Haruhi Suzumiya English version novels review

Yen Press and Little, Brown Books for Young Readers released the official English version of the first Haruhi Suzumiya light novel, “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya,” in April of this year. Volume 2, “The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya,” recently came out earlier this month. I’ve purchased and read both of them, so I figured it’s time for a review…

The first thing to note is that Yen Press has been releasing two versions of each volume in the series; a cheaper paperback version and a more expensive hardcover version.

The hardcover versions feature the same cover artwork as the Japanese releases, but are only available online and not in stores.

The paperback versions feature original cover designs. Yen Press’ reasons for using this style of paperback cover is to hopefully attract a wider audience and not just those interested in manga (however, the novels keep ending up in the manga section of bookstores anyway =P)

But to compensate, they include a picture of the Japanese cover design at the end of each book.

They also have this odd cover page at the beginning of each volume. I guess Yen Press is going for some kind of theme here.

In addition to this, they also include translated versions of Noizi Ito’s color illustrations that were in the Japanese releases.

Noizi Ito’s black-and-white illustrations that appear throughout each novel are left intact in the English version. However, because the size of the English books are larger than the original Japanese ones, the illustrations are stretched.

The below image shows the size of the English novels (left) compared to the Japanese (right).

The illustrations are stretched in order to compensate for the larger size. The quality is thus compromised a little bit but not too badly.

So now that we’ve got the pictures and appearance of the novels out of the way, how is the actual content? I’m happy to report that the translation is excellent. First of all, the translation is perfectly accurate, with all the Japanese names and references left intact. None of the content is changed in the English version. Secondly, Yen Press must have some great English editors because I didn’t spot any awkward or “engrish” sounding sentences. And yet, the native English used in the books still maintains Nagaru Tanigawa’s witty and cynical writing. I’ve read many translated Japanese novels in my Japanese literature classes in college but the Haruhi Suzumiya novels have some of the best translations I’ve read. Yen Press even includes translations of Nagaru Tanigawa’s afterwords at the end of each volume.

Of course, although I can’t really complain about Yen Press’ English translations of the novels, there are still a few areas for improvement. One is that, since the translations are so accurate and have a good number of Japanese references and words, a page or two of translator’s notes, either at the beginning or end of the story, or footnotes at the bottom of the page, would be nice. Japanese words like “yakisoba” and “shamisen” are left as they are, so a lot of English readers probably do not know what they are. I don’t think any of the Japanese references are integral to following the story, but translator’s notes about them would help readers enjoy as much of the story as possible. Tanigawa even throws in uncommon Western or other allusions at times, so notes about those would be helpful too.

Going along the same lines as the translator’s notes, another improvement the English novels could use is including the honorifics. The honorifics (“-san,” “-chan,” “-kun,”) are omitted. Most of the characters refer to each other by surname just as they do in the Japanese version, but without the honorifics it can sound a bit odd in English at times. Though including the honorifics is really not that important, if translator’s notes were available, they could explain what the honorifics mean and thus readers could get even more out of the story.

And lastly, although there are a few typos in these two novels, there are not nearly as many mistakes and inconsistencies as I’ve seen in other translated works and manga. I only noticed one or two typos in the English version of “The Melancholy,” but nothing major. The latter half of “The Sigh” had a few typos, but again nothing that can really take away from your enjoyment of the book. I don’t recall noticing any typos that you couldn’t use common sense to quickly correct yourself.

In conclusion, Yen Press is doing a fantastic job with their English version releases of the Haruhi novels. Their translation is stellar, they’re including all the original illustrations, and so far they seem to be releasing the novels at a decent rate (two a year, which is about how the Japanese releases were). The only big improvement I could recommend is including translator’s notes about Japanese words or other obscure references.

I believe the next English volume will be released in March of next year. So far volume 10 of the Japanese novels has been on hiatus for over two years. It would be outrageous if the English releases were to catch up XD But anyway, I hope enough people purchase the novels so Yen Press will keep up the great work! =)