The Translation Manufacturing Company and Other Writings

Can literature be manufactured like cotton? Togawa Shūkotsu’s satirical Translation Manufacturing Company imagines an industry in which incomprehensibility becomes a selling point. Around it, this anthology gathers twenty other complete Japanese works, each with a distinctive voice and a sharply observed world.

Yanagawa Shun’yō recounts three unnerving encounters, including a courtesan who disappears into a cupboard and a rented house whose garden refuses to yield a familiar path. Ikuta Shungetsu turns happiness, sorrow, and a squid’s ink into unsettling poetic images. Momota Sōji’s labor poems move from a quiet May Day morning to demonstrations, soldiers, pickaxes, and collective hopes; Ueda Susumu follows factory workers who discover a clandestine leaflet.

Other writers debate painting, expose conditions of private confinement of psychiatric patients, demand an end to sexual double standards, and remember lives shaped by illness, love, and theater. Ichijima Shunjō considers eight settings for reading, while Sōma Taizō closes the collection with a funeral procession whose mourners cannot stop laughing. Complete source endings, verse line breaks, original emphasis, and concise explanatory notes accompany this new English translation. AI-assisted translation, prepared and edited by Valentin Sarić.