Sixteen years after it was originally released, TOBI Hirotaka’s 2002 sci-fi novel The Thousand Year Beach (paperback, Kindle) is finally being released in English by Haikasoru. In the following email interview — which was kindly translated by Evan Galloway — Hirotaka explains what inspired this story, the other books that influenced it, and whether its sequel, Ragged Girl, will be getting an English edition as well.
Two years ago, Haikasoru — a division of Viz Media that translates and publishes English-language versions of Japanese science fiction novels — issued Fujii Taiyo’s 2013 debut novel, Gene Mapper, marking both it and Fujii’s debut in the United States. With Haikasoru’s version of Taiyo’s second novel, Orbital Cloud (paperback, digital), recently released in the U.S., I sent a bunch of questions to Taiyo via email, hoping that my inquiries into this books’ origins and influences would translate as well.