Place: Japan

The Summer 2023 Issue Is Here!

July 20, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Amyr Klink, Enrico Remmert, Diana Garzas Islas, and Rio Johan in our Indonesian Special Feature

Wedged between sky and sea is the thin line we all know as the horizon, ever-present in Brazilian explorer Amyr Klink’s nail-biting account of survival in shark-infested waters—just one of many new works from this Rubik’s Cube-like Summer edition. Though this particular horizon is “defined” against a clear sky on the day of Klink’s wondrous salvation, the same line is also “dun-colored” in Ecuadorian author Solange Rodríguez Pappe’s profound fiction; “lacerated” in frequent contributor Habib Tengour’s Homer-inspired sequences; mottled with “dung heaps” in Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez’s poetry; or simply a vortex toward which the ocean ebbs in award-winning short story writer Nukila Amal’s description of the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. Within the same Indonesian Feature, organized in partnership with the Lontar Foundation, Rio Johan’s brilliantly inventive “Fruit Maps”—about a drunk bioengineer!—finds a thoughtful echo in Nicole Wong’s Brave New World Literature entry invoking terroir and fruit to further problematize the mediating role of translation in world literature beyond mere tropes of “domestication” or “foreignization.” In Romanian playwright Tatiana Niculescu’s laugh-out-loud drama, on the other hand, it’s one particular foreigner with a very specific request who gives a museum guide grief; the museum is also the setting for Chapman Caddell’s thrilling review of Argentinian novelist César Aira’s latest “flight-forward” creation. All of this is illustrated by Singapore-based guest artist Eunice Oh, whose stunning photography graces our cover.

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Since the ongoing support of cultural institutions—or, in Asymptote’s case, lack thereof—makes a huge difference in what translator David Williams has wryly compared to the Olympics for being essentially a pay-for-play arena, we return to an interview series initiated two years ago and hear from four more fearless advocates who “work more backstage than onstage” to catalyze the transmission of their national literatures: Susanne Bergström Larsson from the Swedish Arts Council, Wenona Byrne from Creative Australia, Marieke Roels from Flanders Literature, and Shun Inoue from the Japan Foundation, the last sharing the same enthusiasm for manga as our Visual section’s Alexa Frank. “Because literature is such a powerful medium with which to explore the human condition and connect with one another,” Inoue says, “we must continue to look outward, not inward.” Hear, hear.

While we take some time off our issues to regroup and plan for a double milestone in January 2024 (the edition after this will mark both our 50th issue and 13th anniversary!), we hope you’ll join us in looking outward: apart from subscribing to our newsletter and international Book Club, following us in our daily blog, on Facebook, Twitter, our two Instagram feeds, and our newly launched Threads account, we invite you to come on board behind the scenes (apply by Aug 1st) or submit your own translations—who knows? you might share the same fate as contributor Anton Hur, double 2022 International Booker Prize longlistee and, as of eleven days ago, translator of BTS! Finally, if the work we do has similarly changed your life for the better, please consider advertising on our platforms, partnering with us on a Special Feature, or signing up as a sustaining or masthead member.

A toast to horizons in all their myriad forms—especially those that broaden perpetually!

READ THE ISSUE NOW

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 30, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Michal Zechariah, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest literary news from Sweden, Japan, and Israel!

In this week’s news, our editors report on the various matters occupying readers around the world. From the power of literary awards throughout Japan’s modern history, a survey on contemporary literary habits, and the growing Hebrew Book Fair—read on to find out more!

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for Japan

On June 16, the nominees for the 169th Akutagawa Prize and the Naoki Prize were announced to the public. Long recognised as the most important literary awards in Japan, the two accolades are given to emerging authors for a work of “pure literature” (junbungaku) and “popular literature” (taishū bengei) respectively, a fascinating distinction that has shifted tenuously throughout the awards’ long history, reflecting the evolving perspectives on what constitutes literary excellence, the separation between author and work, as well as how taste and zeitgeist can be reflected in the awardees. While the difference between what constitutes a literary text and a popular text can be seen as elitist, there have been, in the past, a great many other factors that have gone into the consideration of awardees—perhaps best exemplified by the awarding of the 1937 Naoki Prize (considered the less prestigious of the two) to Masuji Ibuse, whose profound literary output has insured him a spot in the modern Japanese canon. Throughout their time, the separate realms that the Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes were intended to occupy have opened up significant inquiries as to what, exactly, is valued in writing, consulting the multiple planes engaged by the literary arts: the aesthetic, the political, the dialogic, and the compassionate.

This year, the nominees for the Akutagawa Prize are Sao Ichikawa, Ameko Kodama, Masaya Chiba, Yusuke Norishiro, and Kaho Ishida. The subject matter of the narratives veer from the life of a professional welder; the changing intimacies and relations between four high school students over a single day; the introduction of the Internet in the 90s and its reverberations in a young man’s life; the potentials of anonymity as discovered by a teenage pop star; and the sexual life of a physically disabled woman.

The nominees for the Naoki Prize are Tow Ubukata, Ryosuke Kakine, Kazuaki Takano, Ryoe Tsukimura, and Nagai Sayako. Their nominated works include a historical novel on Ashikaga Takauji, the first shogun of the Ashikaga shogunate; a psychological story centred around the spectral presence at a railroad crossing; a crime novel set between Hong Kong and Japan; a tale of a young samurai who avenges his father; and a work of horror that paints a violent world under Tokyo’s polished metropolis.

What becomes evident in looking at these two groupings, even just by the superficial delineations of their bylines, is that this year, there is indeed a conspicuous demarcation between their preoccupations. Whereas the texts up for the Akutagawa can be all considered as realist storylines, recognisably using the prism of an individual’s life to refract truths and insights into the society in which they—and we—live, the nominees for the Naoki are being publicised along the engaging capacities of thrill and mystery. It is reflective of the same bilaterality that has always troubled the book as an object of consumption: that seeming incompatibility between the educational and the entertaining. Such is undoubtedly a judgement we all make independently when selecting what we’re interested in reading—or what we think we should be reading—and it’s somewhat unsettling to see this consideration fortified in the institutional fixedness of an award, which is by definition a statement of authority, a mandate of a higher power. In this way, the very essence of the Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes presents a conundrum that expounds on the act of reading, not only within Japanese literature and its apparatus, but in regards to the invisible schematic that books themselves exist on—all of these gossamer compartments and classifications that aim to instruct us not only on our own literary predilections, but what the books and their authors should be pursuing. It reveals both the impossibility and the necessity of judgment within the literary industry, about how unruly we know the whole process to be, yet how implicitly we trust it still. The freedom of the writing-act and the imagination of the reading-act has so many binds to negotiate, so many contracts to overcome. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Hagiwara Sakutaro

April 11, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by John Newton Webb

A wretched thieving dog / is howling at the decaying wharf’s moon.

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver distinctive poetry from Hagiwara Sakutaro. In simple, colloquial free verse, sensitively preserved by translator John Newton Webb, Death of a frog and Sad moonlight capture the ominous tonality and unsettling imagery that pervade this singular writer’s repertoire. Tread forward for an introduction to Sakutaro’s dark world then turn back for an insightful special feature from the Spring 2014 issue.

Death of a frog

A frog was killed,
the children circled round and raised their hands,
all of them together,
they raised their adorable,
blood-caked hands,
the moon came out;
a person is standing on the top of a hill.
Under his hat, a face. READ MORE…

A Place for Malice in Literature: On Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears

April 3, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Bella Creel

Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears. . .

Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, Verso, 2023

In the moody, deliriously humorous worlds of Hit Parade of Tears, Izumi Suzuki’s protagonists embody searing emotions, from anguish to apathy, all felt at an apex that seems like a breaking point. Sharp and achingly present, these eleven short stories are transposed by writers Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, and present emotional and often unsettling glimpses into worlds both familiar and fantastical. Though each story stands on its own, there are elements that draw them together: the stream of Japanese rock from the 1960s and 70s playing in the background, a woman searching for her younger brother, a blurry line between mental illness and otherworldly abilities, and perhaps most consistently, a spotlight on some of the ugliest aspects of human nature—pettiness, cynicism, self-obsession, vitriol. We find these traits in her characters across the board, and those who veer from this standard are noted for their irregularity. Whether it’s a spunky teenage girl or an ungrateful husband, the dialogue in translation is natural and engaging, and each character reads with a distinct voice; descriptions are elevated by clever word choice, from a “galumphing figure” to “laparotomized remains,” and each paragraph is a newly vivid scene.

While the women of Hit Parade of Tears occupy the traditional feminine roles of wives, mothers, and sexual objects, they are not held to stereotypical ideals of femininity when it comes to their emotions and motivations, which makes this a thought-provoking and relevant read for feminists interested in non-Western perspectives. Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears—and the men often read like props to the women’s narratives, whether that’s a self-obsessed husband, an ex-lover, a wannabe sugar daddy, a sacrifice, or a younger brother. Men’s bodies are constantly on display and under scrutiny—balding, thin, hot, or literally cut open from the stomach and hung like an ornament in a medical facility—and they rarely have any part in moving the plot forward.

The men in the protagonists’ lives belittle them and take them for granted, but the stories paint them in all their egoistic ways. In the eponymous “Hit Parade of Tears,” we spend the majority of the story listening to the thoughts of a man born over 150 years prior, who hit his prime in the 1960s and 70s. He talks down on his wife and her job archiving that era: “She’s jealous of me, he thought. She’s seething because she couldn’t take part in my youth like someone from the same generation could.” Come to find out, she’s been alive just as long as he has—they even dated briefly a hundred years ago, but he, solipsistic and self-absorbed, forgot, and he can’t imagine her experiences living up to his. Suzuki’s fiction is explicit in its critique of men’s treatment of women—hypocritical, predatory, and strikingly uncool, Suzuki’s men believe they have the upper hand in their relationships. Behind this belief, Suzuki’s women pull the strings, using the hands they’ve been dealt (as housewives, as sexy schoolgirls, as the repressed desires of a depressed woman) to their benefit. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2023

March 13, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Ian Ross Singleton, and Rachel Landau

New translations from the Yiddish, Japanese, and Esperanto!

In this month’s round up of the latest releases, we’re thrilled to introduce three singular works from rulebreakers, free thinkers, and true originals. From Japan, an early novella from the nation’s renowned enfant terrible, Osamu Dazai, gives a telling look at the writer’s internal monologue. From the Nobel laureate Issac Bashevis Singer, a bilingual edition of the Yiddish author’s story—in multiple translations—opens up an inquest into the translator’s pivotal role. And from the Ukrainian émigré Vasili Eroshenko, a collection of the author’s fairy tales, translated from the Japanese and Esperanto, presents a well-rounded selection of the transnational author’s politically charged work. Read on to find out more!

gimpl

Simple Gimpl by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a definitive bilingual edition with translations from the Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and David Stromberg, and Illustrations by Liana Finck, Restless Books, 2023

Review by Rachel Landau, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Whether you choose to know him as “Simple Gimpl” or “Gimpel the Fool,” the main character of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novella is a likable, rambling man who finds himself in an unfortunate situation. His wife, Elka, is frequently using their shared home for affairs with other men, and all of Gimpl’s attempts to come to terms with the situation are complicated by his deep love for her. Even when the pair are forbidden by the town rabbi from seeing each other, Gimpl works tirelessly to provide for the children and for Elka. He feels betrayed to learn, at the end of Elka’s life, that the children were not really his—and his reaction to this deception is a surprising one.

The narrative in Simple Gimpl is slow-moving, reflective, and witty. It is an undeniable pleasure to read—and certainly not difficult to read multiple times in a row, as this edition of the book incites the reader to do. This “definitive bilingual edition,” released by Restless Books, includes back-to-back translations of the Yiddish work; first is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Simple Gimpl,” which is followed immediately by Saul Bellow’s “Gimpel the Fool,” and this compendium of translations is decidedly about translation itself. Over the course of more than one hundred pages, one must realize that this is not a book about Gimpl, and not even about the differences between Saul Bellow’s Gimpel and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpl. It is about the role of the translator; it is about the strange impossibility of rendering a story. READ MORE…

Celebrate International Women’s Day with Women’s Writing!

March 8, 2023  |  in News  |  by The Blog Team

Join us as we highlight the vital contributions of women to literature and translation.

March 8th is International Women’s Day, and we wanted to take the opportunity to lift up the work of women in world literature. Below, find a selection of pieces published on the blog in the past year, across essays, reviews, translations, and interviews, curated to represent the breadth and brilliance of women working in writing.

Interviews

A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi
by Holly Mason Badra

But when you look deeper, when you look at archives, and look at early Kurdish periodicals, you find women. You discover these forgotten voices. An interesting example of that is Zeyneb Xan, who published under the pseudonym of Kiche Kurd (“Kurdish girl”). In 2018, when a publisher was reprinting Galawej (the first Kurdish literary journal published in 1939–1949), they decided to have sections on contributing writers. They came across this name, and one of the researchers working on the project uncovered that the identity of the writer was Zeyneb Xan (1900–1963), the eldest sister of Dildar—a very well-known figure of Kurdish literature who wrote the Kurdish anthem. Although her family was a literary family and at the center of literary attention, her manuscript remained unpublished until 2018. Her truly fascinating poetry collection covers a wide range of themes from patriotism to women’s education and liberation.

Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton
by Sophia Stewart

For me, films and television programs, as well as books and comics, have always been the places where I can meet outsider women, weirdo women, rebel women, sometimes scary women. When I was a child, I didn’t care if these women were human beings or ghosts or monsters, and I didn’t care if they were from Japan or other countries. I was just drawn to them, encouraged by their existence.

To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda
by Rose Bialer

Maybe if I was born in some other place, I would be writing about something else, but I do believe that Latin America is a very violent continent, especially for women, and in all of our traditions of women’s literature, there have always been women writing horror stories in Latin America. . .  I do believe that it’s because you can’t write about anything else. That’s how you live life. You are afraid for your life. You are scared of the violence in your family, the violence between your friends, the violence in the street. You can’t think about anything else except how to protect yourself from violence.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three essays from “The Heart of a Dog” by Hiromi Itō

February 7, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Jeffrey Angles

One day, Také stopped, too tired to go any further.

This Translation Tuesday, we’re thrilled to bring you three personal essays from pre-eminent Japanese author and poet Hiromi Itō, about her aging, beloved German Shepherd, Také. Unflinching in their portrayal of Také’s life, from her irrepressible youth to her gradual physical decline, Itō’s essays contemplate the often brutal inevitabilities of mortality in a quiet, understated prose, translated here by Jeffrey Angles with the aid of students in his translation seminar.

Canine Instincts

If I don’t write this quickly, I feel like I’ll be leaving Také behind, and I could hardly bear the thought of that.

Také is a German Shepherd who has reached the ripe, old age of thirteen. Meanwhile, I’m a fifty-six year-old human being. If I were a dog, I’d have kicked the bucket ages ago. Fifteen years ago, I came to Southern California with my two daughters, and we’ve been here ever since. A year and a half after our move, Také joined us. In other words, she’s been with our family for most of our time in California.

Today, I took Také on a walk to the park near our home like usual. Each time, she always wants to take the same path she’s walked her entire life. The route never varies, and once we start, she won’t be satisfied unless we go the whole way. That’s why I began to drive us back and forth—to decrease the burden on her tired, old body as much as possible.

Today, after we took our walk and returned to the car, I found my keys were missing. I must’ve dropped them somewhere. When I turned back to look, Také made a stubborn expression and refused to budge. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #5 The Hundred-Faced Actor by Edogawa Ranpo

December 26, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

Every time he changed disguise, the shape of his face would also change completely. “Miraculous” didn’t cut it . . . Was I hallucinating?

Is Edogawa Ranpo Japan’s Edgar Allan Poe or is Edgar Allan Poe America’s Edogawa Ranpo? Securing the fifth spot in our countdown of ten most-read articles in Asymptote’s pages from 2022, “The Hundred-Faced Actor” makes good on the reputation of Edogawa Ranpo–as a masterful spinner of horror stories and the father of Japanese mystery. 

If you haven’t yet read “The Hundred-Faced Actor,” translated brilliantly into the English for the first time by Lin King for our Spring 2022 issue, we invite you to step into another person’s skin in this psychological thriller, which José Garcia Escobar, Editor-at-Large for Central America, praised as “bizarre, unique, and fascinating.” Told by an older narrator to a younger audience, this discomforting tale takes us on an excursion to a banned theater featuring the titular actor of hundred likenesses—and the revelation thereafter that emerges amidst old newspapers that is tied to a slate of grave robberies. We can’t bear to give away the twists and turns, but suffice it to say that Ranpo leaves his reader intrigued and a bit queasy. Helping to peel back the layers of mystery is translator Lin King, who shared in her translator’s note: “ The ease with which Ranpo’s work can be translated across both languages and time is, I believe, a testament to the timelessness of his themes: people’s capacity for harming each other, as well as our tendency to dismiss said harm as “impossible” and “faked” when we witness it. In this sense, Ranpo’s work is perhaps more relevant today than ever.”

Here is an excerpt of the fiction:

I’d told R ahead of time that I preferred to watch from the back of the room, but for some reason he sat down in the very front row instead. When the actors came close to the edge of the stage, their faces were only about one ken apart from ours, and we could see every minute detail. But even as close as we were, we still couldn’t make out the smallest flaw in the Hundred-Faced Actor’s disguises. If he was playing a woman, he was a woman; if he was playing an old man, he was an old man—the transformation was absolute. For instance, the wrinkles: an average actor would use makeup to draw on the wrinkles; if you were to look from the side, you’d see through the illusion straight away. The sight of black ink smeared haphazardly on soft, plump cheeks is enough to make anyone chuckle. But the Hundred-Faced Actor—how did he do it?—had actual wrinkles etched into his flesh. And that wasn’t all. Every time he changed disguise, the shape of his face would also change completely. “Miraculous” didn’t cut it: depending on the situation, his face would become round or long, his eyes and mouth would grow big or small, and the very shape of his nose and ears would change dramatically. Was I hallucinating? Was there some sort of secret technique that made something like this possible? To this day, my questions remain unanswered.

In all its shapes, and across myriad cultures, literature extends our notions of what’s possible and helps us conceive a better world—in short, it is a benevolent force of good in this age of divisiveness. If you are feeling generous this gift-giving season, why not support our mission to seek out and publish the very best in world literature? It only takes three minutes to sign up to become a sustaining member or masthead member from as little as USD5 a month!

READ OUR FIFTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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READ MORE…

Everything Is in the Atmosphere: David Boyd on Translating Hiroko Oyamada

December 22, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

For me, the best way to approach idioms is to live with them for a really long time.

Hiroko Oyamada is a master of the uncanny. Though she made her English-language debut in only 2019, her surreal atmospheres and psychological insight has gained significant traction and acclaim, and we were delighted to introduce her third and latest work, the collection Weasels in the Attic, as our book club selection for the month of November. In the interconnected series of three narratives, Oyamada explores parenthood, fertility, and the demarcation between human and animal worlds with signature precision and intrigue, rendered into a graceful English by her long-time translator, David Boyd. In the following interview, we speak to Boyd on his relationship with Oyamada’s works, the challenge of idioms, and his approach to her singular style. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Laurel Taylor (LT): David, this is technically the third title from Oyamada you’ve translated into English, but the stories in this volume originally appeared separately—did you translate them all in one go?

David Boyd (DB): No, definitely not. In Japanese, the stories in Weasels in the Attic can be found in the book versions of The Factory (Kōjō) and The Hole (Ana). They were written around the same time as those novellas — between 2012 and 2014, I think. In 2019, when we published The Factory in English, Oyamada came out to New York and Boston to support the book. At that point, I was already working on The Hole, and New Directions wanted to know what was going to come next. When we talked to Oyamada, she told us that she’d always considered these three stories—“Death in the Family,” “Last of the Weasels,” and “Yukiko”—to be a trilogy. It was never printed as a single book in Japan, but that doesn’t mean Oyamada didn’t view it in that way. Anyway, that was where we got the idea to collect the stories into a single volume: from Oyamada herself.

LT: That’s fascinating to hear, because I was very curious about whether these stories were originally meant to go together.

DB: Absolutely. Oyamada wrote them that way. In my mind, too, they form a single novella, just like her other two books, even if there’s no single volume in Japanese that contains all three. Novellas in Japan are usually published with accompanying shorter stories, and that’s how “Death in the Family” ended up as part of The Factory and “Last of the Weasels” and “Yukiko” ended up as part of The Hole.

I translated them in the order that they were published in Japan—“Death in the Family” right after working on The Factory. That had to be around 2018, or maybe early 2019. It was kind of refreshing, because “Death in the Family” feels nothing like The Factory. Then, after I translated The Hole in the summer of 2019, I came back to Saiki and the others, working on “Last of the Weasels” then “Yukiko” back-to-back. I didn’t mean to do it that way, but it worked out well to have some space between the first story and the other two. A fair amount of time passes in the narrator’s world; he’s older in “Last of the Weasels,” and even older in “Yukiko.” That being the case, I didn’t go back to make sure that they sounded identical. I didn’t feel like there was any need. READ MORE…

The Possible Transformations Between Covers: On Storybook ND

December 15, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

The series’ humor, experimental spirit, and eye-catching design serve as the literary equivalent of an invigorating rollercoaster ride.

Storybook ND, by various authors and translators, New Directions, 2022

In autumn, literary publishers New Directions released a new compilation, corralled under a dreamy concept: Storybook ND offers fiction “to be seen and read for an hour or two . . . [Books] to fall into for a spell, in the space of an afternoon, or early evening, or on waking.” Curated by writer and translator Gini Alhadeff, the series introduces six “long stories or short novels” that can be read as parables, travelogues, or auto-fiction. While startlingly diverse in narrative approach, the common thread among these works seems to be the writer’s classic zeal to bridge a gulf—between life and art, flawed reality and transcendent fiction.

With each book ranging anywhere from sixty to ninety-six pages, Storybook ND currently features one original English-language story—Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool—and five translated works: The Woman Who Killed The Fish by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser; Three Streets by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani; Early Light by Osamu Dazai, translated from the Japanese by Ralph McCarthy and Donald Keene; Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by John Batki; and The Famous Magician by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. While DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool is not a translated work, it can be read as a virtuosic reflection on aesthetic representation and translation; specifically, DeWitt illustrates how both fiction and translation, in transforming reality or a foreign context into something intelligible, can also reflect the writer/translator’s inherent bias and their latent wish to control content.   READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Title: Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada

November 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

. . . the tension of the story's thread does not snap; it remains taut and coiled, hinting but never giving.

After a long history of marginalization, unconventional narratives of gender, parenthood, and conception are coming to the forefront, representing a pivotal step forward as our conversations around these foundational matters continue to be rife with tumult, tensions, and inquiries. In this month’s Book Club selection, Weasels in the Attic, award-winning Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada confronts the murky subject of family and childbearing with her signature command of the strange, weaving a narrative that encapsulates the surreality of these societal pressures. In her questioning of gender stereotypes and heteronormativity, Oyamada’s novella is a fascinating, disarming path through the psychology of not-yet parents, casting a dark suspicion onto the bright facade of nuclear familyhood.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada, translated from the Japanese by David Boyd, New Directions, 2022

Though Japan is famed for horror films of unsparing gore, I feel that the nation’s best stories of the uncanny are found in quieter narratives. Hiroko Oyamada’s Weasels in the Attic, translated by David Boyd, joins other globally famous Japanese authors like Yoko Tawada, Yukiko Motoya, Sayaka Murata in delivering a chill, caused not so much by overt implications of a world gone sideways than by the uneasy feeling that something is deeply wrong—something you can’t quite put your finger on.

Weasels in the Attic, Oyamada’s third volume from New Directions, also shares with Tawada, Motoya, and Murata a preoccupation with fertility and childlessness, two physio-sociological conditions gripping contemporary Japanese society as the population continues to shrink. While some politicians have acknowledged that reforms in work life and childcare are necessary to encourage population growth, blame is still often laid at the feet of women who supposedly prioritize career over family. In Weasels, however, the women of the story seem desperate to have children, while men are the ones expressing reservations or shock at the thought of starting a family. The narrator and his wife haven’t yet gotten pregnant, and she is increasingly frantic for a child while his interest is lukewarm at best. “I always tell her it’s her call,” the narrator explains to his male friends. “Then she comes back with all these pamphlets and websites . . . It’s the same thing every night. Then she asks me: ‘On a scale of one to ten, how badly do you want kids?’” The narrator’s qualms are further hampered by his possible impotency, something he refuses to investigate even when his wife hands him a sample cup point blank.

During a visit to friend-of-a-friend Urabe, the narrator holds Urabe’s newborn daughter and narrates her appearance: “The baby’s face was small and red. Her shut eyes looked like knife slits. I could feel her warmth and dampness through the layers of cloth.” In such a small child, there are already hints of the uncanny, of something lurking in the humid, murky depths. The moment the narrator relinquishes the baby to her mother, he becomes preoccupied with Urabe’s extensive exotic fish collection. Tanks fill Urabe’s home, and he and his wife breed the fish selectively, carefully—yet at the same time, unpredictably. “We still don’t fully understand the relationship between genotype and phenotype,” Urabe’s wife tells the narrator. “We haven’t been able to confirm which genes lead to which patterns. He says that’s why we need to experiment with different pairings—to see which combinations they produce.” In the course of rereading (which I would highly recommend with this text), this sentence rings differently, terrifyingly. Who precisely is experimenting with whom? And to what end? Is it Urabe experimenting with fish worth hundreds of dollars, or is it his uncanny wife—or more accurately, the mother of his child—experimenting with potential mates? After all, as we soon learn, she might possibly be the same girl he discovered in his storeroom dressed in nothing but underwear and a slip, eating bags of dried fish food. The reader, however, is never given clear confirmation of this fact; the shadowy depths of Weasels refuse any straightforward details. READ MORE…

Our Crisis in Democracy: A View from Japan

October 1, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Fuminori Nakamura

It’s frightening to think of history repeating itself.

An ultranationalist religious cult infiltrating the highest levels of the Japanese state—the story of the Unification Church is, as Fuminori Nakamura writes, “straight out of a manga”. Yet the shooting of Shinzo Abe in July, by a man who lost his family to the cult-like practices of the Unification Church, has shone a light on the worrying ease with which fringe religion can infiltrate mainstream politics—and not only in Japan, Nakamura argues, but in embattled democracies across the world. With Abe’s state funeral held earlier this week, his essay, the first in a new series of translated opinion pieces we are hosting in our Saturday column, sounds the alarm at an important time.

The relationship between politics and religion in Japan is deeply rooted.  When considering the current iteration of the Unification Church’s connections with Japanese politics, it brings to mind the era in the 1930s when Japan was progressively listing toward war with the United States.  Before getting into that, however, first allow for a brief review of the attack on Japan’s former prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

On July 8, 2022, Mr. Abe was shot and killed while giving an endorsement speech ahead of the national election. The suspect who fired the gun is a forty-one-year-old man, Tetsuya Yamagami. His family was destroyed by cumulative donations his mother had made as a member of the Unification Church. Allegedly his intention had been to target the current leader of the church, Hak Ja Han Moon, the widow of the founder of the Unification movement, but he targeted Mr. Abe instead because he was, to use Yamagami’s own words, “the most influential person who was sympathetic to the Unification Church.” (Author’s note:  Though in Japan it is still referred to as “the former Unification Church,” the church changed its name to the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, but to avoid confusion I will use its previous designation.)

Since the incident, the depth of the Unification Church’s relationship with, in particular, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is increasingly clear. In Japan, the Unification Church is considered a cult: among their practices, the church tells followers that their ancestors are suffering in the next world and compel them to buy exorbitantly priced jars called “tsubo” (for several million yen) and scriptures called “seihon” (for ¥30,000,000, which is about 50,000 times the cost of a paperback edition of one of my novels in Japan). They also conduct mass weddings where members marry someone chosen for them by the church. Ostensibly, they advocate rather strongly for conservative and right-wing causes. In their desire to rewrite Japan’s pacifist constitution that includes a renunciation of war in order to empower the military as well as their refusal to acknowledge the rights of LGBTQ people, the church bears a strong affinity with the LDP. This has enabled a cult to infiltrate the center of Japan’s politics. Reports about the church’s ties with high-ranking officials within Japan’s National Police Agency as well as the chairman of the Public Safety Commission depict a world straight out of a manga. READ MORE…

Breaking Down the 2022 National Book Award Longlist

September 17, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

A selection to whet your appetite for translated literature!

Now in its fifth year, this rebooted annual award for translated literature deserves a serious look. How does its newly released longlist compare to the Booker International counterpart?

Unlike its Booker International counterpart, works from European languages dominated, continuing the trend from previous years. Previous winner (and frequent Asymptote contributor) Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth was one of the only two titles from Asia.

Order a copy of Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani.

As with the 2020 selections, only one title appeared in both the Booker International and the National Book Award longlists, and it was an Olga Tokarczuk novel translated by Jennifer Croft. We hope it will be third-time lucky for this illustrious duo!

Order a copy of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft.

New Directions is the only publisher to have two titles on the longlist. Aside from Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, Olga Ravn’s The Employees, which our Criticism Editor Barbara Halla chose as her clear winner from last year’s Booker International longlist, is also nominated.

Click here to order a copy of Olga Ravn’s The Employees, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken.

Incidentally, Aitken, who is the only longlisted translator to ever be nominated for his work on different authors, was interviewed in our pages last year. This year, we sat down with Mónica Ojeda, whom interviewer Rose Bialer calls “one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today.” Her Jawbone made the cut:


Order a copy of Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker.

We hope we’ve whetted your appetite with these selections. Take a look at the full longlist here! Oh, and by the way, we may receive a small commission for your purchase(s), which will go toward supporting our advocacy for a more inclusive world literature. Other ways to sustain our mission include signing up as a masthead member, or joining our Book Club!

The Metaphysical Touch of Technology: An Interview with CŌEM

September 5, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

I am convinced that new poetic expressions that have never existed before will be born—and re-introduced to the page someday.

The Tokyo-based CŌEM is a multi-talented collective of poets, writers, and coders who explore the ever-evolving and curious intersection between poetry and technology. In creating immersive experiences and rethinking the potential of words, the group work to advance their writerly craft with feats of digital engineering, operating on the idea that poetry is not only a literary form or a vehicle for expression but a way of engaging with the world as it moves and changes. I spoke with two leaders of CŌEM, the award-winning poet Nagae Yūki and co-founder Jordan A. Y. Smith, our conversation touching on the singular life of the poem, how poetry can be enacted in physical and digital landscapes, and what transpires when minds of discreet intelligences converge.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): CŌEM brings together digital language and poetic language to create projects that aim to immerse readers further into the world of the poem. For you two as poets, what about virtuality entices you? What is particularly seductive or engaging about a poem existing outside of the page?

Nagae Yūki (NY): This addresses a fundamental question of how to determine the essence of poetry. The poetry on the page in the form of écriture can easily be understood as poetry itself—but spoken poetry, with the tongue and the throat and gestures, is a more primeval form than written poetry, as seen with the Iliad and the Odyssey. In fact, I feel that this physicality is key. Over the last ten years, as social media have reached the peak of their prosperity, the digital has largely been criticized as a medium that strips away human physicality; however, today, the latest technology (including the metaverse, which is a sensory technology) allows people to experience leaps in time and space that are possible only in virtual space.

Returning to the first question, what is poetry? Perhaps a metaphysical gaze that overlooks the branching, irreversible movements of time in simultaneity, a miracle of the tongue that freely draws in different places. Isn’t it the poet who makes such connections visible, translating them into something that can be sensed by others? If so, technology as a poetic medium can be considered to have this same power, allowing many people to approach the written word intuitively. Don’t get me wrong—I truly believe in writing, but at the same time, when poets manipulate digital devices and let their bodies and thoughts pass through the metaphysical touch of technology, I am convinced that new poetic expressions that have never existed before will be born—and re-introduced to the page someday. It is my intuition that within these exchanges lies hidden the actual potential for revolutionary changes in the expression of poetry.

Jordan A. Y. Smith (JAYS): Poetry on the page is a great nexus of experiences, but there’s nothing about the medium of paper except its tactility and scent that merits it being the primary locus of poetic form, and the digital “forms” that mimic paper actually sacrifice what’s good about it, remaining faithful to conventions like line shape and length, print-based traditions, and the simulation of book construction that actually deprive the digital of anything that could potentially justify that very sacrifice. There’s a place for poetry in printed forms such as books—I mean, I also edit Tokyo Poetry Journal—so this is not suggesting a replacement of “pages.”

What can be found “in” the poem through the digital is in many ways more akin to the actual poetic experience, which can be synaesthetic, hyperlinked, virtual, disembodied and re-embodied in new ways, spiritually haunting, uncanny, delusional, multilayered, and so on. I’m generally in favor of doing things with poetry—reading it out loud, writing it in my own handwriting, playfully removing parts to highlight, decontextualize, and emphasize them as units.

This sense of play is embodied in Oulipo writers as well, and when I designed and taught a course in digital literature (at UCLA back in 2014), we spent a fair amount of time looking at antecedents of digital literature. Now we have increasingly more versatile tools, so this is just as natural a change as writers switching from quill and ink to ballpoint or mechanical pencil, and from printing press to print-on-demand or e-books.

READ MORE…