I was a little surprised by the length of this one as well. I’ve translated four other tales and they were all about half the words of this one. I don’t know if I changed my style or not. I haven’t tried a translation like this in over a year and I wanted to jump into the writing with a fresh start so I didn’t look back at any of my other writing, or anyone else’s.

I really don’t know how much leeway you get when translating, but the text I worked from was very bare so I took a lot of liberties. I enjoy writing, but I’ve never really had ideas come to me whole, so for me it’s nice to have a very basic road map like the text I used to create the details around. I try to approach it as if I were writing a short story. Often times, folk tales are very sparse in their details. I want to do my best to fill those in with the details I’ve seen and sensed while living in Japan.

As for the italicized dialogue, that’s something I picked up at college. I was told that thoughts and dialogues could be written in italics without quotations and ever since the first time I tried formatting a piece like that, I preferred the way it looked.