Kazuya Minekura's blog again.

[snarp]

This is her latest entry, from yesterday; she'll be putting all manga work on indefinite hiatus for health reasons.

Things I wasn't sure of are in gray; let me know if you have any corrections to make. Apologies for the quality, but since I haven't seen any full translations anywhere else, I thought I should go ahead and post it.

Edit: Thanks to starlady for corrections.

Edit 2: Though Minekura uses the word "tumor" here, what she technically has is fibrous dysplasia. While dangerous, it's not a form of cancer. I assume that she just uses the word "tumor" because it's easier to understand, but as chomiji and smillaraaq point out, it might alarm people unnecessarily.

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[Important Announcement] This Article Will Stay At The Top

This is Kazuya Minekura. Unfortunately, I have some bad news. My manga are being put on hold for the time being.

As I've been saying for a while now, I'm suffering from a certain illness (+α). Recently, things unexpectedly got worse, and it turned out I had an unusual variant. I'm going to need surgery and regular testing, and in these circumstances, it'll be impossible for me to keep up my work schedule. To describe the situation simply, the bone neoplasm has taken root all throughout the upper part of my right jawbone. It's going to be surgically removed and replaced with bone and synthetic grafting.

...fortunately, I wasn't exactly a great beauty to begin with, so I'm unlikely to be traumatized by this (laugh), but after the surgery on my uterus a few years ago, to have to go through this again... It's honestly been pretty hard on me. I feel like, "I've been working working like mad for twenty years, so why...?" And I also think, "Other people keep working in times of even worse illness, so why can't I...?" And then I think, "But if I push myself too hard, it'll be bad for my work and my readers will be disappointed..." That's the sort of loop I get stuck in.

I feel as if my body has failed me, and also the publishers and staff waiting for my work, and most of all, my readers. I have sincerely considered on many occasions simply giving up writing entirely. But those around me have told me, "When you're as sick and upset as you are now, you shouldn't make decisions you might regret." So, for the moment I am merely putting my manga on indefinite hiatus.

I'll be working on a few small urgent things (though my batteries die during surgery and hospitalization...), while doing my best to take care of my body and heart. To all of those who have been patiently awaiting more manga, I'm really, really, incredibly sorry. Even now, I'm still wondering if I should be writing this - walking around in circles and asking myself over and over if it's okay. But regardless, when a writer doesn't have any energy, her characters, who take up part of her life force, end up becoming too hard to continue with; I just have no choice but to stop.

In terms of my work schedule going forward, I'll continue posting updates here. Because I'll be doing things very irregularly, I guess it's even more important now that I post updates... It would make me happy if people who are worried would keep checking here. Of course, the Gaiden OVA and things are still going forward, (I'm still working on some jacket art and things for it, but... there's a lot. (laugh)) so please enjoy those. And there will also be drama CDs and things coming out! (smile)

I want to thank everyone who's supported me all this time, and everyone who might help me in the future. I want to get well as soon as possible, and am going to be doing my best to make it happen.

Comments

[tessercat]

Holy crap. >.< Wow.

I'm glad she's taking care of her health first, but wow... What a thing to have to deal with.

[starlady]

Her cancer sounds pretty serious, then. That sucks.

I think the first grey bit is essentially spot on--I might say, "As I've told you, I have a certain illness." (I think the α is a reference to the cancer variant she has?) The second grey bit basically sounds to me like they're going to make her an artificial jaw, it's definitely "artificial shape/form" literally.

Skipping down, I'd say "My body that won't [work] the way I want it to" literally, so I think your version is fine. The rest of the grey stuff seems fine too.

[snarp]

Thanks; I was worried I was completely off-base on some of those, and I feel much worse doing that here than on, say, Kaoru Mori posting about short skirts.

(The sentence that's really bugging me is the long "body won't work" one - I sat there and fiddled with it for about twenty minutes, went to the grocery store, then came back and did for another twenty minutes before I finally posted it. And now, uh, I'm doing it again. I have a lot of trouble finding Minekuras' sentences' joints sometimes.)

[starlady]

Yeah, that's it's a noun-modifying phrase is tricky--"myself with a body that won't work the way I want it to is really disappointing, to… to… and most of all to my readers." Really hard to render into fluid English; I like your version, but it sort of has to diverge a bit from the literal meaning.

[chomiji]

It's not cancer, it's another bone disease, Fibrous dysplasia, that also causes "lesions." For cancer, lesion = tumor, but not necessarily so for other conditions.

I'm being picky about this because sensei's condition is already upsetting enough without people thinking she has cancer, which is more life-threatening than what she does have.

[starlady]

Ah, my mistake. In that case, snarp, you might want to change 'neoplasm' to lesion, since 'neoplasm' explicitly means tumor, and usually means cancer.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

*nods* Her condition does involve benign fibrous tumors -- http://www.fibrousdysplasia.org/index.php?page=16#7 -- that are often considered neoplasms even though they don't quite fit some definitions of true neoplasms -- http://boneandspine.com/musculoskeletal-tumours/fibrous-dysplasia/

It's all pretty horrible-sounding, even if it's not actually malignant. :(

[lady_ganesh]

There's no cure, either.

Thanks for translating this, snarp.

[snarp]

The thing is that she definitely is saying "neoplasm" or "tumor." The word she always uses is "shuyoh" (腫瘍), which I checked out in a medical dictionary after you mentioned that the first time, to make sure EDICT hadn't made a mistake. It looks like that is the right translation. Whether it's the medically correct term for her to be using, I can't tell, but it seems to be the term she prefers. Do you know where her condition was originally announced?

(And I just now looked up a Japanese-langage article about fibrous dysplasia. It uses several different terms to describe the effects of FD, but it doesn't use "shuyoh.")

[chomiji]

Crud. I'm not sure where we first came across that information. Google cache shows a mention of it in the summer on Sashrene's old RP site, but they've moved to a new Dreamwidth site now. Maybe smilla remembers.

Certainly all the things she's reporting would be true of the fibrous dysplasia, and she hasn't mentioned any of the usual cancer follow-ups, like radiation or chemo.

I just tried looking up "alpha fibrous dysplasia" (because that's an alpha she used when referring to it) and found a bunch of stuff. "alpha bone cancer" leads to much less definitive-looking stuff.

(BTW, I'm a cancer patient myself ... breast, not bone.)

[snarp]

Okay, I just found the original post, from April:

As for what I've got that I've been going to the hospital, it looks like it's something called fibrous dysplasia. It's connected to hormonal problems, so the issue with my uterus was probably the cause.

And she then goes on to talk about having a "tumor." So, I would say that she's just made the decision to use that particular word, even though it's not medically accurate. She may just feel more comfortable with it because "tumor" is, for most people, more of a known quantity than "fibrous dysplasia" - I think everyone knows somebody who's had one at some point.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Awww, geeze, I had been wondering if her past gyno problems were related -- the most severe form of fibrous dysplasia is linked with endocrine problems in women. Poor sensei. :(

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Alas, I don't have any links to the exact postings -- people who have been following her blog for a long time have mentioned that she's noted that specific condition in the past, but I don't know exactly when/where that came up. (It's a fairly rare disease, which definitely fits her descriptions in these recent postings.)

"Neoplasm" and "tumor" both get used a lot in the English-language medical literature on this condition, although sites written for a lay audience may use "lesion" a lot more to avoid that sort of confusion with cancerous malignancies. The goo.ne.jp page seems to be a general web-portal sort of Yahoo-ish site, so they may be reflecting that sort of usage

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Oh, geeze...it was bad enough just reading this in summary form, but seeing the whole thing? ;_;

OK to quote/link?

[snarp]

Sure. I already linked in the comments on the LJ Saiyuki comm here.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Danke! I was just taking a quick peek at the f-list via mobile earlier so I hadn't seen the comment link yet. Folks at http://community.livejournal.com/cranes4minekura/ will definitely not want to miss that.

[chomiji]

Yeah, I had the same reaction - somehow having it more like her own voice makes it so much more sad.

[chomiji]

snarp, thanks so much for doing this.

She's trying so hard to hang tough for her fans.

[rroselavy]

Came in from cranes4minekura Thank you so much for sharing this.

[kis]

Thank you for posting this. It's terribly sad news though.

[amai_kaminari]

Thank you so much for translating this. So sad. :(