Before she left Picador to be an editor at Free Press, Amber Quereshi acquired a few books by Japanese author Yoko Ogawa. The first, The Diving Pool came out last year, The Housekeeper and the Professor is the second and released earlier this spring, and there’s one more in the works. (Can’t remember the title, but I know Stephen Snyder is also translating it.)

Ogawa is a pretty big figure in the contemporary Japanese publishing and has written a ton of books, which, with a little luck, will see the light of day in English after this three-book deal runs out. (Any interested publishers—I think Anna Stein is the agent for this . . .)

Anyway, Will Eells is one of my two Japanese-reading interns this semester and is working toward a Certificate in Literary Translation. This is his first review. And it opens:

Contemporary Japanese literature is all too easy to stereotype. As far as the American reading public goes, the only books that come out of Japan seem to be under one of three genres. The first is the “bizarre things happening in an otherwise normal setting” in the mold of Haruki Murakami. As one of the most successful authors to come out of a non-American or Western-European country in the last thirty years, Murakami is surely a success story that publishers want to recreate. The two other kinds of Japanese fiction published in America seem to be horror novels (Koji Suzuki’s The Ring, et al) and hard-boiled, nihilistic crime novels (think Natsuo Kirino and anything yakuza-related.) Of course, this has led to over-saturation on the bookshelves, and I’ve become completely fatigued by novelists that take an ordinary person with an ordinary life in Tokyo, and then throws in a ghost, or alien, a murder, or any event or characters with motivations completely unexplained to the reader for the protagonist to deal with for instant tension. Why does Japan seem to have a monopoly on novels with extraordinary premises? What happened to all the Japanese realists?

Reading Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor was consequently a breath of fresh air, a beautiful and bittersweet tale by a talented female writer. Ogawa has become a huge critical and popular success in Japan in the last twenty years, winning numerous literary awards including the Akutagawa Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Tanizaki Prize, while also having one of her novels (the one in question) adapted for the screen in 2006. She is also now one of the jurors for the Akutagawa Prize Committee.

Click here for the full review.

Contemporary Japanese literature is all too easy to stereotype. As far as the American reading public goes, the only books that come out of Japan seem to be under one of three genres. The first is the “bizarre things happening in an otherwise normal setting” in the mold of Haruki Murakami. As one of the most successful authors to come out of a non-American or Western-European country in the last thirty years, Murakami is surely a success story that publishers want to recreate. The two other kinds of Japanese fiction published in America seem to be horror novels (Koji Suzuki’s The Ring, et al) and hard-boiled, nihilistic crime novels (think Natsuo Kirino and anything yakuza-related.) Of course, this has led to over-saturation on the bookshelves, and I’ve become completely fatigued by novelists that take an ordinary person with an ordinary life in Tokyo, and then throws in a ghost, or alien, a murder, or any event or characters with motivations completely unexplained to the reader for the protagonist to deal with for instant tension. Why does Japan seem to have a monopoly on novels with extraordinary premises? What happened to all the Japanese realists?

Reading Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor was consequently a breath of fresh air, a beautiful and bittersweet tale by a talented female writer. Ogawa has become a huge critical and popular success in Japan in the last twenty years, winning numerous literary awards including the Akutagawa Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Tanizaki Prize, while also having one of her novels (the one in question) adapted for the screen in 2006. She is also now one of the jurors for the Akutagawa Prize Committee.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is about the relationship between the two eponymous characters (who are never named), and the Housekeeper’s son, only referred to by his nickname Root. The narrator, a single mother employed by the Akebono Housekeeping Agency, has just started her new job working for the Professor, a genius in mathematics who, due to an automobile accident, has a memory that only lasts 80 minutes (and for those who may think this is one of the “unexplained events” that I critiqued above, this condition actually has medical precedent). Every morning, the Housekeeper has to reintroduce herself to the Professor:

“What’s your shoe size?”

This was the Professor’s first question, once I had announced myself as the new housekeeper. No bow, no greeting. If there is one ironclad rule in my profession, it’s that you always give the employer what he wants; and so I told him.

“Twenty-four centimeters.”

“There’s a sturdy number,” he said. “It’s the factorial of four.” He folded his arms, closed his eyes, and was silent for a moment.

“What’s a ‘factorial’?” I asked at last. I felt I should try to found out a bit more, since it seemed to be connected to his interest in my shoe size.”

“The product of all the natural numbers from one to four is twenty-four,” he said, without opening his eyes. “What’s your telephone number?”

He nodded, as if deeply impressed. “That’s the total number of primes between one and one hundred million.”

It wasn’t immediately clear to me why my phone number was so interesting, but his enthusiasm seemed genuine. And he wasn’t showing off; he struck me as straightforward and modest. It nearly convinced me that there was something special about my phone number, and that I was somehow special for having it.

While the Professor’s memory always fails him, numbers never do. It is the only way he can reach out to the world while everything else constantly disappears. The success of this novel lies in the sense that numbers and their relationship to the world are indeed special, and Ogawa’s straightforward and gentle tone actually make numbers seem magical. The novel also works because of how fully-realized and thoroughly sympathetic the characters are. The deepening relationship between the Housekeeper, Root, and the Professor as they create a make-shift family thanks to the power of numbers, the only thing the Professor can relate to, is powerful and poignant, despite the failure of the Professor’s memory.

The novel is full of explanations about different sorts of math theories, but Ogawa’s prose is so clear and beautiful, thanks in no small part by an excellent translation by Stephen Snyder, that it makes even the most difficult theorems relatable. And because the Housekeeper knows as little about number theory as the average reader, everything is explained gently, and with such passion by the Professor, that even the most difficult theorems become almost magical in their presentation. Every event becomes significant and beautiful in the hands of Ogawa, from getting the Professor to go to a dentist, to the celebration of a ten-year old’s birthday. Even in such a tragic setting, love and happiness blossom in a way that feels both real and sentimental without being saccharine or cloying. Its a novel full of powerful and honest emotions, and a novel that is engaging to the reader even without the aid of metaphysical craziness or grizzly murders. It’s hard to believe that publishing something so ordinary could be called “innovative”, but that’s the state of translated contemporary Japanese fiction right now. It’s going to be hard going back.

One of my interns mentioned this the other week, and now The Millions points to this article about ads for next summer’s release of the third volume in Murakami’s already mammoth 1Q84:

Murakami is currently working on the story, aiming for a release next summer, sources said. Sales of the first and second volumes, which hit the market in late May, have sold more than 2.2 million copies in all.

The ads, posted in stations including Tokyo and Yokohama, say, “We will continue receiving invaluable things from the story.”

It shows three Qs — a blue Q to go with the yellowish green one on the cover of the first volume and the orange one on the second. Shinchosha said it will leave it up to the readers to imagine what the ad means.

My cinema was a “Ma,” she wrapped me in her mucous membranes. She shielded me from the sun, from the force of visibility. Life was being played out on the screen, a life before death. People fought there, or else slept together. They cried and sweated, and the screen remained dry. The cinema, its stage, had no depth, but it did have its own light source.

This is how Anh Nguyet the protagonist of The Naked Eye describes her world of escapism through the movies, and only Catherine Deneuve movies to be exact. Although I myself have an affinity for the beautiful icon of French cinema myself, it is nothing compared to our young Vietnamese narrator who seems only to experience and understand life through the world of Deneuve’s oeuvre. Tawada takes us through Anh’s story in thirteen chapters, each titled after a different Deneuve movie. And it’s not just about Deneuve, her movies serve as vehicle for all the other things that seem to be happening in novel—escapism, allegorical references to communism, kidnapping, subjugation, sexual ambiguity and a fair amount of resigned desperation.

All of this seems like the ideal makings for an engaging and original read, and at times, it is. But what plagues this novel from the beginning is the lack of emotional engagement by the narrator. Anh, who is still in high school and the best in her school at speaking Russian, is handpicked to attend the International Youth Conference in Berlin to deliver a paper she wrote in Russian entitled, “Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism.” Within the first ten pages she is kidnapped by a German student who plies her with vodka and then takes to his apartment in Bochum, which is six hours away from Berlin. Anh says that she wants to go home, but Jörg, her captor, tells her she is pregnant with his child. They become lovers and she waits in his apartment all day long for him to come home. She writes a letter to her family saying she has been offered a scholarship and that is why she is not coming home. What is strange is that there is no sense of urgency for Anh to get home. Finally, she learns one night on a double date with Jörg that there is a train that stops in Bochum on its way to Moscow. She finds the train and ends up in Paris where she spends the next six years of her life.

She meets a blond prostitute, Marie, in the chapter entitled, “Zig Zig.” She has a brief sexual encounter with her but they end up living together. Anh spends her days reading old issues of Ecran magazine looking for anything relating to Catherine Deneuve. She has no job and does not go out in the sunlight. She merely survives with Marie:

Marie was not an abductor, she was my protector. She protected me by ignoring me. She acted as if she were unable to see me, or as if I were a wildflower that just happened to be growing in her garden. If only I’d been able to exchange a few words with her. I couldn’t understand her language, and she even seemed to be withholding it from me.

Clearly, there is desire on Anh’s part to communicate, but she never makes that commitment. She wanders the streets and goes to Catherine Deneuve movies. Once while she is line, a fellow Vietnamese woman that she met on the train to Paris recognizes her. Anh is ‘mesmerized’ by her melodic way of talking and decides to go stay with Ai Van and her French, much older husband, Jean. She leaves Marie without a word and stays on the couch of the couple. She watches them come and go and goes to the movies. Exasperated by Anh’s lack of initiative, Ai Van tells her there is a job available with a Chinese doctor that will use her skin for cosmetic experiments. Anh obliges without a struggle and Tawada compares this to Deneuve’s vampire role in Hunger. Other than the comparison and the synopsis of the plot by Tawada, the parallels of Anh and Deneuve’s movies are not drawn well enough. It becomes merely a plot synopsis of each movie and less and less about Anh. Maybe this is intentional, but it is disturbing as well. I felt, as a reader, that I was waiting for a reaction from Anh—to life, her situation, her loss. But she drifts and the only thing Tawada gives us is a rundown of Deneuve’s movies, as if Anh is struggling with cinematic autism. Although this does add to the power of Anh’s escapism, it doesn’t give us much more. As if we are constantly seeing someone in the throes of addiction, but never seeking help.

Towards the end, we do see Anh show frustration with her inability to live any life outside of Catherine Deneuve’s various screen roles:

“Get out of here!” I say to the cinematographic currents trying to carry me off with it. Leave me alone. I don’t want to be carried off. But it was difficult to maintain a distance from the images. They swept me away with them, wanting to drown me. Why was I, a free human being, not allowed to turn off the images when I wished or a t least correct them? I wished to experience boredom, for this I would at least entail the individual freedom not to take part. If I fell asleep in my seat, the film would have been better for me. I had to remain awake, though, to wait for you.

Anh has the ability to recognize her obsession, but this is towards the end of the novel and the reader gets no hints of her self-awareness before this. Even despite her obsession, she manages to befriend a man, Charles, who introduces her to a Vietnamese emigré, Tuong Linh. Tuong Linh is a surgeon. Anh ends up living with him even though she is in love with Charles. Tuong Linh insists that she go to language school but she avoids his inquiries whenever the topic is mentioned. But in order to do this he decides to marry her so she can get a visa. She obtains a fake passport from one of Tuong Linh’s friends and is arrested. Tuong Linh is well on his way to Thailand, with no idea of Anh’s arrest. When she is released, she ends up at Marie’s apartment and almost doesn’t recognize her because Marie had aged so much in six years. Which brings us to Les voleurs which star Catherine Deneuve as another character named Marie who is now a middle-aged professor having a lesbian affair with one of her students. She stays with Marie, again in poverty, and ends up through circuitous ties, with Jörg. She returns to Bochum and lives with Jörg. But she is back to where she was in the beginning of the novel. The last chapter is entitled, “Dancer in the Dark,” and is a plot synopsis of the movie which leaves the reader wondering too much about what Anh ever really wanted and where if anywhere, she will go to find herself.

One of the things I did find most interesting about Tawada’s novel is the appearance of communism and the sense of government as mother. From the onset, Anh is devoutly Communist. And throughout there are running themes of class division, the cinema being compared to her motherland as protector and a dialogue and metaphors about liberty and freedom. Anh adheres to the concepts of Communism in her beliefs, but becomes totally oblivious to the present day changes that Communism has endured and its weakening grasp on the world.

I wanted very much to love this novel, but ultimately had too many unanswered questions were presented to the reader and like Anh felt like I was watching a narrator act like she was in a book, but never fully present. And one note on the translation—parts of the novel were written in German and parts were written in Japanese and then translated by Tawada into both languages. The extremely capable Susan Bernofsky translated it from the German. When I encountered phrases that seemed out of character for Anh or sudden strong phrases that were an anomaly to her narrative voice, I wasn’t sure whose translation that fell on or if that was an authorial choice. Regardless, it was jarring and it interrupted the generally low key and fluid narrative.

I hope we can read more of Tawada’s work in the future because it is so intriguing—ones without such a narrow conceit. I have watched as many Catherine Deneuve movies as possible and felt that if I hadn’t, I don’t know where I would’ve been as a reader approaching this novel? Too much rests on the magic of Catherine Deneuve and not enough on the author. As the French say, “Quel dommage!”

The other day, we posted a short piece about an exchange between Michael Emmerich and Daniela Hurezanu that took place on the Calque website and centered around a recent interview with Emmerich the striking differences between his unedited version of The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P and the version edited by Elmer Luke.

Thanks to the general awesomeness of St. Mark’s Bookshop I was able to pick up the most recent issue of Calque last night. And thanks to the boring, depersonalized nature of airports, I just had a chance to read this entire interview and versions of Emmerich’s translation of Matsuura Rieko’s novel.

First off, the edited version of the translation reads much better than the unedited one. The concerns Hurezanu expressed in her letter to Calque are completely valid—there are occasions when editors mutilate a translation to fit certain preconceived notions about the reader—but in this case, my personal feeling, and no offense to Emmerich, who is clearly one of the top Japanese translators working today, is that the edited version simply reads better. (For instance, “Roused from my slumbers by a barrage of knocks on the front door, it gradually dawned on me that an hour earlier I had agreed to have a talk with Kazumi, and I made a mad dash for the hall,” doesn’t read as well as “I was roused by a barrage of knocks on the door, and suddenly remembering Kazumi was coming over, I made a mad dash to the door.”)

And Emmerich’s description of this book makes it sound wonderfully perverse:

The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P is an unusual sort of masterpiece. Riveting, provocative, funny, disturbing, touching, verbose, explicit, and absurd, it was also a bestseller. I doubt anyone in the United States who can’t read Japanese even suspects that Japanese literature contains novels like this, or authors like Matsuura. A novel, that is to say, whose heroine has a penis on her foot and spends much of the book on the road with what amounts to a sexual freak show.

Aside from the excerpts though, the interview with Emmerich is simply amazing and totally worth the cover price. The opening section about Ukigumo—which is considered the “first modern Japanese novel”—is fascinating, since its author, Futabatei Shimei (which is a pseudonym and pun that reflects a Japanese phrase that translates as “drop dead”) translated Ivan Turgenev and was heavily influenced by Russian writers.

Futabatei also cites Dostoevsky and Goncharov as the stylistic models that helped him break out of the distinctly “early modern” written style and prose rhythms that dominate Part 1 of Ukigumo, and we know that when he was struggling with Parts 2 and 3, he sometimes wrote in Russian first, then translated his Russian into Japanese [. . .]

There’s a ton of things to quote from this interview, but my plane is boarding, so I’ll leave off with Michael’s response to a question of “what distinguishes a good translation from a poor one?”

The reader. This sounds like another dodge, I know. But that’s the best answer. Unless we’re talking about a particular translation, and considering it in relation to the context within which it came into being, trying to determine how well it meets the needs it was designed to meet. [. . .] We tend to assume, for instance, that readers who are able to compare a translation with the work that inspired it are best equipped—are perhaps the only ones equipped—to judge its merits. And yet translations aren’t designed to meet the needs of readers who . . . I can’t think how to say this without slipping into tautology . . . who don’t need a translation.

To tell the truth, I suspect that readers who can compare translations and originals actually tend to be worse judges of the quality of a translation than people who are unable to read the original. [. . .]

Of course, readers who can access both the original and the translation are able to find obvious mistakes, and that’s somethign only they can do, and that can be important. But surely that’s not what we mean when we ask what distinguishes good translations from bad? We’re interested in something that runs deeper, I would hope—not something so superficial that any old multilingual reader can come along and point it out after a hasty comparison of the two texts. [. . .]

I finished reading Contemporary Japanese Writers, Vol. 2 over the weekend, and found seven writers/books that I wish were translated into English:

Yoshikichi Furui

Asagao (Rose of Sharon) is a masterpiece from Furui’s middle period. In a commentary to the paperback edition, writer Hisaki Matsuura remarks on the author’s dogged efforts to finish the book, grappling with it until his mid-forties: “Through his struggles, he must have looked hard at the potentials and limitations of this writing format and fully experienced the inherent inconsistencies between it and his own temperament.” By “this writing format,” Matsuura means maintaining the framework of the modern novel while incorporating elaborate devices in a style reminiscent of Nabokov.

Kariojoden shibun (Accounts of Provisional Rebrith: A Draft) sounds most interesting to me. It’s a collection of personal essays interspersed with episodes of the “hapless deaths of various eminent Buddhist monks.” Two collections from Furui have been published in English: Ravine and Other Stories (Stone Bridge Press) and Child of Darkness: Yoko and Other Stories (University of Michigan).

Hideo Furukawa

In his novel Veruka, hoenai no ka? (Bark, Veruka!), the author’s epic imagination is compressed to such amazing density that the work conveys a sense of tremendous speed. Half of the story is a historical tale that traces developments in the latter half of the twentieth century through the propagation of military working dogs. [. . .] The other half of the book is a suspense story about a former KGB military dog handler who kidnaps the daughter of a Japanese yakuza gangster. Eventually the two stories merge, developing into a richly textured faux history in which military dogs are, it would seem, major players in world history.

Steve Erickson is one of the authors cited as an influence on Furukawa, which is intriguing as well. (As is the fact that Steve Erickson is cited over and over and over in this book . . . I think that’s great, but I didn’t really that Erickson had such a huge reputation in Japan.)

Naoyuki Li

His short story collection Nigotta gekiryu ni kakaru hashi (Bridge Over a Muddy Torrent) contains nine works. A swift-moving stream divides the town into Right and Left Bank sectors, while repeated improvements to the lone bridge linking the two sides have left it an involuted, fantastical structure impossible to grasp in its entirety. A collection of odd people live in the town: a clan with bulging heads; a woman who has single-handedly organized the “Bridge Improvement Volunteers’ and stands o the bridge day in and day out campaigning for safety; a mayor who is able to communicate only with cats and lives the life of a recluse, yet whose preternaturally keen political instincts are intact. Each story interlocks organically with the next, revealing a richly imagined universe. In the last chapter, the characters reappear in unexpected fashion and the story ends as though swallowed in the waters of the torrent.

Akiko Itoyama

Her novel Tobo kusotawaka (Dang Fools On the Run) (Ed. note: “Damn Fools”?) is about a manic woman (the narrator) and a depressed (and possibly deluded) man escaping from a mental institution. “The pair head south in a beat-up old car, quarreling along the way, with the narrator bothered by aural hallucinations of a voice repeating a mysterious line from Marx’s Das Kapital.“

Masahiko Shimada

Oboreru shimin (Drowning Citzens) is a collection of fourteen short stories numbered from 0 to 13. Each one describes the ordinary yet odd daily lives of the residents of Nemurigaoka, or “Sleepy Hill,” a neighborhood that might be found in any Tokyo suburb. In the fourth story, “Chonai bika” (Town Beautification), Mr. Kodama bids his wife goodbye each morning and sets off for work. Ever since he retired, she has somehow lost the power of speech and can say only “Goodbye, dear” and “Welcome home, dear.” Kodama’s “work” consists of picking up litter, and the townspeople call him “Volunteer Guy” or “Trash Master.”

Shimada’s Dream Messenger was published in English back in 1994. The PW review was less than enthusiastic: “In this trying-too-hard-to-be-hip contemporary novel of fantasy, kinky sex, and emotional insecurity, young Japanese writer Shimada explores the fate of ‘rental children,’ who grow up willing to do anything—for a price.”

Gen’ichiro Takahashi

Takahashi is compared to Pynchon, Barthelme, and Calvino, in part for his novel Sayonara, Gangsters, which came out in English from Vertical back in 2004. According to PW:

Takahashi’s first novel to be translated into English can be amusing, sexy, moving, intelligent and maddeningly obtuse-often all at the same time. Which is exactly what Takahashi, acclaimed author of postmodernist romps and former porn director, intends. Somewhere in a future time and place, people have no names. Lovers find this inconvenient, so they begin naming each other. he two main characters settle on the following names: the woman is the Nakajima Miyuki Song Book, and the man, who teaches at a poetry school, is Sayonara, Gangsters.

(“Naming” and confusing signifiers seems to play a large role in Takahashi’s work. His novella “John Lennon versus the Martians” “starts with a prologue in which a third base coach gives a batter the incomprehensible sign, ‘John Lennon versus the Martians.’” And the narrator of the novella receives a postcard from a guy named “Japan’s Wonderful War.”)

The novel Nihon bungaku seisuishi (The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature) sounds like the most promising of his works.

To discover why it is so hard to write fiction today, Takahashi examines the history of modern literature, with the Meiji period (1868-1912) as his startying point. He summons literary giants of that era such as pioneer Shimei Futabatei, who like Takahashi agonized over his inability to write, and attempts to share his agony. [. . .] The author himself barges into this epic fantasy. Is he writing a fictional history of Japanese literature, or is he merely ridiculing writers?

Yasutaka Tsutsui

Tsutsui is most well known as one of Japan’s “Three Great” science-fiction writers. That said, apparently he’s continued to expanded his interests and writing style, and has published a number of metafictional and slapstick books. (His novel Hell was recently published by Alma Books in the UK and was part of the JLPP program, and sounds a bit Philip K. Dick-esque.)

A book which stirred great discussion is Tsutsui’s satirical novel Bungakubu Tadano Kyoju (Professor Tadano, Faculty of Letters). This hilarious work of metafiction exposes the inner workings of a faculty of letters at a private university in Japan. At the same time, through samples of literary theory interpolated into the story, it mocks the absurd underpinnings of contemporary literature and thought.

As I was poking around the JLPP site this morning, I came across this recent interview with translator Michael Emmerich, who has translated more than a dozen books from Japanese, including Asleep, Goodbye Tsugumi, and Hardboiled & Hard Luck, all by Banana Yoshimoto and The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P by Matsuura Rieko, which was on an earlier JLPP list, and I believe is coming out from Seven Stories early next year.

(As a sidenote, Emmerich is going to be part of a translation panel here at the University of Rochester taking place on October 1st and also featuring Marian Schwartz, Edward Gauvin, and Martha Tennent—more details to come.)

In response to the opening question about Matsuura Rieko’s fiction, Emmerich has some interesting things to say about both the book and women’s writing in Japan.

Some years ago, it struck me that most of the writers I was reading in Japanese were women—people like Enchi Fumiko, Tsushima Yuko, Tawada Yoko, and many others. I still have the sense that a fairly large proportion of the writers I find most interesting are women. You can imagine that, until recently, when men really occupied the center of the Japanese literary world, it must have been incredibly difficult for women to break into publishing. But perhaps in some ways that situation also enabled women writers to be more experimental than their male counterparts, or to experiment in different ways.

When I was a Master’s student at Ritsumeikan Univeristy, in Kyoto, a good friend recommended Matsuura Rieko to me, and I made a mental note of her name. Then one day during a visit to Keyaki Shoten, one of the dozens of bookstore in the Jinbocho area of Tokyo, I happened across a signed first edition of The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P. I started reading it on the train back to Kyoto, and I was completely sucked in—I simply couldn’t put it down. And since lesbianism is one of the main themes of the book, and that’s not something you see all that often in Japanese literature, certainly not Japanese literature in English translation, I had the sense it could have a big effect on the image of Japanese literature in English. Part of what I’m trying to do as a translator, I think, is to help readers see that there’s more to Japanese literature than just Kawabata Yasunari and Murakami Haruki.

He also touches on the situation of translation within the academy:

When the late Edward G. Seidensticker and other scholars of his generation were on their way up, establishing themselves as scholars, translation was really the only way to go—there was a pressing need to introduce Japanese literature to scholars in other fields, to show them that it was worth studying. And of course translation was the only way to do that. But by the late 1970s, once translation had established the field, people began to ask whether translation really ought to be counted as scholarship at all. “Theory” was on the way in, especially in English departments, and there was a strong sense that Japanese literary studies needed to head in that direction, too. And so, by the 1980s, translation was something to be actively avoided. People sometimes ask me “So are you a scholar or a translator?” But the truth is, that’s not a question you can ask—it’s not a choice we have in this field. You can only be both. And yet if you do a lot of translation at the same time that you’re active as a scholar, people tend to pass over the scholarship and focus on the translation.

But his reason for learning languages is my favorite part of this interview:

As a child, I really liked to read, and my sister and I had a dream that one day we’d be able to speak seven languages. We figured that if we could learn seven languages, we could speak a different one every day, and that would be really great.

Language Hat points out this interview from 1965 between Yukio Mishima and Robert Trumbull, which has a great bit about translation:

Mr. Mishima always writes in Japanese and never changes a translation. “The translator asks me thousands of questions,” he said, “but I don’t mind small mistakes.” He was amused, not angry, when the translator of an earlier novel rendered the word “yatsuhashi” as “eighth bridge,” which is a perfectly correct alternate reading of the characters that the author intended to mean a kind of cake sold in Kyoto. “The translator really had to struggle with that sentence to have it make sense with a bridge in it,” he said, chuckling.

Publishers Weekly is one of my favorite review sources, providing a slew of brief, intelligent reviews every week. I especially like the fact that they cover a higher percentage of independent, small press, and university presses than most newspapers or magazines.

In this week’s reviews there’s a nice write-up of Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool: Three Novellas. My friend Amber Quereshi acquired this for Picador some time back, and I’ve been anticipating its release ever since. (I believe James Gurbutt from Harvill also bought this, adding even more literary coolness to the book, topped off by the fact that Anna Stein was the agent.)

PW calls her work “crafty” and “suspenseful,” and state “Ogawa’s tales possess a gnawing, erotic edge.” The novella “Domitory” about a Toyko wife who nurses an armless one-legged manager at her old college dormitory sounds fantastic.

And if you’re interested, two of her stories appeared in the New Yorker — The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain and Pregnancy Diary.

What’s troubling about this week’s PW is the starred review of the new Dean Koontz book. Really? He needs to be reviewed? I think there should be a ban on reviewing titles I can by in the Express Checkout Line at the local Wegmans. Yuck.

As if Natsuo Kirino’s books don’t sound interesting enough by themselves, this interview in the LA Weekly has convinced me to check them out. Her books—two of which are available in English, Out and Grotesque, which was a Reading the World book this year—are beyond categorization, seeming to inhabit a space between crime fiction and literature, with a strong feminist underpinning that is twisted and disturbing.

As if that wasn’t confusing enough, here’s Margy Rochlin’s take:

Margy Rochlin describes her work as:

Author Natsuo Kirino is often referred to as “the queen of Japanese crime fiction.” But is that really the best way to classify her work? Her queasily disturbing, gender-political tales have also been called “Japanese feminist noir,” while in Japan, her brainy writing-style mashup is known as “Kirino Jynru,” or a book that borrows freely from several genres but feels beholden to none of their rules.

Michael Orthofer pointed this out as well, but Kirino’s response to the question about super-agent Binky Urban and which books are next in line to be translated provides an interesting glimpse into the politics of fiction in translation:

I went to New York and I hoped that Soft Cheeks would be translated because I thought it was a really good book. But Binky did her own research and found out through a Japanese connection that Grotesque might be a good option. After hearing a little bit about it, she decided that that would be the next one.

Since Binky doesn’t read Japanese, it’s odd that she has so much say in what comes out when. Although that kind of attention to the American market is what created the image we have of Murakami Haruki . . .

The next book does sound cool though, especially since it sounds like Americans won’t like it:

[What Remains] is a pretty dark story of kidnapping, and appears to be well received [in Japan], but I have my doubts about how it’s going to be received over here because of the sexuality. The narrative is structured in kind of a sandwich form, where you’ve got the author in the present, who’s reflecting on this time in the past when she was kidnapped for one year and held captive by a guy who said he wanted to be her friend. It’s a dark remembrance with these sexual scenes in it, so I feel a little skeptical about how it’s going to be taken here.