Misplaced In Translation: 10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights

Nat Harrington Pilate turned again and did not look back. It was only when he had reached the walk leading to his residential chambers that it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen the expression on Jesus’s face when the sentence was pronounced. He couldn’t even clearly remember whether or not the carpenter had still been standing there. But of course—he had to have been there. Where else could he have gone? Mitsuse Ryu’s Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights (2011 [1967], translated by Alexander O. Smith “with” [sic] Elye J. Alexander) is billed by its back cover blurb as “The GREATEST Japanese science fiction novel of all time.” This might seem like a bold claim even from the perspective of English-language readers, who are better positioned to evaluate the field of Japanese SFF than most other languages, though even Japanese SFF in translation remains marginal within the field of (written) SFF published in English. (A brief caveat: for the purposes of this discussion I’m…