UPDATE: Colorful by Mori Eto

Hi everyone,

I’ve got good and bad news for you.

I’ll start with the good news:

“Colorful” by Mori Eto has been officially chosen as one of the novels to be translated into English by the Japanese Literature Publishing Project (JLPP). JLPP gets Japanese novels translated into English and promotes them to overseas publishing companies.

They’ve been very successful so far in successfully getting those English-translated Japanese novels into the foreign book market (for a list of the titles they’ve worked on so far, here’s a link: http://www.jlpp.go.jp/jp/published/published_titles_e.pdf)

Now onto the bad news…

Because this blog was started as a way of promoting Japanese books that haven’t been translated into English, it defeats the purpose of this blog to be working on a title that has already been translated. In addition, it is not my intention to compete with JLPP and have them possibly run into problems getting this title published because an English translation is already available online.

What does that mean? As much as I hate to have to do this, I’ll be dropping this project.

I only found out about JLPP having picked up “Colorful” after I had already finished translating the first chapter, so I have posted this chapter, but that will be the last of the translations for this title. When JLPP does find an overseas publishing company to publish this title in its English glory, please support them and buy a copy!

End with good news!

Since I hate to leave things off on a sad note, let’s wrap up this post with some good news! Since I’ll be dropping “Colorful” that’ll allow me to pick up another series to translate.

My next project will be: “Soap Bubble” by Nonami Asa. It’s a heartwarming comedy about a delinquent who steals from seniors and women for a living somehow ending up in a remote countryside town where an elderly woman mistakes him for her grandson! Cue chaos.

Well then, until next time!