Mondays are the day we announce the release of the new weekly Library translation. This week’s translation is, like its predecessor, the first-ever English translation of an Eiji Yoshikawa novel, exactly 100 years after it was first published in Japan, THE SECRET SCROLLS OF NARUTO: The Edo Scroll. Edo, of course, is the old name for Tokyo, as it was known thoughout the era of the Tokugawa Shogunate, until it was renamed in 1868.Edo, the 1760s. A junk dealer works his way through the back streets of Surugadai in midwinter, calling out for old rags and broken crockery. He is not a junk dealer. He is Mankichi, the Tenma detective from Osaka, and he has traced a missing woman to a shuttered house with a changed nameplate and bars on the windows. What he finds inside is worse than he imagined — and the people who put her there are already coming back.The second book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto shifts the action from the open roads and waterways of the Kamigata to the warren of Tokugawa-era Tokyo, where the conspiracy runs deeper, the villains are closer, and nobody can be trusted. Two killers strike a deal over saké: one will murder the swordsman-monk Gennojō, the other will claim the woman he has been hunting since Osaka. Underground chambers, a great urban fire, a swordfight in total darkness on a plum-scented path, a deathbed confession that transforms a pickpocket, and a midnight ambush at Sensō-ji temple — this is the book where Yoshikawa Eiji earns his reputation as the Alexandre Dumas of Japan.I can attest that these books are very, very good. If you’re interested in being among the first to ever read these books outside of Japan, you can support the Library’s translation efforts by becoming a paid subscriber to Castalia Library or you can simply pick it up on Kindle, KU, or audiobook.It should be mentioned that the Library’s translation efforts are not limited to Japanese literature. We already have two translators actively working on Spanish literature; the first three books in the landmark 46-volume Episodios Nacionales by Benito Pérez Galdós have already been translated and will be made available in May. We have also completed hitherto-untranslated works from Italian and German. The translation work is being done at a very high level of quality, one that consistently rates higher than the average translated classic.DISCUSS ON SGThe post The Edo Scroll appeared first on Vox Popoli.