Viz Media’s Haikasoru Literary Imprint Debuts Yuya Sato’s Evocative Novel Dendera
VIZ Media’s Haikasoru imprint opens 2015 with its first release of the New Year. Dendera, award-winning author Yuya Sato’s stark and moving novel, is set to be published on February 17th. An eBook edition debuts the same day on the Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Kobo, and Google Play digital storefronts.
“Dendera is a captivating work that presents a strong female lead character and evocative story based around ubasute, the custom of leaving the elderly to die via exposure, a recurring theme in Japanese literature,” says Nick Mamatas, Editor. “This fabulist tale will be of interest to both fans of fantasy and literary fiction.”
In Dendera, Kayu Saitoh wakes up on a snowy mountainside. Her family abandoned her according to the tradition of sacrificing the elderly to benefit the young. Instead of passing into the afterlife as she believes she should, Kayu finds herself in Dendera, a utopia crafted by other old women that were forsaken. When a ravenous mother bear attacks, they must face it together.
Yuya Sato, born in 1980, is a writer of “strange fiction,” which features fantastic or horrific concepts treated in a refined literary style. His short stories have appeared in English in the mixed manga/prose anthology series Faust, and his novel 1000 Novels and Backbeard won the Yukio Mishima Prize, one of Japan’s highest literary awards.
Yuya Sato’s book was inspired by Shichiro Fukazawa’s The Ballad of Narayama, a classic novel that was adapted into a feature film directed by Shohei Imamura that won the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. Dendera was also turned into a feature film in 2011 and, as fate would have it, directed by Daisuke Tengan, the son of Shohei Imamura.
Dendera has a MSRP of $15.99 U.S. / 16.99 CAN.
Haikasoru is the first U.S. imprint dedicated to Japanese science fiction and fantasy in translation for English-speaking audiences. For additional information about Dendera and the Haikasoru imprint, please visit the dedicated website at www.haikasoru.com.