Maurice, a streetwise tomcat, has the perfect money-making scam. Everyone knows the stories about rats and pipers, and Maurice has a stupid-looking kid with a pipe, and his very own plague of rats ― strangely educated rats...
But in Bad Blintz, the little con suddenly goes down the drain. For someone there is playing a different tune and now the rats must learn a new word.
EVIL.
It's not a game any more. It's a rat-eat-rat world. And that might only be the start...
(Source: Back of book)
A flawed translation but a fun read
This is the Japanese translation of Sir Terry Pratchett's first Discworld book for young readers, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. 'The Amazing' Maurice is a talking cat and con artist, who has been travelling from town to town with a troupe of likewise talking rats and a stupid-looking kid, scamming officials by bringing them a 'rat plague' and then pied-pipering the rats away. The town of Bad Blintz is meant to be their last job... but something is very wrong here.
I found this book difficult to read, and if I was not reading it side-by-side with my English copy, there are several parts where I would have been completely lost. While I'm not a believer in the conventional wisdom that translated books use unnatural language and are bad tools for learning -- if there's ever a book that would apply to, it's this one. The translator was clearly struggling throughout to be faithful to the original while having no clue what many of the British-isms and Pratchett-isms meant, resulting in a disjointed cadence and some complete non-sequiturs that make it hard to focus on what's going on. Some Japanese reviews I found also noted that the language level is too high to be considered a children's book, so my problems with comprehension may not have been due to flow alone.
Having thoroughly enjoyed this book in English when I was a kid, I had fun revisiting it in this form, and for Pratchett fans, I think seeing how his work translates is an experience worth having. But overall, I would say that the translated book has very low learning value, and this is not the edition to choose for entertainment if you've never read the story before. Reading the English and Japanese editions side-by-side was a very enlightening experience, though, and for those who do read it, I recommend doing it that way; it was very interesting comparing passages that were awkward or difficult to understand in Japanese with the original, and getting a sense of the translator's process. While I don't feel I learned particularly much language-wise from reading this, I did come away from the book with something that felt worth it.
GNU Terry Pratchett