White Dog, Black Crow
an excerpt from The Holy Family by Hideo Furukawa
translated by Kendall Heitzman

Bird’s-Eye View
a chapter from Sheltering from Reality by Kyōhei Sakaguchi
translated by Sam Malissa

After two years in a first-floor apartment, the tenant realizes that a certain cat would pass along the street in front at precisely the same time each day; following the cat, the tenant sees it disappear into a vacant house; when the tenant first moved into the apartment, the house wasn’t vacant
a story by Tomoka Shibasaki
translated by Polly Barton

Selections from
Communications from a Wandering Comet
five poems by Makoto Takayanagi
translated by Michael Emmerich

Cathedral
a story by Hiromi Kawakami
translated Ted Goossen

Bearman
a story by Natsuki Ikezawa
translated by Chris Corker

Other People’s Ghost Stories
a story by Kelly Link


The Heron
a selection from the novel Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

Fish in Muddy Waters
graphic vignettes by Satoshi Kitamura

Four Poems
Sawako Nakayasu

A Bear’s Tale
a story by Laird Hunt

Utō: A Noh Play
from the modern Japanese translation by Seikō Itō
translated and with an introduction by Jay Rubin

What do you do when a straightforward translation sounds weird?
Remarks from twelve translators

Jeffrey Angles on peculiar poetry and lucid prose
Sonja Arntzen on the power of names
David Boyd in defense of weirdness
Ted Goossen on translating onomatopoeias
Kendall Heitzman on discovering what a thing meant
Sam Malissa on putting the pieces together
Jay Rubin on the freedom to improvise
Mariko Saitō on Japanese loanwords in Korean
Motoyuki Shibata on “you”
Asa Yoneda on rooms to dream in
Hitomi Yoshio on titles and cover designs
Anna Zielinska-Elliott on the temptation to add

Contributors

Credits