For no real reason at all, I recently added Locus Online to my news feeds. Anyway, today’s edition features a brief obituary for Tetsu Yano, whom I’d never actually heard of before, but who apparently wrote (among other things) “the most reprinted Japanese science fiction story in the in the world” according to Strange Horizons. (I’m still trying to find a copy online of the story in question.)

Maybe it was that I’d just finished reading the feed for Neil Gaiman’s journal, since Gaiman, too, is something of a Death writer/translator. Maybe it’s just the way my mind works. The idea of the Grim Reaper, visiting Tokyo, in desperate need of a translator, amuses me.