Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The Village Beyond the Mist is a moving and fantastical story of a young girl’s burgeoning independence, taking place in a strange village nicknamed Absurd Avenue. Kashiwaba is a prolific author of children’s literature in Japanese, with her oeuvre ranging from the grounded and slightly magical to the utmost heights of imagination—but embedded alike with a deep emotional resonance. Widely read by both children and adults, The Village Beyond the Mist in particular has had a global effect as the inspiration behind Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, and Avery Fischer Udagawa’s English translation now renews this magical book for US readers.
Udagawa’s repertoire of translations contains a number of Kashiwaba’s works, including Temple Alley Summer (2021) and The House of the Lost on the Cape (2023), both from Restless Books. In the following conversation, we discussed Kashiwaba’s influential body of children’s literature and Udagawa’s thought process while working on The Village Beyond the Mist.
Bella Creel (BC): You’ve translated a number of works by Sachiko Kashiwaba, from short stories to three full-length novels. From what I’ve read in your translations, it seems that her works, while often fantastical, remain grounded in real-life challenges—coming of age, the loss of a loved one, or the relationship between parent and child. How would you describe Kashiwaba as an author—what seems to drive her writing?
Avery Fischer Udagawa (AU): Sachiko Kashiwaba’s work seems to well up from both a deep love of Japanese storytelling and a vast knowledge of European and North American children’s literature, gained through a voracious reading of translations that began in childhood. Her works refer in form or content to a wide range of sources, from the Brothers Grimm fairy tales to L. M. Montgomery to the Tōno monogatari, the collected folklore of the Tōno region in her native prefecture of Iwate. The afterword to her debut novel mentions The Chronicles of Narnia and Mary Poppins—before going on to thank the father of Japanese fantasy, Satoru Satō.
She has said that she hopes above all for readers to enjoy reading her books, finishing them and saying, “ah, that was fun.” But I have only to flip through her long-running Monster Hotel series—featuring a vampire and witches alongside a partially shifted kitsune (fox) girl and a rokurokubi (long-necked spirit)—to see how she relishes braiding the traditions she grew up with.
Her concern for real children and families is also palpable, perhaps especially in work that she produced shortly after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, which affected Iwate. Her novel The House of the Lost on the Cape was first serialized in the city newspaper of Morioka, where she lives, for young readers who would have experienced grief, trauma, and survivor’s guilt just like the characters in House. In the story, she marshals kappa river spirits, stone lion-dogs from a Kesennuma shrine, and a giant Jizō statue from near her own house to facilitate communal healing.
Virtually all of Kashiwaba’s stories feature insights about families, such as how a growing daughter and her father may suddenly find themselves talking less; in The Village Beyond the Mist, a shared knowledge of a place promises to be the key to reopening communication.
BC: Alongside your role as a teacher, you have also built a prolific career in the translation of children’s literature—how did you find this niche?
AU: After discovering a love of Japanese as an undergrad and studying in Japan full-time for a period after that (thanks to the Fulbright program, now threatened by the Trump administration), I knew that I wanted to translate and tried working with different kinds of texts. I soon found that children’s and young adult literature appealed to me. Close involvement with professional organizations, such as the Japan region of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, was—and remains—key for finding community and obtaining the education specific to working with children’s literature.
BC: Being from the United States, have you noticed any differences between the stories you grew up with and the stories children in Japan are reading? Or, are there any aspects that you have noticed remain true in children’s literature regardless of its country of origin?
AU: I have noticed, when pitching stories, that certain literary values prevalent in US children’s publishing—show don’t tell, action over exposition, a clear hero’s-journey plot arc, a hopeful ending—are less universal than they sometimes seem. The age categories used for marketing books and the expectations attending those categories sometimes also differ. One novel that I translated, which had a nine-year-old main character, was packaged for middle grade readers in the US and adults in Japan!
Beyond the editorial trappings and packaging, however, the best stories ignore borders, which is why you can walk into bookstores in my native Kansas and bump right into translated children’s and YA books: The Rainbow Fish, Pippi Longstocking, and Persepolis, to name three on the shelves of Watermark Books and Café in Wichita right now. Temple Alley Summer by Sachiko Kashiwaba is also there!
BC: Most new readers will know Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The Village Beyond the Mist as the story that inspired Spirited Away—but how did you first encounter the tale, and what led to its translation now?
AU: Restless Books took a chance on Sachiko Kashiwaba—an author then largely unknown Stateside—when I pitched Temple Alley Summer during the pandemic. The gamble paid off in a book that earned an American Library Association Batchelder Award, which is like the Newbery Medal for translations, and a berth on the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) Honour List, which is a bit like getting a commendation from the children’s lit UN. Recently, Kirkus Reviews named TAS to its Best Books of the 21st Century (So Far) list, in the middle grade fiction category! The success of this book paved the way for Restless then to bring out The House of the Lost on the Cape, one of the few children’s books in English about the March 2011 disaster that is written by a resident of the affected region.
This year, Restless decided it was time to publish Kashiwaba’s debut novel and best-known work in Japan. The Village Beyond the Mist was first published exactly fifty years ago, and at joint appearances in cities as far apart as Washington, D.C. and Hong Kong, I have seen Japanese readers come up to Kashiwaba specifically mentioning this title. Sometimes they even bring their childhood copies for her to sign. It has had a whole life of its own in the imaginations of generations of readers, quite apart from influencing Spirited Away.
BC: In The Village Beyond the Mist, protagonist Lina encounters a series of unusual characters in an unusual place called “Absurd Avenue,” where all the buildings have chimneys—a strange sight in a mountain village in Japan—and the old woman who runs the place, Ms. Pippity Picotto, is harsh and demanding. Suddenly, Lina is expected to work for her keep, and her every utterance is critiqued. What does Lina’s experience here, and the growth she goes through over her time in Absurd Avenue, say about the story’s overall message to a young audience?
AU: Lina’s experience of chimneys and cobblestones in Japan is certainly par for the course with Kashiwaba. As for the hard-nosed Ms. Picotto, I think she stands in for any number of elder figures in young people’s lives, whom they must sometimes learn to live with while tearing their hair out. (Rachel Lynde in Anne of Green Gables comes to mind!) The increasing independence that Lina experiences definitely mirrors the growth children go through in their upper primary school years, which can take on the qualities of an adventure. Books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Phantom Tollbooth also capture this, I think. Literary cousins.
BC: I’d love to hear more about your translation process. At various points you left uniquely Japanese words transliterated with little explanation. Other translators might have explained further or omitted the Japanese altogether, perhaps opting for sandals instead of geta, or funny mask instead of Hyottoko mask. Why did you choose to preserve the Japanese in this way?
AU: I have the privilege of working at a time when non-English words are accepted more and more, while their explanation and even italicization are required less and less. Restless Books actually asked that we drop the italics, beginning with Temple Alley Summer. They’ve also been great about marking long Os (such as in the myōga ginger that a mountain wizard eats) and otherwise making transliteration easy to do faithfully. The editors have been open to glossing unfamiliar terms but do not insist on extensive information-dumps that take readers out of the story. One great thing about illustrations is they sometimes do the explaining, as with the Hyottoko mask.
Transliterating gets us so much closer to the specific sounds, concepts, and objects that populate the source text. Children these days are as savvy as ever about looking up unfamiliar words, and I like to leave the Japan-isms for them to wonder about and savor. I also know that some readers may be Japan-savvy due to (for example) living in a bilingual household, so they know their geta from their sandals.
BC: And finally, do you have any other projects in the works at the moment?
AU: I am about to translate a short travelogue that Kashiwaba wrote about promoting the translation of Temple Alley Summer into Indonesian. (A German edition has also come out since the publication of TAS in the US.) I am also trying to puzzle out how to translate a four-volume high-fantasy series by her, illustrated by Satake, swiftly while teaching full-time. I wish I could call on some sorcery!
Avery Fischer Udagawa grew up in Kansas and studied English and Asian Studies at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. She holds an MA in Advanced Japanese Studies from the University of Sheffield. She has studied at Nanzan University, Nagoya, on a Fulbright Fellowship, and at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, Yokohama. She writes, translates, and works in international education near Bangkok, where she lives with her bicultural family. Her translations include Sachiko Kashiwaba’s middle grade novels Temple Alley Summer and The House of the Lost on the Cape, which garnered the 2022 Mildred L. Batchelder Award and a 2024 Batchelder Honor, respectively. She serves as Global Translator Coordinator in the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. In 2024, she was named the SCBWI Stephen Mooser Member of the Year.
Bella Creel is a blog editor at Asymptote and a writer in her spare time. Her occasional newsletter can be found here, and she is always happy to connect on Instagram.
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