Queer-coded yakuza story wins prestigious U.K. crime writing award

Japan Times

04-07-2025

Akira Otani's "The Night of Baba Yaga,' translated into English by Sam Bett, received the prestigious Crime Writers' Association Dagger Award for crime fiction in translation in London on July 3. It's the first time a Japanese writer has won the translation award since it was established in 2006.
The genre-bending novel takes place in Japan's 1970s yakuza underworld and centers on two women, Yoriko Shindo, a ruthless martial arts fighter, and 'the princess' Shoko, daughter of a mob boss, for whom Yoriko serves as a bodyguard.
"In form and style and content, 'The Night of Baba Yaga' is unlike any book I've translated, but it's also eerily familiar, like a myth you overheard before you learned to talk,' Bett tells The Japan Times.
Contributor Kris Kosaka writes in her review, '(The novel) radiates with both cinematic grandeur and a subtle, constant railing against normalization of any kind, the latter of which can be seen in another aspect of queerness that permeates the novel: its framing of what it means to be the 'other' in society.'
'The Night of Baba Yaga' was a commercial success in Japan and was shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 2021. It's Otani's first novel to be translated into English, by Soho Press in the U.S. and Faber and Faber in the U.K.
Translating the novel was not a safe, obvious venture from the start. "'The Night of Baba Yaga' has no obvious comparison title among what's been published from Japan,' Bett says. 'It's more like a 1970s exploitation film than any book that comes to mind. It's built differently, somehow both borrowing from action cinema and playing entirely by its own rules.
'After today, those of us working in publishing should all feel more encouraged to take risks on the books that we believe in.'