The Beautiful Japanese Covers...

This year, the Japanese publishers Thousands of Books, published Japanese editions of Ghost Song and Ghost Dance, adorning them with the most beautiful covers I think have ever been designed for my books.

This shows the front cover -- on the left -- and the back cover. The story tells, among other things, of a family of reindeer people who are cursed 'with everlasting change' -- with the change to darkness, they will change to wolves and with the change to light, they will change back to people. The back cover shows one of their reindeer skin tents.

In Ghost Dance, the shaman heroine changes into a goshawk. As in the other books, she visits the Ghost World, where the dead grow. In the Ghost World, around the Iron Ash, the World Tree, grows Iron Wood. The book describes the metallic rustling and clanging of the iron leaves -- and there are those iron leaves on the back cover.

The translations are by Mizuhito Kanehara and my hat off to him. Translating from English to Japanese cannot be easy.

I wish I knew the name of the cover artist.