In my own special place there is no little prince from a distant star, nor a pleasant river bank from where sounds the clear strains of Pan’s pipes. My special place is the house in Tokyo where I was born and grew up, which was destroyed in an air raid during the war. I can still recall how, when I joined the mass evacuation of primary school children leaving for the countryside, I kept looking back at it longingly over my shoulder as I was led away. No trace remains of that house now, nor of the house in the shade of the big Zelkova tree next door. And I’ll probably never again get to meet that little imp of a girl who lives there.

Or so I believed for ten years, until one day I ran into an old friend by chance on the train and he happened to mention her to me. “She still remembers you, you know,” she said. “She sometimes wishes she could meet up with that boy next-door who was so good at the high bar. She sounded really quite wistful.”….

About the Author: Tomiko Inui (1924-2002) has won the Mainichi Publishing Culture Award and the Akaitori Award for Children’s Literature, and was a runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen prize. The Secret of the Blue Glass is the first of her books to be translated into English.

Ginny Tapley Takemori lives in rural Japan and has translated fiction by more than a dozen early modern and contemporary Japanese writers, from bestsellers Ryu Murakami and Kyotaro Nishimura to literary greats Izumi Kyoka and Okamoto Kido. Her most recent book publications include Miyuki Miyabe’s five-volume Puppet Master and Tomiko Inui’s The Secret of the Blue Glass, shortlisted for the Marsh Award, and her short fiction translations have appeared in Granta, Freeman’s, Words Without Borders, and a number of anthologies. Her translation of Sayaka Murata’s Akutagawa Prize-winning novel Convenience Store Woman was published in June 2018 to great acclaim. Her translation of Kyoko Nakajima’s The Little House is forthcoming in 2019. Read the BOA interview: Ginny Tapley Takemori on Translating Convenience Store Woman.