Mieko Kawakami’s 2008 novella Breasts and Eggs won acclaim in Japan for its depiction of the tense, complex relationship between the narrator, Natsuko Natsume, her sister, and her niece. Haruki Murakami called Kawakami his favorite young novelist, and the novella went on to win the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. Kawakami later expanded the story into a novel of the same name. Its translation into English, forthcoming from Europa Editions (US) and Picador (UK), will be her English-language debut and has been listed among this year’s most anticipated releases by The New York Times, The Millions, Lit Hub, and others. The book’s award-winning translators, Sam Bett and David Boyd, are working together to translate all of Kawakami’s novels. Here, they discuss their co-translation process and some of the novel’s challenges: Kawakami’s musical prose, the characters’ Osaka dialect, and the plot’s focus on women’s experiences.
Allison Braden (AB): How does your work, in general, complement each other’s? What is it about the other’s product or process that makes for a good collaborator?
Sam Bett (SB): I discovered David’s work as a reader, through the magazine Monkey Business, and wrote him something of a fan letter. We’ve been each other’s first readers for almost five years now. Depending on the project, this sometimes means doing a close “side-by-side” read, where we offer comments on specific translation choices, and sometimes means reading the translation independently from the original, to see how well it stands up on its own. I think the most important thing is receptivity. Translation is, by nature, a group effort. Our collaboration is essentially a long-term workshop. When you have mutual trust and let your guard down, you can admit your fallibility, which is the only way to grow.
David Boyd (DB): Translating Breasts and Eggs with Sam was incredibly satisfying. That said, I could see how co-translation could go horribly wrong under different circumstances. If you asked around about experiences with co-translation, you’d probably hear more horror stories than happy endings . . . I agree with Sam. What made our collaboration work was trust. On top of that, if you’re going to co-translate, you’d better be happy with how your collaborator approaches writing. Otherwise it isn’t going to work. There was one other thing that I think made our collaboration work: the way we divided the text. Sam retained ultimate say over the translation of the narrative and I had the same degree of control over how we handled the dialogue. That division really helped.
AB: What was the most surprising result of this particular collaboration?
SB: I’d say how little time we spent talking about Osaka dialect, which is the first thing people tend to ask about whenever the book or the translation comes up. It helps that I lived in Osaka for a while, and also that very little of the book is set in Osaka. In fact, only the main characters use the dialect, and not even exclusively, though some Tokyoite characters do make a comical effort to pass as Osaka natives, which was a fun translation challenge. For me, what links this book to Osaka is its animated spirit. The story actively engages in the spectacle it creates. I think that readers who are expecting something staid or coolly bizarre from Japanese fiction will be pleasantly surprised at the gushing life force they find here.
AB: How did you decide to divide the work this way? How did that approach benefit the final product?
DB: We’d heard about another pair of translators working along similar lines in the past. That’s where the idea of splitting narrative and dialogue came from. Oddly enough, not long after we started working on this book, I ran into one of those translators and asked what it was like to divide the text in that way. They said they’d never even heard of approaching co-translation like that. Anyway, Sam and I had already done a fair amount of the work by that point, and we were very happy with how things were shaping up.
SB: The idea was to divvy up the fiction along existing lines. Since the narration and the dialogue already use different registers, we were able to impart each with a unique voice without worrying about irregularity. I can also imagine two translators splitting the work up between main characters, as long as the narrative maintained discrete channels for each.
AB: Breasts and Eggs centers on experiences traditionally associated with womanhood, even though Natsuko doesn’t necessarily fit the mold of traditional womanhood. Does the gender of the translator matter? How did your being men inform (or not) your approach?
SB: It’s a great question, because it points to the varied nature of what translators do. As readers, we immerse ourselves in writing we might lack the experience to write ourselves. As writers, we stand in for the author, which makes us accountable for both their voice and our chosen mode of delivery. What reading and writing have in common, and what makes translation possible, is listening. Translators of different genders might hear different things in what they read. So might native Japanese speakers. Our goal has been to create the book that Mieko Kawakami would write, if she wrote Breasts and Eggs in English.
DB: Yes, by Natsuko’s own account, she doesn’t really fit the mold, but she spends much of the narrative exploring the boundaries of womanhood. That was a large part of what made the book such a joy to translate. Maybe this sort of thing is ultimately beyond our control as translators, but we put a lot of thought into how to have Natsuko come across as Natsuko, not just a generic stand-in for womanhood or womanhood in Japan today. Natsuko is a challenging narrator and she needs the room to be exactly that.
AB: Given all the differences between the two parts and the fact that the first part had been published previously in a slightly different form, how did you approach consistency across the two parts? How did the structure and publication history affect your process?
SB: The book has its own internal connectivity. Rather than impose consistency, we tried to remain sensitive to how the original maintains coherence. Not every subtle cue will carry over. I see translation as an exercise in letting go, which is most important (and hardest) at the beginning and end of the process. A strong book rewards revisitation, and the rewards are amplified for the translators. I see something new every time I open Breasts and Eggs.
DB: I couldn’t agree more. The translation is finished, but the book continues to change every time I read it. Books One and Two connect in many ways, not all of which are obvious. When we were working on the second half of the novel, it felt like we were constantly discovering subtle connections between the two halves.
AB: How was this book similar or different from books you’ve translated before? What were the biggest challenges? Surprises?
SB: One big surprise was how much our dynamic shifted throughout the process. In some cases David drafted the dialogue weeks before I introduced the narration, or vice versa. In others, we worked nearly simultaneously. Somehow, the first full draft did not feel patchy. This is largely credit to the vitality of the book, which set the standard for everything we did. David and I did our best to remember to have fun. It’s tempting to find a rigid system and stick with it, but playing around with the process is often the best way to keep the air fresh and the prose lively.
AB: Mieko Kawakami is also a singer and songwriter. How does her musical sensibility come through in her writing? How did you approach translating that?
DB: Breasts and Eggs is absolutely musical. We did our best to capture the raw, sonic quality of the Japanese. Throughout the translation process, Sam and I spent a good amount of time talking about music. Specifically, we talked a lot about what we were listening to while we worked, or songs or albums we were reminded of by what we found in the text. Talking about music like this, we were able to share some of what we were hearing in Kawakami’s writing.
SB: Kawakami’s writing is melodic and concerned with sound and rhythm, but I see these traits as a natural part of fiction. Like any great work of art, it exists in a world of its creation without being of it.
Sam Bett holds a B.A. with highest honors in Japanese and English from UMass Amherst. In March 2016, he was awarded Grand Prize by the Japanese Government in the 2nd JLPP International Translation Competition. With David Boyd, he is co-translating the novels of Mieko Kawakami.
David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated stories by Genichiro Takahashi, Masatsugu Ono, and Toh EnJoe, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat won the 2017⁄2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. With Sam Bett, he is co-translating the novels of Mieko Kawakami.
Allison Braden is a writer and Spanish translator. In addition to representing Argentina as an editor-at-large for Asymptote, she is a contributing editor to Charlotte Magazine and an editorial assistant for the academic journal Translation and Interpreting Studies. Her writing has appeared in Columbia Journalism Review, The Daily Beast, Asymptote, and Spanish and Portuguese Review, among others.
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