PEN America on their official website announced the longlist for its 2023 Literary Awards amongst which was Tomihiko Morimi’s novel The Tatami Time Galaxy.

The Tatami Time Galaxy novel has been nominated under PEN Translation Prize category. The category features book-length translation of prose from any language into English.

The novel was translated from Japanese to English by Emily Balistrieri, and published by HarperCollins in December 2022.

The winner for the Translation Prize will be awarded with 3,000 USD. The finalists for all the categories will be announced in February 2023.

The Tatami Galaxy is a 2004 Japanese varsity novel written by Tomihiko Morimi and published by Ohta Publishing. Its first-person narrator is an unnamed upperclassman at Kyoto University reminiscing on the misadventures of his previous years of campus life, with each of the four chapters taking place in parallel universes in which he is enrolled in a different student society.

A sequel, The Tatami Time Machine Blues was published in 2020, which combines the characters of The Tatami Galaxy with the plot of Makoto Ueda’s play and film Summer Time Machine Blues.

The Tatami Galaxy was adapted into an 11-episode anime television series produced by Madhouse and directed by Masaaki Yuasa, which aired in 2010. The adaptation was critically acclaimed, winning the 2010 Japan Media Arts Festival Grand Prize in the Animation Division and the 2011 Tokyo Anime Award in the Television Category.

An original net animation adaptation of The Tatami Time Machine Blues produced by Science Saru premiered in September 2022 on Disney+.

Source: PEN Literary Awards