremor of something that will take the whole country.

Then smoke appears on the horizon at Shinagawa, and the Black Ships come.

An excerpt is available on Castalia Library. As a side note, I should mention that I changed the name of the first volume to THE CURSED KINDLING since I thought it was a better and more descriptive title, although it may take a while for Amazon to implement the change.

UPDATE: We may as well call the subscription Castalia Unlimited. Upon further review, three books per month in addition to the 4-5 weekly books is infinitely more than Kindle Unlimited provides, because KU only lets you borrow up to 20 books total, and you lose all access to them once you stop your subscription.

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