Digression: 2025 wrap-up party
I’ve had a bit too much happening to stick to a regular posting schedule in the last couple of weeks, but I want to fit one last one in before the year is up!
After spending quite a lot of time in the first few years of the PhD making preparations and trying to work things out, I finally managed to focus on the main practical work of the project this year, and I’m happy to have made a lot of progress. So today, I want to go over what’s happened in 2025 and what comes next!
The biggest thing of course was working on translating Torikae baya, one chapter at a time. At the outset of the project, I had visions of a scanlation of all 13 volumes, but this was reined in early on for a few reasons. Because of the impracticality of basing everything around images and the greater potential for copyright issues, I decided to format the translation a bit like a screenplay, in a way that should make it readable both to people who can view the original manga pages alongside and people who can’t. A nice upside of this, which I discussed briefly here, is that the need to describe the images helps me notice details I might’ve missed otherwise and ensures I pay appropriate attention to the visual side of the medium.
Meanwhile, earlier experiments with the style of the translation made it clear that 13 volumesworth (65 chapters) was never going to be even close to fitting into the accepted limits for the thesis, and it would mean spending a lot of time translating large portions that would be unlikely to make the final cut. So the plan was to translate volumes 1 to 7, then skip to 13.
These aren’t just random numbers! I couldn’t pick the exact chapters to include in the thesis proper without actually doing the work of translating them and learning through the process what material would be most relevant. However, I was confident early on that I would want to say a lot about this series as an adaptation of Torikaebaya monogatari, so I chose to focus on translating the portions that follow the original plot most closely – a lot of the manga’s totally new material comes between Sara and Suiren’s return to the capital and the ending. This will still be too much to fit within the word count restrictions for the thesis, so I’ll need to whittle down the 40 translated chapters to somewhere between 15 and 20 that are especially significant, while the rest will probably end up in an appendix.
Another big event this year was my trip to Kyoto in the summer, with funding from the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee and Edinburgh University’s School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. I studied classical Japanese language, visited locations from Torikae baya along with places like the Kyoto International Manga Museum, and I even got to meet Saito Chiho and ask her questions about the process of writing Torikae baya (I can still hardly believe that really happened!). Altogether, the trip gave me important ideas and insights for the project, and changed how I think about the Japanese language. It was a lot of fun too!
Around the same time as that trip, one exciting development was that I moved from part-time to full-time study. Part of the slowness up to that point came about from being limited in how much time I could devote to working on the project, but fortunately, I got confirmation during the summer that the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation were willing to give me full-time funding. Since September, that has made it realistic for me to increase the pace of my work going into the later stages of the project.
I also had a couple of opportunities this year to present my work, first at the Japan Foundation/BAJS PhD workshop here in Edinburgh in February, then at the BAJS Conference in Cardiff in September. It was great to get experience of giving talks as well as meeting other people working on related and (much more often) very unrelated topics.
And finally, in between all these other activities, I was also writing these blog posts! I’ve found this helpful for getting some of my thoughts in order and briefly exploring topics that could make their way in some form into the commentary section of the thesis. I didn’t particularly plan to do it this way, but I’ve mostly gone one manga chapter at a time. As the translation process has sped up in the last few months, the chapters I write about have increasingly lagged behind the ones I translate. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because I find it quite useful really to return to something I haven’t touched in a few weeks and go over it with fresh eyes.
Anyway, I’m excited to say that because of that increased work rate on the translation, I actually finished translating the 40 chosen chapters a couple of weeks ago! It’s just a first draft and the job is by no means complete, but this is definitely a huge milestone. It adds up to more than 130,000 words – more than the limit for the whole thesis on its own – and even the blog posts so far come to about 28,000 on top of that.
That means one of the main things to work on in 2026 is narrowing down what exactly is going into the thesis. I’ll be looking closer at the translation to redraft it, examine the key points to concentrate on and pick out the chapters that will go into the thesis proper. There’ll be a lot of reading too, and a lot more blog posts to write to continue working out exactly what’s going into the commentary! I have another conference lined up in a few weeks’ time – I’m participating in a panel at InTO MANGA: Critical Paths in Manga Studies in Torino – and I’m also planning to apply to at least one other conference later in the year.
And with that, the last thing I want to say for this year is THANK YOU to everyone who has supported the project in any way! Please keep on reading as I continue talking about Torikae baya and sharing project updates in 2026. ❤
