On the topic of the loss of my favorite rocker to suicide last week, I've decided to finish translating his autobiography into English. Back in my 20s (hahaha) I was big on improving my Japanese. I was also big into Japanese rock music, so the two collided when I realized that a lot of my favorite band members had released autobiographies and that I could do the rest of the world a favor by translating them into English.

I only ever finished one full book translation (Gackt's Jihaku, which can be found here) but I did a bunch of partial translations of articles and chapters of other books. Taiji's book was one of those, but I stopped doing any sort of translation around the time I moved to Boston.

But I figure, this is as good a way as any to pay tribute to an awesome musician. I'm going to try and do one chapter a week. This will help improve my Japanese again anyway, as I've slipped since I moved back to the US.

The rest of the chapters can be found here: http://seventhmoon.org/taiji/

( Chapter 3.20: Voiceless Screaming )

For those of you who have no idea who Taiji is, you might have heard of X Japan, one of the most influential Japanese metal bands of the 80s. They're still active and have long moved past their metal stage, but Taiji was their bassist from 1985-1992.