So this is wild.
As one of my new year's resolutions, I want to read more books in 2026. I started with a collection of ghost stories centered on the area I live in (which I deeply want to discuss but also don't want to doxx myself). Then after that, I started 変な家, which has been pretty heavily advertised over the last few years (and I think has a movie version that came out?). @miss-prince was enjoying hearing about the first couple chapters so much that she wanted to join in, and so she started reading the translation, Strange Houses, alongside me.
It was a lot of fun! We finished our respective copies of the novel, and were discussing this morning about the themes such as how very human foibles can easily lead into both the literal and metaphorical structures in which people need to then find space for themselves, and about how history is often directed by people who are on the margins of the "main narrative" and such, and then we realized something.
There's an inconsistency between the two versions. (There's a couple, actually, but usually they could be explained as intentional translation decisions made to preserve thematic resonance.) I won't get too into the specifics, as it's a spoiler, but in the Japanese version, Henna Ie, one character's fate is arrest and trial, while in the English Strange Houses, they go missing.
I also brought up a mystery plot point that never gets answered from the first chapter, and @miss-prince tells me that they address it again in the afterward. Confused, I start to read the last few pages of the book, and she says, "No, the afterword."
me: There...isn't an afterword?
her: Yes there is. It's from the perspective of the contractor character.
me: It does not exist in the Japanese version.
her: What?!
She then read me the afterword in the English translation, which contained some key ancillary information that was NOT in my copy of the book.
Fascinated, she did some googling and found this blog post from the translator: (caution, there are spoilers)
Jim goes on a somewhat spoilery journey looking back on an issue encountered in translating Strange Houses by Uketsu, which ended up making
So it turns out that there was an afterword added to the bunkobon reprint of the book, but most fascinatingly, it's not the exact same as the one in the English translation.
I kind of love this.
It's a bit frustrating I suppose, given that I read the original print of the book and didn't get the information (though thankfully I was able to put a lot of those pieces together on my own lol), but it's made us reading both versions even more fun and engaging.
What a weird and cool circumstance!
Next we're going to tackle 変な絵 (Strange Pictures), of which I do own the bunkobon version, so we'll see how that goes as well.
