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The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1965)

by Yasutaka Tsutsui(Favorite Author)

3.14 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

184688134X (ISBN13: 9781846881343)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Alma Books

review 1: Saw this on a list of thought-provoking science fiction novels. I found it to be a pretty lackluster, by the ropes time travel story. I understand the film adaptations of it are supposed to be a lot better. I liked the explanation for how the time traveling mechanic came to be, but the story is too short for any meaningful character development or memorable time traveling hi-jinks to take place.
review 2: Two novellas for the price of one, so to speak. Having seen the movie-length anime film of the same name, I prefer the text. We've all wanted a "do-over" at some point, if we could just go back in time and do this, or not do what we did...but when watching the anime film I grew very impatient with the heroine. I mean, seriously--time-leaping because your si... morester ate your pudding? (And besides which--what's the deal with the importance of pudding in Anime?) I have no idea which came first, but I found the structure of the written text much more...what? "Believable" is a strange word to use. Easy to follow? Whatever. Certainly less "shojou-sentimental." Both the title story and the second novella, The Stuff That Nightmares Are Made Of are the classic grist of anime and manga: adolescents coming to terms with the adult world and its problems, trying to work out their own salvation, so to speak. The second story perpetuates the old Hollywood/pop psychology myth (and it is a myth!) that if you understand why you're afraid of what you're afraid of, your phobia will automatically vanish. Not so, apparently, for the boy who's afraid of spiders (or indeed, my own phobias. I understand where they came from, and why, and surprise, surprise--they're still there). As a professional translator myself, I recognised what I call "five-page syndrome". It takes five or six pages to really pick up the original author's cadence, tone and voice. I was lucky, in that I had a bilingual proofreader with wide cross-cultural knowledge who helped me scrap those first five pages and rework them, every time. Not so the translator of these tales. Someone really needs to tell him that "But" is a conjunction, and as such is terribly clunky to start sentences with...particularly 3 sentences in the same paragraph. In many ways the published novellas read like a first draft of the translation, which does a terrible disservice to the author of the original.Having said that, I see the author has another book entitled "Salmonella Men on Planet Porno," so what do I know? less

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