More Words, Deeper Hole

In old Edo, the past was never forgotten. It lived alongside the present in dark corners and in the shadows. In these tales, award-winning author Miyuki Miyabe explores the ghosts of early modern Japan and the spaces of the living world—workplaces, families, and the human soul—that they inhabit. Written with a journalistic eye and a fantasist’s heart, Apparitions brings the restless dead, and those who encounter them, to life.

Three years ago this week, Haikasoru launched with the publication of All You Need Is Kill and The Lord of the Sands of Time. Since then we’ve brought you the best in Japanese science fiction, fantasy, and horror, have experimented with hardcover releases and magical realism, brought you videogame tie-in novels for Ico and Metal Gear Solid and have even won a few awards. Heck, Good Luck, Yukikaze just received second place at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards over the weekend! And with our anthology The Future Is Japanese, we’ve started introducing original content!

To celebrate, we’re doing one of our famed giveaway essay contests! Just write a comment, in the comments section of this post, on the Haikasoru title you’ve enjoyed the most, and you’ll be five lucky and talented winners will be able to select any Haikasoru title they want as their prize. We ship anywhere, and we read English, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Greek, and Chinese. (And if you have all the Haikasoru titles already, I’ll flip you a copy of Genocidal Organ, which nobody has yet. We pick the winners on noon Friday, so get to typin’!

I am going to go ahead and assume that no readers out there are currently wondering what would happen if aliens invaded ancient Japan, or how time traveling cyborgs would fight them off. Even if the cyborgs had been skipping through time in an effort to block the xenocidal menace and were aided by a snippy, AI-controlled spaceship, this is probably not a question that keeps people up at night. Ogawa, on the other hand, has let the scenario occupy his Seiun Award winning brain long enough to unleash The Lord of the Sands of Time on an unsuspecting populace; Haikasoru then chose this as one of its four launch titles.

The Rounds are humans with the sex organs of both genders. Artificially created to test the limits of the human body in space, they are now a minority, despised and hunted by the terrorist group Vessel of Life. Aboard Jupiter-I, a space station orbiting the gas giant that shares its name, the Rounds have created their own society with a radically different view of gender and of life itself. Security chief Shirosaki keeps the peace between the Rounds and the typically gendered “Monaurals,” but when a terrorist strike hits the station, the balance of power and tolerance is at risk...and an entire people is targeted for genocide.