The MOTHER and MOTHER 2 novelizations by Saori Kumi (a pen name for author Ineko Hatano) were published the same year as the games’ respective releases in 1989 and 1994.

Translations of the novelizations have been posted online by Nyaasu Nekoban through Google Docs, and you’ll be able to find them in their complete forms here on Mother Forever once she finishes editing them! You can find links to their current versions in their respective sections below until then. And, if you’re interested in the story behind translating these novels, check out their translation history as written by Thane Gaming!

MOTHER Novel Translation by Nyaasu Nekoban

Read it here!

I’ve got to come along with you! – Ana, a girl with mysterious powers, the athletic Ken, and the scientific young genius Lloyd stand together to save the world from a crisis. In order to enlist the help of Queen Mary, ruler of the kingdom of Magicant, they must seek out eight melodies scattered throughout the world, as the sinister influence of their alien foe draws steadily closer. And just what is the true identity of their dreaded enemy…? A complete novelization of Shigesato Itoi’s beloved, immersive RPG! (Translation from back cover.)

“MOTHER: Invasion of the Unknown” Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Translation by Nyaasu Nekoban

Read it here!

Strange things are happening in the neighborhood lately. There are rumors of roaming corpses and bizarre murders. The town has been placed under martial law, and the townspeople spend uneasy days confined to their homes. Podunk, the most beautiful location in the state of Maine, is starting to look more like a ghost town. Douglas, a boy living in Podunk, finds a strange diary in his attic. Guided by this diary, Douglas heads out on a journey. His destination – Mount Itoi. The dark clouds looming over the mountain’s peak may hold the key to all these strange mysteries. Together with Anna and Lloyd, two friends he meets along the way, Douglas makes his way toward the cursed mountain. But a fearsome enemy awaits them there… (Translation from back cover.)

MOTHER 2 Novel Translation by Nyaasu Nekoban

Read it here!

My name is Ness. Before a meteor fell on the mountain behind my house, I was just an ordinary, baseball-loving kid in a red ball cap. But after that night, an unbelievable journey began for me and my friends! Paula, a beautiful blond girl with psychic powers. Jeff, a prodigy with all things mechanical. And Poo, the prince of a mysterious kingdom. In order to protect the future of our world, we’ll need all of our courage, wisdom, and love, to stand against an enormous enemy! The masterpiece RPG from producer and director Shigesato Itoi returns, in an epic and emotional novelization. (Translation from back cover.)

Novel Translation History by Thane Gaming

Early Attempts

To the more-obsessive EarthBound fans, it’s been known for quite some time that there are two official Japanese novelizations for MOTHER and MOTHER 2. These adaptations – totaling nearly 1,000 pages when combined – were authored by Saori Kumi (real name Ineko Hatano), and published the same year the games were released on Famicom and Super Famicom (1989 and 1994, respectively). In the 25+ years that have passed since then, there have been several notable unofficial translation projects that have made promising progress; professional localizer Clyde Mandelin (aka “Mato”) never had plans to translate and distribute the MOTHER novel, but he did give us fans something by summarizing each page with a single sentence, all the way up to chapter four.

This was all we had until the legendary Starmen.Net user “kenisu” (who previously fan-translated the supplementary MOTHER Encyclopedia, and is currently in the process of revising it/translating the entire thing) actually did translate the full MOTHER novel with plans to someday release it all… but it was only a first draft he wasn’t entirely happy with, so the completed text was never posted online. There are excerpts from a handful of chapters he “reworked with a fine-toothed comb” until he was satisfied with the wording, and a full sample of the first chapter he polished later in 2020 still up on Starmen, though!

As for the MOTHER 2 novel, Mato (again) wrote a very quick summary of the first chapter he self-described as being more like “jotted-down notes”. Many years later, “Kyosuke” (an EarthBound superfan who later became a “Localization Specialist” at Capcom, Japan), decided to take that torch and write a “fuller” summary for chapter two.

Chewy’s Translation

However, it is Lindsay Nelson (aka “Chewy”) who provided us with the most complete amount of English content we’d get until just this past year. She had a detailed website called “The MOTHER 2 Novel Translation” that featured FAQs, a blog, an “about the book” and “about the translator” tab, along with a fanart section where illustrators who submitted artwork based on designated excerpts from the novel were featured. This website had to be taken down because it was hacked in 2014, and can no longer be accessed by traditional means (the main page requires a sign in with a username and password), but through the magic of the Wayback Machine, you can bypass it and explore these would-be defunct web pages. Like Kenisu and his MOTHER novel translation, Chewy successfully completed a first draft of the MOTHER 2 novel in English, though she was also serious about trying to get the approval necessary to publish a print version of her translated text. She even successfully contacted Saori Kumi, and archived her email responses on the site.

Kumi explained that while she would have loved to give Chewy the “go ahead” to get the novel officially published into English, there was the complicated matter of copyright that had to be dealt with. You see, while Kumi did write the novel, the publishing rights (etc.) are not only with her, but the “owner of the rights of the original—in other words, the game production company (Nintendo), the original creator, Shigesato Itoi, and all of his staff.” Kumi did say she would forward Chewy’s request to the “editor in charge at the publishing company who published the MOTHER novels”, but nothing more came from this interaction, besides an interesting follow-up email explaining why a MOTHER 3 novel never happened, and how Kumi would go about creating one if she was ever given the opportunity.

Clearly, an official English release just could not happen (which is of course unfortunate, but understandable)! So us fans not able to read Japanese could only take these summaries here and those segments there from what had so generously been translated for us already (by fellow fans doing this in their free time, keep in mind), and dream about how it all pieced together to form one, cohesive story. That is, until a very special announcement that brought us fans a great amount of holiday cheer during a time it was so desperately needed.

Q&A With Nyaasu Nekoban

In December of the same year she expressed intent to translate both novels – an insanely short amount of time for the work required – “Nyaasu Nekoban” actually managed to post full unofficial English language versions of each book. How exactly did this happen, and where did the determination come from? Well, I (Thane) reached out to the kind Nyaasu on Twitter, who said that it all started when she was told about these books “about 20 years ago” by a friend: “Path”. This friend actually bought the first novel as a gift for Nyaasu’s birthday, but ended up falling in love with the story herself, and so Nyaasu decided to let her keep it…then just sort of forgot all about it.

[PK] Flash forward to early 2021, coincidentally during Nyaasu’s birthday again, and “Pollyanna” randomly enters the queue on her MP3 player. This gave her a sudden impulse she couldn’t refuse: the urge to replay MOTHER! So after re-exploring the warmly familiar world and reflecting on its themes, Nyaasu remembered the novel she once wanted so desperately to read but never got around to, and decided that there was no better time than the present. So with a “wad of bills” from Everdred in hand ready to throw at the screen, she paid an eBay seller what may’ve been a hundred thousand dollars or more. Okay, that part isn’t true, but it was quite the investment, which ultimately encouraged her to read through it all to justify the purchase price.

Finally cracking open the book that eluded her for decades, Nyaasu came across a funny paragraph about her favorite character (Lloyd), and decided to roughly translate the lines to text them to her aforementioned old friend Path, who laughed and told her: “You know, no one’s ever translated these. Maybe you should!” Nyaasu was actually surprised that an unofficial translation was never posted online. It hadn’t even crossed her mind because of how diligent the MOTHER community “has always been with this sort of thing.” Upon doing some research and discovering that Chewy had already translated the entire second novel but hadn’t uploaded it, Nyaasu mulled over a week’s worth of anxious thoughts concerning whether or not it was a good idea to post hers, but went ahead with it when she correctly concluded that Chewy never did mainly in hopes of releasing the work someday as an official publication.

Nyaasu was very clear that she didn’t want to “step on anyone’s toes” by putting up these translations. She also has a ton of respect for the original author, and very much dislikes the idea of posting someone else’s art online, being an artist herself. Nyaasu struggled for a long while before arriving at the decision to just go for it, approaching the situation with a similar mindset to MOTHER 3 fan translator Mato (who’s stated in the past he’d remove the English patch for download if Nintendo ever announces an official release). Nyaasu too will “burn down the whole site immediately” if Saori Kumi has any issues with it! Whatever the case, if by some divine marvel these books do get official English versions, you should absolutely purchase them with your dad’s ATM Card so that everyone who deserves to get paid gets their money. Nyaasu obviously agrees and hopes that an official translation does come to fruition someday.

Q&A With kenisu

But that’s not quite the end of the story – just as I was close to finalizing this write-up, someone special reached out to me by sheer coincidence: kenisu himself! My eyes lit up, as I realized I could–in addition to asking brand new questions–now clarify the things I previously only presumed by scouring archived Starmen.Net forums. I was curious most of all about what happened to his supposedly completed translation of the first MOTHER novel.

According to kenisu, it was 2006 when he first decided to try and translate the book, knowing Mato was too busy for the time it demanded. Like many of us, kenisu longed for a full English version, but the task proved to be insurmountable for an up-and-coming albeit amateur translator like himself. The prose was far outside kenisu’s comfort zone, “flinging unfamiliar grammar, idioms and all kinds of scary things” his way. As hard as we worked, kenisu only “managed to produce an unintelligible mess”, so he waved a white flag…he thought that if his localization was ever going to be finished, it had to be done in the future after “leveling up” his skills.

Later in 2010, when Chewy announced her translation of the second book by the same author, he figured he’d give his own draft of the first one another attempt. With four years of practice under his belt he had noticeably improved, but came to understand that it still wasn’t enough. At this point, he somewhat inadvertently revealed he was working on the translation in a Starmen thread asking about it, and thus began feeling the pressure of a whole lot of people now depending on him. So he powered through the mountain of text to put something together he described as “barely workable gibberish”. With this rough first draft technically complete, yet too “awkwardly worded” to show anyone, the project sat there. “For years.” A full decade later in 2020, kenisu decided to finally do something with the sacred texts, which is where his cleaned up first chapter comes from.

Unfortunately though, that rekindled fire died out when his life was unexpectedly “flipped upside-down”, resulting in the project going on indefinite hiatus again. Kenisu then had this to say about the following year, when Nyaasu was preparing to release her own translation: “I guess I shouldn’t mince words: I took it like a javelin to the heart. Hopes and dreams I’d been carrying for fifteen years got wiped out in a matter of days. But that’s enough of my little pity party. I made my bed when I let my translation collect dust for so long, and I paid for it. I still entertain the possibility of polishing up and releasing my own translation one day, even if the novelty of being The First Ever™ is gone and hardly anyone reads it, just so that I can make good on my promise. For this reason I haven’t yet had more than a peek at Nyaasu’s translation, because if someone else’s wording gets in my head, I get worried I may end up forgetting it isn’t my own, and unconsciously plagiarizing it if/when I finalize my own wording. But until then, that’s it as far as I come in, on the long road to getting Saori Kumi’s MOTHER work translated. I’m thrilled English-speaking fans can finally enjoy it, and I wish Nyaasu all the best.”

Conclusion

So there you have it! This has been a long journey indeed, but despite how twisted the Brick Road path to translation became, we’ve arrived at the signpost at the end of the dungeon reading “Way to go. Please come back again.” Thanks to the combined efforts of everyone who threw their Hobonichi New Era® 9FIFTY™ baseball hats in the ring (Mato, kenisu, Kyosuke, Chewy, and Nyaasu), us fans now get to read these once-impossible fan-translations in all their weird and wonderful glory.