Note: Only part of the parent essay, published in Fantasy Newsletter, #61, in which Somtow mainly discusses some of the oddities of the German publication but also comments on the quality of the translation of his novel Starship & Haiku. In this he comments that while he admires the artwork on the cover, he thinks the concept for it was a product of a misunderstanding by the artist. He postulates that the German art director described the book as being "about Japan, samurai, and it has a lot of vales (whales, of course) being killed in it". So the artist showed veils being killed with a samurai sword. He also approves of the translation by Jürgen Saupe.