After I interviewed Hagio in 2004, and after I translated the whole recorded interview into English, Ms. Konishi and Ms. Uzuki from the amazing"Tosho no Ie"transcribed the entire Japanese interview for me. Hagio had given me permission to put the interview onto my website, so I was very excited to have the transcript. But when I looked at it--nearly five hours worth of talking!--I thought, "This is going to take me forever," and I put it aside. But since I put the English version up, I thought "I really should put the Japanese up, too." So today I started editing it. The problem is, there is a lot of junk (we had two meals during those five hours!), and there are also a lot of off-the-record, personal comments. Furthermore, when I edited the English translation for publication inThe Comics Journal, I changed the order of of parts of the discussion. I want to recreate that order in the Japanese version, but proofreading, cutting out junk, editing for clarification, and putting all the different pieces into the order I want them is like trying to put together a 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It's overwhelming! I spent hours on it today, and got less than a third done. But I owe it to Konishi-san and Uzuki-san, not to mention Hagio-sensei and all her Japanese fans, to get the thing done and uploaded. Hagio-sensei's birthday (which is alsomybirthday is in six days. I'd love to upload it by then! But this is a job I can't delegate to someone else. Arghh!!

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Matt Thorn

Department of Comics Production

Kyoto Seika University