Castalia House Just Finished Japan’s Greatest Adventure Series, Now They’re Translating Its Sherlock Holmes
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.
In Okamoto’s own words, from his 1927 account of how the series began:
“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. 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.”
He was right. The Hanshichi stories are set in a world of constables and private thief-takers, city magistrates and Edo back alleys, where logic runs alongside folklore and every strange occurrence has a very human root underneath it. They are the exact opposite of what the modern publishing industry produces: specific, period-grounded, morally serious, and free of any agenda beyond telling a good story about how people get into trouble and how a clever man unravels it.
This announcement follows the completion of Castalia’s first major translation project: The Secret Scrolls of Naruto, the six-volume first English translation of Yoshikawa Eiji’s Naruto Hichō, the 1926-27 serial that made Yoshikawa the most widely read author in Japanese history and created the modern Japanese adventure novel. All six volumes are now on Amazon in Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and audiobook.
The complete Secret Scrolls of Naruto series:
Volume 5: The Tsurugisan Scroll
The Hanshichi Casebook Volume 1: The Ghost Master will be on Amazon in Kindle and KU next week. Subscribe to Castalia Library at stack.castalialibrary.com to get it this week as part of the paid subscriber ebook program.
Are there any plans of Castalia to publish their translation in printed form? I find the catalogue very interesting, but digital books are just a deal breaker, for me at least.