Posts featuring Hiromi Kawakami

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 24, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by David Boyd, Eva Wissting, and Suhasini Patni

The latest in literature from India, Japan, and Sweden!

This week, our editors on the ground are bringing news of book fairs, prestigious awards, and new mediums for well-loved texts. Suhasini Patni takes us through the JCB Literary Prize longlist, David Boyd introduces a new adaptation of Banana Yoshimoto, and Eva Wissting welcomes back the revitalised, in-person edition of the Gothenburg Book Fair. Read on to find out more!

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

August and September have been the months of literary awards in India. The fourth iteration of the JCB Literary Prize, known as India’s most “valuable literary prize” has announced its longlist; the panel of judges—“author and translator Sara Rai—who will act as chair, 2018 JCB Prize-winner Shahnaz Habib, designer and art historian Dr. Annapurna Garimella, journalist and editor Prem Panicker, and writer and podcaster Amit Verma”—have chosen mainly debut novels for the longlist.

There are also three novels in translation, all from Malayalam. Notably, the prize last year went to Moustache, written by S. Hareesh and translated from Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil. The books on the longlist are: Delhi: A Soliloquy, written by M Mukundan (translated by Fathima EV and Nandakumar M), Anti-Clock by VJ James (translated by Ministhy S), and The Man Who Leant to Fly but Could Not Land by Thachom Poyil Rajeevan (translated by PJ Mathew).

Delhi: A Soliloquy was the winner of Ezhuthachan Puraskaram, the highest literary award given by the government of Kerala. The book is set during the 60s-80s and follows the lives of Malayalis living in Delhi, exploring how the daily existence of migrants are full of disruption and longing. While the capital undergoes a war with China, the Emergency, and the anti-Sikh riots, the families struggle to earn money to send back home. “Delhi’s underbelly is laden with squalor and misery. I wanted to talk about these dark sides of the city,” said the author. But the loneliness and alienation of migration is captured through a discussion on language.

She didn’t know Hindi, and no one spoke Malayalam. For a few months, she had to live without language. For the first time in her life, she understood what it meant to be isolated.

The New India Foundation also announced its longlist for the fourth edition of the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, celebrating excellence in non-fiction writing. The foundation is also currently accepting translation fellows for work in non-fiction. The mentors for this fellowship include writers like Ayesha Kidwai, Vivek Shanbag, and Rana Safvi among many others. READ MORE…

From Japan to Brazil: An Interview with Translator Rita Kohl

April 19, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by David Boyd

Murakami has definitely opened a lot of doors for Japanese literature . . . I’m just anxious to see different people passing through those doors.

In recent years, the popularity of Japanese literature has risen in Brazil, and a much larger share of Japanese titles is now being made available in direct translation into Portuguese. Rita Kohl, who has worked on fiction by authors such as Yoko Ogawa and Hiro Arikawa, is one of the most prolific literary translators working with this pair of languages. 

In this interview with Editor-at-Large for Japan, David Boyd, Kohl speaks about several of her recent translations—from Haruki Murakami’s Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (Ouça a canção do vento & Pinball 1973) to Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (Querida konbini) and Earthlings (Terráqueos). She also touches on the current state of Japanese literature in Brazil.

David Boyd (DB): Who’s reading Japanese literature in Brazil? What kind of translations are they reading?

Rita Kohl (RK): I’ll try to give you my general impression of the reception of Japanese literature in Brazil, although I wouldn’t say that I’m particularly knowledgeable about the publishing world here. I used to read reviews of translations much more closely, but I haven’t been able to stay on top of it lately, as—thankfully—there’s been so much more of it.

One important thing to keep in mind is that the direct translation of Japanese fiction by mainstream publishers is a relatively recent development. Up to the 1990s, we had some pivot translations from English, such as a few novels by Mishima translated into Portuguese in the 1980s, but direct translations typically came from the academic world or the Japanese-Brazilian community, and didn’t really reach a popular readership.

This started to change toward the end of the 1990s. Leiko Gotoda’s translation of Miyamoto Musashi, published in 1999 by Estação Liberdade, had a significant impact; I say this because it became something of a bestseller (but as this work was the subject of my master’s research, I might be biased). Since then, translations of Japanese literature have been steadily increasing, and are mostly translated directly from Japanese, although it’s still not uncommon to see some indirect translations (thrillers by Natsuo Kirino and Kanae Minato come to mind).

The shift we’ve seen from indirect to direct translation isn’t limited to Japanese literature. It reflects a change in public perception of translation on the whole, which can also be seen, for example, in the translation of Russian literature. At the same time, since editors typically can’t read the original work, we continue to depend on the canon of Japanese literature translated into other languages, and I feel as though we’ve been trying to catch up, translating authors who were translated into other languages quite some time ago: Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Sōseki Natsume, and so on. In contemporary literature, the overwhelming majority of translated works are by Haruki Murakami, but we also have some books by Banana Yoshimoto, Hiromi Kawakami, Yoko Ogawa, Ryu Murakami, and Sayaka Murata. I think that a lot of these new additions are the result of an effort to translate and publish more female authors. Personally, I’m very happy with this development, and I tend to prioritize women authors when recommending novels or thinking about what I’d like to translate next.  READ MORE…

Back in (MONKEY) Business: A Japanese Revival

November 25, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Lindsay Semel

The heart of the publication, however, is its rich offering of delightful voices that have yet to garner much anglophone attention by other means.

It’s such a treat to welcome fellow journals of translation into the scene—and a rare one to welcome them back! We’re thrilled to announce that after a somewhat prolonged hiatus, acclaimed translators Ted Goossen and Motoyuki Shibata have put out the rebranded MONKEY: New Writing from Japan. The long-awaited edition features sundry gems from rising and established stars alike, and here to guide us through them is Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel. Her interest in the project was piqued after covering prior MONKEY contributor Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighbourhood (in Goossen’s own translation) for our August Book Club. Read on to learn why it paid off in spades!

After a nearly three-year hibernation, MONKEY: New Writing from Japan—formerly Monkey Business (2011–2017)—reemerged on the literary scene in full force this October. The annual journal aims to introduce anglophone readers to Japanese literature in its full depth and breadth. The mirror image of its eponymous predecessor, MONKEY is edited by two industry veterans who work in opposite directions: Ted Goossen, acclaimed translator from the Japanese, and his counterpart Motoyuki Shibata, one of the foremost translators of contemporary English literature into the same. Together, the two employ their formidable literary networks to facilitate the exchange of stories and ideas, challenge stereotypes, and offer promising new talent a foothold in a too-often impenetrable industry. 

The high-profile likes of Haruki Murakami, Hiromi Itō, Hiromi Kawakami, and Mieko Kawakami, for example, appeared frequently in the pages of Monkey Business, and they all reappear in its new incarnation. Their participation lends both legitimacy and visibility to the journal, as well as prestige to their lesser-known colleagues. “Good Stories Originate in the Caves of Antiquity” is an interview between Murakami and Mieko Kawakami translated by Goossen. The last in a series of previously published conversations between the two, it enacts a sort of passing of the baton from the old to the new vanguard. Murakami insists equanimously that the “weight and strength [of ‘good stories’] have endured over great lengths of time—stretching back to those caves of antiquity”; meanwhile, Kawakami grills him on difficult topics like true evil and writers’ responsibility to speak to the suffering of their time. The result is simultaneously a philosophical treatise on the role of art in society, an insight into the thinking of two great public figures, a glimpse into the struggle between institutions and artists for the soul of the nation’s literature, and a gentle assertion that that soul need not submit to a single owner. READ MORE…

Of Dreams and Dames: Ted Goossen on Translating Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighborhood

September 17, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

What Westerners . . . call magical realism … [is] a way of normalizing that which doesn’t easily fit into our categories.

Last month, we were delighted to bring you award-winning author Hiromi Kawakami’s latest in translation. Like much of her writing, our August Book Club selection tackles the everyday with a deliciously fantastic twist. In this interview with assistant managing editor Lindsay Semel, the inimitable Ted Goossen gives us a fascinating glimpse into the Japanese canon and the author’s place within it. He also shares his aversion to labels like “magical realism” or “women’s writing”: there are as many forms of the real and the female as there are cultures, he suggests, and that’s quite a gift.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve mentioned in interviews (mainly in connection to MONKEY, the magazine of Japanese literature you co-edit) that you strive to bring non-canonical Japanese writers to Anglophone readers. Do you think there’s a difference between the Japanese literary canon and the Western canon of Japanese literature in translation?

Ted Goossen (TG): That’s an excellent question, and of course there’s a difference. Regarding the Western reception of Japanese literature, one of the earliest works was The Tale of Genji: a 1,200-page, thousand-year-old novel written by a court lady, whose manuscript was initially hand-copied and circulated among her female peers. The first English translation, Arthur Waley’s, was published around 1920. At that time, Genji was highly exotic, even for the Japanese, because it was written in a way they couldn’t read. So Waley did us all a great service with his beautiful translation, and since then, there have been four or five more.

Other than that, Japanese literature didn’t really gain a Western audience until the 1960s; at that point, the US had made Japan—its enemy in World War II—an ally, and it had tried to resurrect its reputation. Because of the war, Americans thought of the Japanese as cruel and heartless, so the US needed to make them more “human,” render them more attractive. Not only was there an element of exoticism when it came to Japanese culture, then, but also a need to rehabilitate it. When Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in 1968, Japanese literature was prized for the kind of poetic, Zen-like quality present in his writing. Kenzaburō Ōe, who won the Nobel in 1994, distanced himself from that whole stream, and his literature is unlike any that preceded it; it did garner a Western audience, albeit a relatively small one. Now, of course, it’s Murakami. He dominates the West to such an extent that when we speak of “non-canonical,” it’s almost like we’re saying “non-Murakami.”

You’ve mentioned MONKEY, and the paradox there is that Murakami is one of our biggest supporters; he and my co-editor Motoyuki Shibata are very close, I know him as well, and Jay Rubin, a frequent collaborator, is one of his best translators. So ironically, we’re using the magazine to highlight the work of writers who aren’t Murakami, but we use Murakami to draw attention to it by publishing lots of interesting interviews, essays, and dialogues about or with him. Still, certain authors like Mieko or Hiromi Kawakami are getting lots of buzz in their own right, simply because they’re so good. There are others, too, so we’re seeing the rise of quite a few Japanese writers in the English-speaking literary world. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 4, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, David Boyd, MARGENTO, and MK Harb

This week's latest news from Lebanon, Japan, Romania, and Hong Kong!

Our writers bring you the latest literary news this week from Lebanon, where writers have been responding in the aftermath of the devastating port explosion. In Japan, literary journals have published essays centred upon literature and illness, responding to the ongoing pandemic. Romanian literature has been thriving in European literary initiatives and in Hong Kong, faced with a third wave of COVID-19, the city’s open mic nights and reading series have been taking place online. Read on to find out more! 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

This week, as French President, Emmanuel Macron, began his Lebanon tour by meeting the iconic Lebanese diva, Fairuz, the literary world continued to grieve for Beirut in the aftermath of the explosion. Author Nasri Atallah, writing for GQ Magazine, recounts the cataclysmic impact of “Beirut’s Broken Heart.” Writer and translator Lina Mounzer and writer, Mirene Arsanios, exchanged a series of letters to each other for Lithub, talking about the anguish of distance and the pain of witnessing tragedy.Writer Reem Joudi also wrote an intimate essay exclusively for Asymptote, reflecting on her experience of the explosion and the uncertain future that Beirut now faces. Naji Bakhti, a young Lebanese writer, made his literary debut with Between Beirut and the Moon. Published on August 27 with Influx Press, the book is a sardonic coming of age story in post-civil-war Beirut (1975-1990). While Bakhti was chronicling the past, reading it now feels eerily relevant.

In translation news, writer and transgender activist, Veronica Esposito, interviewed Yasmine Seale about her upcoming translation of the Thousand and One Nights. Seale, whose English translation of Aladdin is beautiful in the most transgressive sense, will be the first woman to translate the Thousand and One Nights into English. In the interview, she discusses the colonial and class legacy of translating classics and the wild possibility of re-translating and re-imagining many Arabic classics. Lastly, here at Asymptote, we are excited about acclaimed Egyptian author, Mansoura Ez-Eldin’s new novel, Basateen Al-Basra from Dar El-Shourouk publishing house. Her previous novel, Beyond Paradise, was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2010. We eagerly await its translation from Arabic!

David Boyd, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Japan

This month, Japan’s major literary journals continue to showcase writing that deals with illness. The September issue of Subaru features several essays on the intersection between literature and illness, including “Masuku no sekai wo ikiru” (Living in the World of the Masque), in which Ujitaka Ito connects Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman to the current pandemic. READ MORE…

Announcing our August Book Club Selection: People From My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami

August 31, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

The portrayal and analysis of collective experience makes this a text that truly meets our moment.

As we continue into the latter half of this increasingly surreal year, one finds the need for a little magic. Thus it is with a feeling of great timeliness that we present our Book Club selection for the month of August, the well-loved Hiromi Kawakami’s new fiction collection, People From My Neighborhood. In turns enigmatic and poignant, as puzzling as it is profound, Kawakami’s readily quiet, pondering work is devoted to the way our human patterns may be spliced through with intrigue, strangeness, and fantasy; amongst these intersections of normality and sublimity one finds a great and wandering beauty.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

People From My Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen, Granta, 2020

Like a box of chocolates, Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighbourhood (translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen) contains an assortment of bite-sized delights, each distinct yet related. This peculiar collection of flash fiction paints a portrait of exactly what the title suggests—the denizens of the narrator’s neighborhood—while striking a perfect balance between intriguing specificity and beguiling universality. The opening chapters introduce readers to each of the neighborhood’s curious inhabitants, while later chapters build upon the foundation, gradually erecting a universe of complex human relationships, rigorous social commentary, immense beauty, and more than a little magic.

Existing fans of Kawakami’s will surely recognize these common features of her award-winning body of work, while first-time readers will likely go searching for more. Goossen is better known as a translator of Murakami and editor of the English version of the Japanese literary magazine MONKEY: New Writing from Japan (formerly Monkey Business); ever committed to introducing Anglophone readers to non-canonical Japanese writers, he brings his flair for nonchalant magical realism to this winning new collaboration.

The first story, “The Secret,” introduces readers to the anonymous narrator and sets the tone for the collection. First presented as genderless, (we only find out later that she is female) she discovers an androgynous child, who turns out to be male, under a white blanket in a park. The child, wild and independent, comes home with her. Despite occasional disappearances, he keeps her company as she ages, all the while remaining a child. In this story, we receive her only concrete—but general—description of herself: “I’ve come to realize that he can’t be human after all, seeing how he’s stayed the same all these years. Humans change over time. I certainly have. I’ve aged and become grumpy. But I’ve come to love him, though I didn’t at first.” This one statement exemplifies many of the collection’s trademark characteristics and overarching themes: a version of time in which past, present, and eternity coexist, the supernatural, and the narrator’s fascinating method of characterization. READ MORE…

WIT Month: An Interview with Ginny Tapley Takemori

August 24, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

. . . a book is like a musical score, and readers are the musicians; a book is only complete with their performances.

As we approach the end of a wonderfully celebratory Women in Translation month, Asymptote is proud to present a week of content featuring women writers and translators who are working at the top of their game. Since the first WIT Month in 2014, advances and improvements have been made for women working in global letters, but the significance of continuing to read and translate women’s voices remains. The act of reading women is indistinguishable from the act of reading the world—a truth we must continue to recognize.

First up in our spotlight series is translator from the Japanese, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Though Japanese literature is a landscape built by men and women alike, the nation-specific politics and postulations of gender makes for thought-provoking discussion as one examines the truths and concepts reflected in its literature. An advocate for women translators and writers in Japan, Tapley Takemori has translated award-winning texts by Sayaka Murata, Kyoko Nakajima, Kaori Fujino, among many others. In the following dialogue, she speaks with blog editor Xiao Yue Shan about her prolific endeavours of translating such vital, well-loved work.

Takemori

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): While there isn’t necessarily a conspicuous lack of literature by women in Japan, the country’s publishing market does seem entrenched in a gendered hierarchy, with books by women largely being marketed towards and read by women. Has this been your experience in navigating Japan’s literature? And if so, do you think it has affected the way women in Japan write?

Ginny Tapley Takemori (GTT): I don’t think there is a lack of books by women—on the contrary, there are lots of women writers! A lot of women working in publishing as well, for that matter, and I don’t really notice works by women writers being particularly marketed towards and read by women. I wonder what the stats for that might reveal? There may be some truth in it, given the historical development of women’s literature in Japan. From my own present observations, however, I’d say it’s true in certain cases; for instance, Boys’ Love manga is written by women for women, but it’s super niche. In 2017, Waseda Bungaku published their whopping tome Joseigo (女性号, Women’s Edition) and it sold out in a week! I’m not convinced that only women bought it. One thing that is clear is that women are winning the big literary prizes (about par with men for the Akutagawa and the Naoki). And I don’t get the impression that these prizewinning authors are writing specifically for women at all.

XYS: Yes, I definitely agree that women have quite a prominent, well-regarded presence in Japanese literature—arguably more so than in most other countries! Yet as you said, there are certain indications in the historical development of Japanese literature that subject matter is ingrained with gendered notions: women engaging more with the occupations of day-to-day life, men with politics and metaphysical matters.

GTT: That has been the case until not so long ago, but I’m not sure the boundaries are so clear nowadays. There’s an enormous variety in women’s writing now in terms of genre, writing style, and subject matter. I don’t think women writers are content to be confined to any particular subject or style, and in some cases, they explode these boundaries in quite spectacular and innovative ways, like Sayaka Murata with Earthlings. Some also deliberately revisit literature of the past, like Hiromi Kawakami in The Ten Loves of Nishino (trans. Allison Markin Powell), harking back to The Tale of Genji. There are critics who claim that contemporary writers are nowhere near the standard of the greats like Mishima, Soseki, et al (all men, naturally), but I have a different view of literature myself.

XYS: Would you say that one of the aims of Strong Women, Soft Power—the collective you co-founded with fellow translators Allison Markin Powell and Lucy North—is to direct a spotlight on women writers in Japan, and in doing so, direct the country towards gender equality, as well as greater awareness and resistance to sexism?

GTT: Strong Women, Soft Power is first and foremost a translators’ collective, and our aim is to give Japanese women writers a voice to speak for themselves through translation. It is not our intention to impose any forms of feminism or feminist critique on them; we simply aim to create awareness of their work and highlight the imbalance in the translation of men and women writers (a phenomenon not exclusive to Japan). At the same time, we offer a platform for promoting work by women writers and to some extent for women translators, although we do collaborate regularly with our male colleagues too. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2019

November 11, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, Alyea Canada, Daljinder Johal, and Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

November’s best new translations, chosen by the Asymptote staff.

November brings plenty of exciting new translations and our writers have chosen four varied, yet equally enriching and timely works: Bohumil Hrabal’s memoir that is at once a detailed study of humans’ relationship with cats and an exploration of dealing with mounting pressures and stress; a debut collection of Chilean short stories which explores social and economic difficulties and sheds light on some of the causes behind Chile’s recent social unrest; Hiromi Kawakami’s follow-up novella to the international bestseller, Strange Weather in Tokyo; and a novel set on the Chagos Archipelago which recounts the expulsion of Chagossians from the island of Diego Garcia and examines cultural identity and exile. Read on to find out more!

hrabal_all_my_cats_jacket

All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson, New Directions, 2019

Review by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Educational Arm Assistant

Bohumil Hrabal’s All My Cats is not for the faint of heart. Though fans of the author will recognize and appreciate the quirky humor and lyrical melancholy, one must also be prepared to take on the harsher aspects of the story, and I suspect that the uninitiated may find the descriptions of cats being murdered a bit much to take. The short memoir documents the author’s relationship to the feral cats living in his country cottage in Kersko, and his anguished labors to brutally limit their number. It is a lovely homage, and a richly evocative account of the pleasures of feline companionship, with lush descriptions of their delicate paws and velvety noses. We become acquainted with each individual kitty and their distinctive markings, habits, and personalities, but these rhapsodic stories are punctuated by episodes of grim slaughter that are depressingly specific—a morose account of an awful deed. And so, gradually, horrifyingly, this becomes a book about guilt and how it shapes one’s worldview, producing a strange reckoning of crime and punishment that reads retribution in the random alignments of events.

Witnessing Hrabal shuttling back and forth between his life in Prague and Kersko, we begin to notice that his concerns about his cats are combined with a steadily accumulating sense of anxiety and torment about his work, neighbors, and life. “What are we going to do with all those cats?” his wife asks, in an echoing refrain, as new litters of kittens, inexorably, arrive. The book is about the cats, but we start to realize that it is also not about the cats, not really, but rather, about how Hrabal struggles to manage the various stresses of his life more generally as he gains success and recognition as a writer. Haunted by his guilt over the murdered creatures, he surveys the world around him, reflecting on the relationship between art and suffering, and increasingly begins to feel that he is a plaything of fate, doomed to unhappiness, with no choice but surrender. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 10, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, MARGENTO, and Stefan Kielbasiewicz

The most important literary news from Hong Kong, Romania, Moldova, and the UK.

It’s Friday and that means we are back with the latest literary news from around the world! From Hong Kong, Editor-at-Large Charlie Ng brings us the latest on theater, literary festivals, and poetry readings. MARGENTO brings us exciting news about past Asymptote-contributors and other brilliant writers from Romania and Moldova. Finally, our own assistant blog editor, Stefan Kielbasiewicz shares news about poetry in the UK. 

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, Hong Kong

November is a month filled with vibrant literary performances and festivals in Hong Kong. On stage from late October to early November, a Cantonese version of The Father (Le Père) by French playwright, Florian Zeller, winner of the Molière Award for Best Play, is brought to Hong Kong audiences by the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre for the first time.

The seventeenth Hong Kong International Literary Festival kicked off on November 3 with a grand dinner with Scotland’s well-loved crime fiction writer, Ian Rankin, who also attended two other sessions as a guest speaker: Mysterious Cities: the Perfect Crime Novel and 30 Years of Rebus with Ian Rankin. Carol Ann Duffy was another Scottish writer featured in this year’s Festival. The British Poet Laureate read her poetry with musician John Sampson’s music accompaniment on November 9. The dazzling Festival programme includes both international authors such as Hiromi Kawakami, Amy Tan, Min Jin Lee, Ruth Ware, Hideo Yokoyama, and local writers and translators such as Xu Xi, Louise Ho, Dung Kai-cheung, Nicholas Wong, Tammy Ho, and Chris Song.

READ MORE…