The Witcher in Japanese: the Hayakawa editions

The Witcher is the exception among this batch's IPs: a Western series with a complete, verified Japanese edition programme. All nine Sapkowski novels exist in Japanese from Hayakawa, in the Hayakawa Bunko FT line. Seven Japanese ISBN-13s were verified in the census from Hayakawa's own online shop and Japanese trade listings.

The verified seven are: The Last Wish, 9784150206086, December 24, 2021; Blood of Elves, 9784150205935, August 24, 2017; Baptism of Fire, 9784150205997, May 17, 2018; The Tower of the Swallow, 9784150206062, January 10, 2019; The Lady of the Lake, 9784150206079, July 18, 2019; Season of Storms, 9784150206239, November 18, 2024; and Crossroads of Ravens, 9784150206291, September 30, 2025.

The publication pattern is its own story. Hayakawa published the five saga novels first, between 2017 and 2019, then the story collections afterward, with The Last Wish arriving in Japanese only in 2021. A Japanese reader therefore met the saga before the stories that introduce it, the reverse of the reading order this Library recommends in English, and a reminder that translation order is a publishing decision, not a story decision.

Two fields are honestly blank. Japanese editions of Sword of Destiny and Time of Contempt are confirmed to exist, published in 2022 and 2017 respectively, but their ISBN-13s were not retrieved in this census pass and are not stated here. Filling them from an unverified secondary list would break the rule this bibliography is built on, so they are flagged as the first targets of a follow up pass.

Crossroads of Ravens is the headline for collectors: its Hayakawa edition was released on September 30, 2025, the same day as the English hardcover, in a 21 country simultaneous release. A same day Japanese bunko edition of a Polish fantasy novel, matched against English 9780316597739, is a genuinely unusual pair to shelve together.