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Takaoka’s Travels 

Forthcoming: May 14, 2024

"An arresting novel that readers will cherish."
— David Keymer, starred review, Library Journal

“Takaoka’s Travels will somehow remind you, simultaneously and impossibly, of a hundred books you’ve loved and nothing you’ve ever read. The plot moves in eddies, playfully forgetting and then remembering itself. . . . It’s rare to read a book and feel not only that you don’t know where it’s taking you but, over and over again, that you don’t know where it took you, and I can’t stop thinking about the experience.”
— Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations

“I love Takaoka’s Travels so much that my novel The Third Love features a character inspired by Shibusawa’s hero, Prince Takaoka. With the publication of this translation, readers around the world will be able to enjoy this marvelous book!”
— Hiromi Kawakami, author of Strange Weather in Tokyo

“Takaoka’s Travels is a fantastical allegorical novel that traverses a man’s dreams in the name of Buddhist devotion.”
— Aleena Ortiz, Foreword

A fantasy set in the ninth century, Takaoka’s Travels recounts the adventures of a Japanese prince-turned-monk on a pilgrimage to India. As Prince Takaoka and his companions pass through faraway lands, the rules of the ordinary world are upended, and they find curiosities and miracles wherever they go. The travelers encounter strange creatures—a white ape who guards a harem of bird-women, beasts who feed on dreams, a dog-headed man who can see hundreds of years into the future. On the high seas, their ship is boarded by ghostly pirates and driven back by supernatural winds, and still they push on. At every turn, Prince Takaoka is drawn to the beauty around him, whether it takes the form of a perfectly shaped pearl or a giant blood-red flower, but such beauty proves to be extremely dangerous. Seductive and mysterious, offering high adventure yet deeply human, this is a novel that transcends all expectations.

TATSUHIKO SHIBUSAWA (1928–1987) published only one novel, Takaoka’s Travels, but it is considered a touchstone of Japanese counterculture. He was a prolific translator of French literature, known for his translations of the Marquis de Sade and the surrealists. In addition to Takaoka's Travels, he published several volumes of short fiction and numerous essays dealing with topics ranging from dreams to the occult.

DAVID BOYD is an assistant professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat (Pushkin Press, 2017) won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. He has translated three novellas by Hiroko Oyamada: The Factory (2019), The Hole (2020), and Weasels in the Attic (2022). He won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the second time for his translation of The Hole. With Sam Bett, he co-translated three novels by Mieko Kawakami: Breasts and Eggs (2020), Heaven (2021), and All the Lovers in the Night (2022).