Winner of the Yomiuri Prize.
Winner of the 2024-2025 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.
Recipient of the 2022-23 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation.
"In the ninth century, a Japanese prince-turned-monk sets off with companions on a journey to Hindustan (India), the center of Buddhism. . . . An arresting novel that readers will cherish."
David Keymer, Library Journal Starred Review
"A rich novel unlike almost anything else available in English translation from Japanese."
Alison Fincher, Asian Review of Books
"A lush and fabulous journey into the unknown with impossible creatures, fantastic dream worlds, and things that seem to echo events long past."
Regina Schroder, Booklist
"A romp across Asia thats both bawdy and spiritual."
Thu-Huong Ha, The Japan Times
"A fantastical allegorical novel that traverses a mans dreams in the name of Buddhist devotion."
Aleena Ortiz, Foreword Reviews
"Boyds skilled translation brings the story of dream, memory, and drifting between strange lands to contemporary readers in English."
Richard Medhurst, Nippon.com
The premodern worlds porous sense of boundaries, unplaceable beings, and spiritual iconoclasts offer an especially fertile site for experimentation in ways to talk about sex, gender, and sexuality.
Nathaniel Gallant, Tricycle
"Takaokas Travels thrives on dreams, blending both the wondrous and terrible into a work of enduring imagination."
Chris Corker, The Japan Society UK Review
"Provocative, funny, absurd and, in its way, beautiful."
Ian Mond, Locus Magazine
"Takaokas Travels enables us to step into worlds we could scarcely imagine... showing us the limitless and even magical possibilities of travel."
Eric Margolis, Metropolis Japan
"With a deft translation by David Boyd, Takaokas Travels is a fun adventure story by a 9th century Showa-era master filled with amazing and imaginative creatures from Japanese mythology."
DC Palter, Japonica Publication
"An exotic supernatural journey in search of nirvana that comes alive under the hands of translator David Boyd."
Walter Sims, The Straits Times
" A neatly imagined quest tale, focused on the journey rather than the idealized but out of reach (physical) destination, Takaoka's Travels is an appealing mix of the historical and the fantastical."
M.A.Orthofer, The Complete Review
"A joy from start to finish as we bounce from adventure to adventure, the tales getting taller by the minute."
Tony's Reading List
"A journey fraught with the pitfalls and discoveries of wondrous creatures worthy of a perfect fantasy tale.
Salome Lelievre, Actusf
A work of magic and science, of literature swallowed and rendered in the form of dreams and pearls, a magnificent journey to the west from which one never returns.
Jean-Paul Brighelli, Marianne
Like a hallucinatory journey populated by mythical figures and confusing landscapes, with the certainty that one must follow one's deep desire. [ ] A promising start to the journey to Shibusawa.
Frédérique Roussel, Liberation
I love Takaokas Travels so much that my novel The Third Love features a character inspired by Shibusawas hero, Prince Takaoka. With the publication of this translation, readers around the world will be able to enjoy this marvelous book!
Hiromi Kawakami, author of Strange Weather in Tokyo and Dragon Palace
Takaoka's Travels will somehow remind you, simultaneously and impossibly, of a hundred books youve loved and nothing youve ever read. The plot moves in eddies, playfully forgetting and then remembering itself. . . . Its rare to read a book and feel not only that you don't know where its taking you but, over and over again, that you don't know where it took you, and I can't stop thinking about the experience.
Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations
Daugiau apie elektronines knygas