Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with Jim Rion, the translator who brought Uketsu’s viral Strange series to English-reading audiences worldwide.

A short intro today, because this interview went long! Last week, I had the absolute delight of speaking with Jim Rion, an English language translator who had a hunch about a popular Japanese YouTuber and pitched his idea to Pushkin.

Today, that author, Uketsu, is a global sensation whose Strange mysteries have gone viral around the world. Each of the Strange books places an innocent concept—a child’s drawings, an architectural floor plan—at the center of a bizarre and sinister mystery.

Through fake investigative interviews and images, Uketsu’s intricate mysteries elegantly build and collapse in deeply satisfying ways.

Jim and I talked about the inside baseball of translating, what’s popular in Japanese horror right now, and his own relationship to the horror genre. To offer a small insight into Jim’s general vibe: I was utterly mystified by the International Date Line, and Jim very kindly and non-judgmentally helped me schedule our call.

If the interview cuts off in your inbox, click “Read Online” in the top right corner to view this as a blog-style web page!

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Michelle Delgado: I've been wanting to reach out to you since I read your translator’s note in Strange Houses! Now that Strange Buildings is out, it was the perfect time. Thank you so much for being willing to hop on a call.

Jim Rion: It's very exciting to be part of all of this, so I'm extremely happy to do it.

Let’s start at the beginning! How did you arrive in your current career as a translator? Did you have a relationship to Japan previously?

I have a master's degree in German language, linguistics, and literature. I did that at the University of Iowa, and obviously, when you're studying languages at the graduate level, there's translation involved. I've always been interested in language and literature, but it was never like, “I'm going to be a translator.”

Japan was not even on my radar. In college, I was a cinema buff guy—I was watching Kurosawa movies, and ninjas were cool and all that stuff—but it's not like I was ever thinking about being a Japanese translator.

And then I came to Japan, sort of by accident. I was living in Germany, and I ran out of money and things to do. I was looking for the next step. And a friend of mine was teaching English in Japan, and said, “There’s an opening of my school. Why don't you come to Japan?” Sure. Why not? Twenty-two years later, I'm still here.

I came to Japan in 2004, and I did not speak any Japanese. I started from the very beginning with the basic writing system. Then I was teaching English, and companies kept going out of business, so I kept losing my job, and I kept having to find new jobs. Luckily, it was never super hard, but every time it happened, I was like, “I’ve got to do something else.”

The last time, I was finally at a point where my Japanese felt strong enough that I could branch out of just teaching English. I started out by what they call translation checking, which is basically an editorial job—your basic, nuts-and-bolts translator. Corporate websites, pamphlets, museum catalogs, just whatever came my way.

In 2018, [there was] this Facebook group I was on—one of the members was a guy named Edward Lipsett, who was basically Kurodahan Press. They did tons of really niche science fiction and horror and fantasy Japanese books into English translations. Very, very small publisher, but we did a lot of Cthulhu mythos stuff. He posted this Asamatsu Ken book we ended up calling Kthulhu Reich. It's a short story collection of Cthulhu mythos stories set in Nazi Germany, importing all of that, like, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Hitler's-obsessed-with-the-occult stuff, and mixing that with Cthulhu.

I was like, this is me. I studied in Germany. I've been a horror fan my entire life. I've got to do this. And so I did it, and it went okay—it was a learning process. Obviously, I was still relatively new to the whole business. But it went well enough that the author recommended me to Kikuchi Hideyuki, who did Vampire Hunter D. I did a Cthulhu Western for him. I was like, wow, this is a lot of fun.

And then came the pandemic. And I was like, wow, I have a lot of time. I started looking at books, and I found a book I wanted to translate. I pitched it to all kinds of publishers, and nobody said anything except for Pushkin—who said “No, but we like what you had to say about this book. Would you be willing to tell us about other books and do readers reports?” From there, I did the Devil's Flute Murders, and then along came Uketsu.

Life is just a series of little decisions, isn’t it? You don't know where it's gonna lead in the end.

It’s wild. Ten years ago, if you asked me, “Are you going to be a literary translator in Japan?” No! I just want to keep the lights on. But yeah, here we are.

You already anticipated one of my next questions—what is your relationship to the horror genre? I was snooping around on your blog, and I saw that you like John Langan and Neil McRobert. I love their work, too.

I'm 48 right? I grew up in the ‘80s, and I was reading Stephen King way too young. Then in the ‘90s, we had this sort of mini boom of really, really crazy transgressive stuff like, Clive Barker's Books of Blood. We had all of these wild little paperbacks. [John] Skipp and [Craig] Spector were these—I don't know if you've heard of these two editors, they made all of these anthologies in the ‘90s with, like, zombie sex stories.

When I was little, like seven or eight years old, my grandma actually gave me a collection of Alfred Hitchcock Presents stories. Back in those days, mystery and horror were really sort of mixed. All of these stories, like “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” were in that anthology. I was reading these macabre things, like Poe and Algernon Blackwood, when I was really young.

So, yeah—horror is deep, deep, deep in my blood. It's funny, though, because there was a long period when I didn't read much. In college, I was much more into fantasy and science fiction. It wasn't until the last few years when I sort of had this resurgence of interest in horror. And now I get to work with it.

I grew up on The Twilight Zone and Scooby-Doo and Ray Bradbury stories—I was always more of like a fantasy / sci fi reader. I liked crime and mystery, and I'd never really considered myself a horror reader.

Looking back and understanding what I now know about the horror genre, I realize that it’s actually a very blurry line. There’s so much overlap.

Especially in that really old stuff—it really was everywhere.

I promise we're going to get to the Strange series, but continuing on this line—so much has been written about Western horror and J-horror and all the cultural exchange there.

But you have a unique perspective—to translate these stories, you become so immersed in them. As you've gotten deeper into literary translations, are there themes or ideas that you notice appear more frequently in Japanese horror? Or aspects of Japanese horror that differ from Western horror?

It's a very good question. This is absolutely a thing I think about all the time. Interestingly enough, the Uketsu [novels] have been relatively straightforward. There are some of those ties to the history of Japanese mystery. But like to get the really different cultural perspectives, there's books that aren't yet in English.

There's this whole tradition of kaidan—basically ghost stories, but they have a certain structure of urban legends that goes back hundreds of years. It's a very, very distinct approach to storytelling with its own set of tropes that inform a very, very wide stretch of Japanese horror. I think that would be really fun to play with in English.

Ghost stories, obviously, are easy to carry over. We have ghosts, they have ghosts. [But] there's this idea that ghosts come about as a result of a transgression, in the Christian Western mythology, or whatever word you want to use. Whereas in Japan, the transgression is different. It's not a sin, it's sort of an excess.

When you die in a state of too much emotion, or some resentment lingers, it’s like this residual emotion is a destructive force. Like a stain on the surface of reality. It’s not about a ghost seeking revenge. And we get that in America—in The Shining, the Overlook Hotel is a Japanese ghost story, right?

Then there's this idea of what they call kegare. On my blog, I wrote about a book called Zan'e, which is a kaidan sort of story about a stain that happened because of some terrible, terrible accident. It spreads—people who come into contact [with it] carry it all over Japan. There are these haunted houses and people dying, and the idea of an impurity that can be conveyed through touch and through experience, which is one of the aspects of Japanese horror that I really want to make more prevalent in English. I think it's really cool.

» Read Jim’s blog on Zan’e!

My brain is flashing to Ju-on: The Grudge and Ringu, and that specific idea of contamination and spread that I don't think we really see as much in Western horror. It feels like it appears more as demonic possession or something.

I learned about the Kowasugi Files from another author I interviewed—those are totally that urban legend storytelling.

I actually wanted to ask you—because I was looking at your blog, and you had the book by Shiraishi Koji. Why do you have that?! How did you get that?

I'm a little eBay freak. I'm always on eBay, just looking around at stuff.

I had trouble finding it here in Japan, and it doesn't have the DVD.

I need to figure out how to burn it for you!

[Shiraishi Koji] is one of my favorite directors. He's amazing. Noroi and Cult and Occult. Kowasugi Files definitely deal with the kaidan and the urban legends and these traditions, obviously in a very new and fresh and unusual way. He does some wild work.

I don't know if it's going to make it into English, but About a Place in the Kinki Region is his newest movie. It's based on a book that just got an English translation. Such a good book. I haven't read the translation, but the original—I was desperate to get that in English, but they beat me to it.

It was one of my favorite books of last year. Very cool, very much in that fake documentary style, which is super big right now in Japan. It's everywhere.

That's something I love about the the Strange series, too. They're so self-referential. There's this plausibility to them—you know it’s fiction, but it strikes that note of what if…?

There are three authors right now at the top of this wave of what they're calling fake documentary fiction—Uketsu. Sesuji, who did About a Place in the Kinki Region. And then another author called Nashi, who is much more complex. One of his books is a collection of short stories called 6—very difficult to Google.

6 is wild, okay. It's a very standard kind of background where this newspaper reporter has gone missing, and the editor is trying to find him, and he's tracking him down, and all of this weird stuff is going on. But I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the entire book is a metaphor or an exploration of samsara—the six levels of reincarnation in Buddhism, from the heavens down to hell.

» Read Jim’s blog about 6 by Nashi!

Well, I don't even need an excuse to go buy more books. I will absolutely be reading these.

Spread the word. Let the publishers know that people are hungry for this. Keep me in the job!

Pushkin is doing so much great work—not just the fact that they're releasing these books, but that they're so beautifully designed. It feels like they’re designed to be photographed, or to be an art object in your home.

That's definitely part of the industry now. It's got to be BookTokable, it's got to be Bookstagrammable. I'm not a designer, but even I can see they've got a design language and an overarching concept. No matter how many books come out, they know how to fit them all together. You could put them on your shelf and they fit, they're a set. It's very cool.

It's fun to have a new series to look forward to, and one that’s being translated so quickly! One of my other favorite Japanese writers is Natsuo Kirino—I can see that she’s written around thirty novels and short story collections, but only a handful are available in English so far.

There's an overall trend [with] authors in Japan, to have so many books. I hope we can hold out for more Uketsu. Strange Maps is on its way, but I haven't heard anything after that.

If more come out, I will read them all happily!

I'm so glad that the reaction has been so positive. I hoped that people would like the books in English, but there's no guarantees in life. Just the idea that I would be like, “You know, these are good books, these are fun books, and I think people will like them.” And Pushkin said, “Yeah, let's try it.” And it's gone this far—it feels good.

Is it too much to say that you are the person who who brought Western readers Uketsu? Do you feel like Uketsu’s popularity was an inevitable force, or was your pitch to Pushkin the turning point?

It was going to happen. It was a timing thing—I was early, I was able to get them to Pushkin before anybody else. I must have brought them up to Pushkin at the end of 2022, and in 2023, they did all of the negotiations and signed the contracts. I started the translation in 2024.

Just after I'd finished the initial draft of the Strange Pictures translation, I got contacted by someone from an international rights agency, saying, “You know, this Uketsu author was the talk of the Frankfurt International Book Rights Fair. Pushkin has the English rights, but I'm going to be representing it for all of the other languages, and we want to use your translation in our marketing.”

So, yeah—I was lucky enough to get there first, but there was no question that someone was going to get there. And the reason I got there first is because my wife showed me the videos on YouTube, and she's like, “Oh, they've got books. You should try to get them translated.” She says that about every book that she likes—so I am willing to give her partial credit, but also like, come on.

A team effort!

It was a team effort. She introduced me to Uketsu, and it was really cool. And then I found the books, and she was like, “Oh, the book is really good.” And, yeah, timing. It was all just lucky timing.

I have that ego, right? I have that thing like, “Oh, well, you're the one who brought Uketso to the world.” But not really. I'd love to be able to say that, but it was just timing.

Well, I think a lot of people would claim that, so I think it's a credit to you that you see it differently.

I’m sure Uketsu’s popularity on YouTube was a factor, but you’ve also written about the accessibility of his writing style and the way that builds a relationship with the reader. If you had to define a moment or factor that really made you feel confident pitching the first Uketsu translation to Pushkin, what would that be?

The biggest factor was [that] I really like these, but the thing that made me confident they would work in English is that mix of accessibility and freshness. I'm not gonna say that the Strange books are the greatest literature ever written. They're popcorn books. But they're in that really tight, almost ideal popcorn book shape, right? They're quick, they're easy to read. The pacing is on.

I don't know, I haven't read every book, [but] there's just not a lot out there like [the Strange books]. The way they work together, the interaction between the the text and the pictures. And, obviously, a lot of it is just purely about accessibility. It has the kind of repetition to make sure people don't get lost.

I think that's that's really friendly to a very, very large audience. The scary bits aren't too scary, the gory bits aren't too gory. It's just very, very big tent. I felt that early on.

I agree. Some stories are simple because they’re simple, and other stories are simple because they take a complex story and intentionally express it very clearly. That’s what I feel in these books.

They aren’t simple or shallow, they’re well articulated and well crafted. I mean, I read so much, and sometimes I just want a book I can tear through, you know? Without feeling like it's talking down to me.

I think that's an excellent way to put it. Because if you really get into it, Strange Pictures is a really complex narrative. He really does a good job of guiding the reader and making sure that you don't get lost—which is such a blessing when you are translating. It makes things much easier if I don't have to go back like, “Wait a second, is that clue? I have to go back and reword that…” It was crafted very carefully.

Do you know the secret behind Uketsu's identity? Have you met?

No, I do not. I have spoken to Uketsu on Zoom with the camera off. He's a man, probably in his thirties. He's a little cagey about that. He won't talk about his family, so all I know is that he lives up near Tokyo, and that he worked in a grocery store and didn't want people to recognize him from his weird YouTube channel, which is why he wears the suit and the mask. It's a privacy thing.

At this point, I don't think he can take it off. The Uketsu brand is rolling like a freight train.

We live in an age where everybody is monetizing every personal, intimate detail about themselves. There is something really cool about someone who's choosing not to do that.

I helped him with a speech that he wrote, and we have had some interactions. He just seems like a super down to earth, nice guy. Despite all of the weird, weird stuff that he does, he just seems kind and thoughtful.

I'm glad to be part of that, because there are people who would turn this into a circus. You know, brand sponsorships and monetized Instagram channels and everything. So, yeah, it's pretty cool.

I hadn’t made the connection until now, but I guess in the US, we have Chuck Tingle, who conceals his identity behind a pink pillowcase.

I guess it is kind of like Chuck Tingle! But a bit more anonymous and little bit more mainstream.

There's some serious marketing power behind Uketsu. I bought Strange Pictures because display ads were following me all over the internet. The ads didn't even say what they were for. It was just “Strange Pictures.” I was so intrigued.

It’s really, really on point. I'm a translator. I'm here in my office—this is just a house. I don't have a lot of connection [to the marketing]—which is not to say the publishers shut me out or anything. I'm [just] not part of of all of those conversations.

The first time I saw they made a book trailer for it, I was like, “Oh, wow. You guys are really pulling out all the stops.” There’s merch. I was interpreting for interviews with The Guardian in London. They really, really worked hard on these books, which obviously has paid off.

I don't know why these books got that treatment, but other books don't. But I'm glad that they did, because it has obviously made a difference.

Hopefully it will open some doors for other authors as well.

I think it can. I can only mostly talk about the British market, because my direct contact is with Pushkin. But this is a second year in a row where a Japanese novel has been a big deal. Before Uketsu was Butter, in Polly Barton's translation.

I think you're right—this is probably going to open some more doors. It's definitely opened doors for me, which is crazy. I think only good things can come from this.

I actually had a translation question I wanted to get your take on. A few years ago, I read a wonderful Icelandic mystery in translation. The writing was gorgeous, so when I found out the author had a horror novel, I was eager to pick it up.

But in the horror novel, the writing felt very stilted. There was lots of awkward phrasing and repetition. I know this author is a wonderful writer, and it made me curious about how genre may affect translation.

I don’t want to knock the skill of the translator—it was more that curiosity of whether certain genres receive less investment of the time, money, and attention that lets something be really finessed.

I think your instinct is probably right there. It generally does come down to money. Skill aside, let's talk about confidence and talk about your own mental state when you're translating. When you are new to translating, and you are translating a book that has been published and that has contracts behind it, [you’re in a] much bigger system. When you are new to that, you feel very small, and you feel nervous about changing things, about making choices.

It sounds to me like the person who translated the horror novel was not willing to make the choice to step away from the structure and the style of the original. I was definitely like that, probably up through The Devil's Flute Murders. Then when Strange Pictures came out, it was was much more direct, and I didn't have to worry so much about those choices.

But there are definitely things that happen in other languages that you just can't replicate. That repetition you mentioned is something that happens in Japanese all the time. When you're translating, you're in this flow, you're processing it. And then you go back and read, it's like, no, no, no, no. That's not good English. That's bad English.

And so you have to change it. And the confidence of how much you change it, and how you change it is something that only comes with security and with time and experience.

And definitely, I think what we like to call genre tends to be treated a little bit more like a commodity by a lot of publishers. The money is cheaper, the deadlines are tighter, particularly when we're talking with Japanese things like light novels. You've got six weeks to translate [a light novel]. You can't stop to think [or] really make those choices that turn the Japanese into really high quality English.

So, yeah—definitely, money does play into it, expectations play into it, and experience and confidence play into it.

It makes me wonder if, in the future, we might get new translations of certain books. I keep going back to Ringu, because that's such a classic. But I've read all Ringu books that have been translated into English, and they get shaggier and shaggier as you go along. By the time you get to the later sequels…I don’t know what the original novels’ reputation is, or whether the quality of the writing matches. But I would love to read a new translation someday.

It's not out of the question, particularly with the current market of interest. People are really interested in Japanese novels. The author, Suzuki Koji, just released a new novel in Japanese, and it's getting the red carpet treatment in Japan.

It is kind of weird—he gave an interview in English where he said the English rights had been sold. But that's not true. I know that's not true, because afterwards, an agency asked me to help them put together a sample translation of it. Dude’s out there just telling a story.

I actually hadn’t heard about any of that! Maybe I just live under a rock.

It's wild. I don't even know how to explain—eco-science fiction, horror tinged, very big picture stuff. I don't want to translate it. It's way too hard. It goes into, like, the nature of reality is based on the movement of these particles.

That series lost me at a certain point, with all the sci fi elements. I like the scary videotape. I don't know. Maybe I'm simple.

I'm right there with you. I like the scary videotape stuff. The daughter of the ocean deity and how her DNA was shaped…yeah, to each their own.

Is there anything that's going on in Japanese horror right now that's exciting to you, that people in the US and UK might be sleeping on?

I definitely think more people would be excited if they knew about the horror that's happening right now in Japan. I'm getting publishers more on board with exploring bigger stories and more complex stories. Uketsu is great, I'm a fan. But you know, there's a lot more under the surface. Let publishers know that there's a market for stuff that's even weirder, because I would love to translate Nashi.

Oh, and also—you should know Fake Documentary Q. Everybody needs to watch Fake Documentary Q on YouTube. Oh my god, it is maybe some of the best horror being made in Japan right now, which is just just wild.

It’s not about story—these guys are sort of the core, next to Shiraishi. They are making documentary style horror, and there's no story, there's just these videos where they say, “Okay, we found this video of this woman in an elevator. It's really weird. You should watch it.” And it is riveting.

The nature of the media, and the way they create tension—there's no words in some of these stories. It's just incredibly tense, short videos. Some of them are long narratives, and some of them are like interviews. They're all different.

That sounds amazing. I will absolutely be watching that tonight.

This week brought two new book reviews over on Macabre Daily! The first is on Wretch by Eric LaRocca—a sweetly decaying portrait of grief. It made my skin crawl with recognition of that very specific kind of pain.

And next, I heaped effusive praise on You Have to Let Them Bleed by Annie Neugebauer, which will surely be one of my very favorite books this year. It’s a vivid collection of short stories and poetry that I devoured in less than three days over the past week. Annie’s writing is so good, and so scary.

Later today, I’ll be jumping on a video call with Rapture Publishing’s Mitch Hull. Until recently, Rapture has focused on publishing limited edition chapbooks—but with Chris Panatier’s Daytide, Mitch has leapt into the wild depths of publishing epic novels.

I’m hoping to publish this conversation next Thursday. And after that, it will be a very special week…the one year anniversary of Scare Me! I’m not exactly sure how I’ll celebrate, but I am hoping to share a few things I’ve learned from 52 consecutive weeks of publishing a horror newsletter.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.