Posts featuring Mieko Kawakami

On Women Who Refuse to Die: Who Will Win the 2022 Booker International?

May 25, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

What worlds have we been missing in prohibiting or dismissing women’s writing?

As we countdown to the 2022 Booker International Prize announcement on May 26, the contenders for the award offer new indications and perspectives by which to think about the world of literature and translation. In the following essay, our resident Booker expert Barbara Halla considers the digressive and variegated realm of “women’s writing”—that five out of the six titles on the shortlist were works by women authors is both evidence of the work’s scope and diversity, and also an overwhelming rejection of that old and tired idea: that women’s writing is simply of any gender-specific experience.

Since 2019, I have been relentlessly punished by the memory of this essay by an Albanian critic who argued in favor of the inherent superiority of men’s writing. His reasoning went like this: men write to triumph over life, whereas women write to survive. And for that very reason, the author claimed, men’s literature has universal appeal, as men are able to overcome the limitations of their own lived experiences and perspectives, while women’s writing focuses only on their painfully limited (i.e., domestic) existence.

My frustration with this article was compounded by finding its logic replicated elsewhere, in other books about the history of women in literature, and even during a conversation with another Albanian male writer a few months after reading that article. In the ensuing Q&A, the writer in question issued a complacent mea culpa about his lack of interest in women writers—he simply found their writing too limited and introspective. Of course, this is understandable. After all, it is easier to relate to Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei or Goethe’s Faust when one spends their days in the battlefield before making a deal with the devil and are whisked away for a night of debauchery with witches. After all, this is what “real” life is actually about, and it’s not like men ever write about minor concerns like marriage or childcare.

I’m being facetious, but this understanding of literature is pernicious—this desire to determine artistic value along essentialist gender lines. It also seeks to explain the existence of global and local literary canons as meritocratic, rather than the result of conscious policy decisions that have contributed to the erasure and devaluing of women’s writing. I was wondering about this argument as I made my way through the six books shortlisted for the Booker International 2022—five of which were written by women and published in the past fifteen years in South Korea, India, Poland, and Argentina. To be straightforward to the point of being trite: these five books undermine the notion that there is anything akin to a universal “women’s writing.” READ MORE…

The International Booker Comes Home

April 4, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

There is much to be said about the (fleeting) feeling of accomplishment in seeing a favorite longlisted.

With the upcoming announcement of the Booker International shortlist on April 7, our in-house Booker expert is here to take you through the impressive longlist, discuss the intersection between closed-door judging and fervent public online discourses, and the increased visibility of the translator in bringing these vital titles into the English-language sphere, Read on to find out more!

The International Booker Prize, like a number of other British literary prizes, has become a unifying topic amidst a very active online community. Twitter is the kind of place where bubbles of connections and affinities naturally form, but participating in this nexus simultaneously fosters a detached sense of irony that makes any earnest acknowledgment to it a touch mortifying. I am willing to take the risk of too much earnestness today because, for the sake of honesty, my relationship to the International Booker would not be the same without this community.

I became a regular follower of the prize after attending a meeting with the judges at Shakespeare and Company in Paris back in 2016 (a discussion I left certain in the knowledge that Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, was going to win, as it did). But it was entering in conversation with other readers and translators through Twitter that made the International Booker an event that I await impatiently every March. We make a friendly race out of reading the entire longlist, and debates about the merits of each selection get unreasonably heated, as we work to change the minds of others about the books we love—or even loath at times. Not to mention that I would be very happy not to have the “what constitutes nonfiction” debate again in my lifetime, which was in full swing both last year, with the longlisting of In Memory of Memory and The War of the Poor, and in 2019 when The Years was shortlisted.

Perhaps more importantly, being part of this community has shaped the approach I take the reading (and reviewing) the list. Thanks to it, I am constantly aware of the labor that goes into each book, not merely the translation but the efforts by the translators themselves, often acting as both agent and publicist. For instance, when Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker in 2018, Jennifer Croft had spent a decade advocating for it to be published. Furthermore, participating even somewhat actively in the discussion happening on places like Twitter is to be aware of the uneven dynamics of the publishing world. Much has rightfully been said about the International Booker’s Eurocentrism (which this year’s longlist provides a refreshing break from), but at the same time, as an online participant in these communities, you see in real time that the Booker is probably replicating trends that exist within publishing at large. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

March 11, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Erica X Eisen, Julia Sherwood, and Lee Yew Leong

In which we discuss the International Booker Prize longlist and bring you literary news from Poland and Uzbekistan!

This week, our editors from around the world discuss the 2022 International Booker longlist (released just yesterday), the Polish literary world’s reaction to the war in Ukraine, and literary nationalism in Uzbekistan. Read on to find out more!

Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief, on the 2022 International Booker Prize Longlist

The longlist for the 2022 International Booker Prize landed yesterday and we’re chuffed to see so many of our past contributors (20!), former team members (five!), and Book club titles (two!) on it! We’re especially thrilled for Anton Hur, who debuted in a big way by making the cover of our Fall 2016 edition with his translation of Jung Young Su’s “Aficionados” (we are proud to have played a small role in ”changing his life,” as he himself attests). Hur has not one but two titles on the 13-book list—a feat which, as far as we know, has never been accomplished before in the (admittedly short) history of the International Booker Prize. You can find his very smart metafictional essay on translating Bora Chung from our Winter 2021 issue here (accompanied by a translation into the Korean by Chung herself!); Hur also facilitates Rose Bialer’s interview with Sang Young Park here (both Chung and Park appear respectively with Cursed Bunny and Love in a Big City).

In stark contrast to last year’s longlist, which saw only one work from Asia included, this year was a bumper year for Asian representation, with five titles—among these, nominees Norman Erikson Pasaribu and translator Tiffany Tsao also first appeared together in Asymptote (read their debut in English here). We extend our warmest congratulations to editor-at-large David Boyd, whose co-translation, with Samuel Bett, of Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven—Kawakami’s inclusion this year makes up for the glaring omission of Breasts and Eggs last year—is also nominated. Before we let you check out the list on your own, we note, with no small measure of delight, that Phenotypes, our Book Club pick for January 2022, and After the Sun, our Book Club pick for August 2021, were also selected for the longlist, proving that joining our Book Club is one of the best ways to encounter tomorrow’s prizewinners today. Find our interviews with the two respective author-and-translator duos here (Paulo Scott and Daniel Hahn) and here (Jonas Eika and Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg). Best of luck to all nominees—and may the worthiest pair (or trio) win!

Erica X Eisen, Blog Editor, reporting on Uzbekistan

The month of February saw celebrations in honor of the 581st birthday of the poet Alisher Navoi, a key figure in the history of Central Asian literature who was born in 1441 in what was then the Timurid Empire. While festivities occurred in several countries of the former Soviet Union, they were most pronounced in Uzbekistan, where Navoi’s work is seen as foundational for the country’s national literature. In various parts of the country, admirers of the poet held readings of his ghazals and reflected on his life and legacy.

READ MORE…

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…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 30, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Darren Huang, Nestor Gomez, and Thirangie Jayatilake

The latest literary news from Taiwan, El Salvador, and Sri Lanka.

This week, Asymptote team members report on a Taiwanese science-fiction novel that’s caught the attention of Japan’s literary establishment, a poetic commemoration of a 1975 tragedy in El Salvador, and a Sri Lankan press that promises to be the first of its kind. Discover the latest from around the world, then catch up on this week’s blog entries, including a review of Asymptote‘s July book club pick.

Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan

In July, Taiwanese novelist Li Kotomi (Li Qinfeng) was awarded one of Japan’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Akutagawa Prize, for her novel “Higanbana ga Saku Shima” (An Island Where Red Spider Lily Blooms). The novel, which incorporates elements of science fiction, concerns a girl narrator, Umi, who drifts to an imagined island between Taiwan and Japan. The island is governed by women who lead the religious ceremonies and political affairs, while men are excluded from government. The islanders speak a language called “nihon” and another called “female language,” which can only be learned by women over a certain age and is used to pass on the history of the island. Qinfeng has remarked that for thousands of years, patriarchal societies have written official history through the perspectives of men. In this novel, she reflects on the imbalance of history-making by imagining a community where women control the writing and inheritance of history. Qinfeng’s win is unique as she is the second writer whose native tongue is not Japanese to be awarded the prize. Her accomplishment was also well received in Taiwan, where she is considered one of the first Taiwanese writers to be recognized by the Japanese literary establishment. Previous winners of the award include Mieko Kawakami for Breasts and Eggs and Hiroko Oyamada for The Hole.

Despite the recent escalation of the pandemic in Taiwan, the cultural minister Lee Yung-te emphasized that the Taiwanese arts, especially in literature, illustration, and film, continue to flourish. Literature and art museums have continued their exhibitions with COVID precautions. Notably, the National Museum of Taiwan Literature is celebrating a century of progressive literature and thinking through its exhibition, “A Century of Heartfelt Sentiment,” which started on May 8. The show is organized into a series of love letters, or writings and works from authors, painters, and other artists, focusing on six essential intellectuals of the last century. The exhibition includes the manuscripts of the poet Lai Ho, the diary of the social activist Tsai Pei-huo, the artworks of the painter Tan Ting-pho, and works of music from the era of Japanese occupation.

READ MORE…

Memory in Present Tense: On Haruki Murakami’s First Person Singular

July 1, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Darren Huang

Murakami's latest collection returns to his perennial fixations with jazz music, baseball, and mysterious meetings with women and animals.

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, Knopf, 2021

In Haruki Murakami’s short story, “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” (from his 1993 collection The Elephant Vanishes), the archetypal Murakami protagonist—an unreliable, doubtful man—fleetingly encounters an unfamiliar girl on the street and suddenly realizes she is the 100% perfect girl for him, though he has never spoken to her, nor finds her particularly beautiful. Instead, this melancholic, gently absurdist piece concerns itself with what the narrator would have said had he approached the girl. After dismissing a number of ridiculous ideas, the narrator decides on a long fabulist story, in which a young girl and young boy meet, discover they are one hundred percent perfect for each other, and separate to test their feelings. While apart, however, both lose their memories, and when they eventually encounter each other again, both only briefly acknowledge that they are perfect counterparts, but still go on to forever disappear from one another’s lives.

The story, which later served as inspiration for Murakami’s novel 1Q84, employs the author’s recurring narrative device of intermingling reality and unreality in the minds of his narrators, largely applied to the fleeting but transformative romantic encounters between men and women—most famously evident in his early bestselling novel, Norwegian Wood. It also reflects Murakami’s longstanding thematic concerns of loss, estrangement, doomed love, and loneliness. Notably, the young girl and boy not only become estranged from each other, but also from themselves in the loss of their memories; this theme of disconnection unites the stories in the author’s latest release, First Person Singular, fluidly translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. The collection is his first since the English publication of Men Without Women in 2017, and returns to Murakami’s perennial fixations with jazz music, baseball, and mysterious meetings with women and animals. They are all narrated by an aged writer—resembling Murakami himself—who wistfully reflects on loosely chronological formative experiences. In this way, the stories blur not only dream and reality but also author and narrator, playfully employing the lens of memory to grapple with how we transcend—or fail to transcend— the disconnections that occur between others and ourselves.

READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (May 2021)

May 6, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

From getting shortlisted for (or winning!) prestigious prizes to publications and performances, we were busy making waves this quarter!

Contributing editor Adrian Nathan West’s translation of Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World was shortlisted for the Booker International Prize.

Senior Copy Editor Anna Aresi’s Italian translation of a poem by Anna Akhmatova won the 2020 All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature & The Institute for Literary Translation’s “Writers of the Silver Age about War” translation contest.

Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki was awarded a Graduate Nonfiction Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan for two essays, one of which is forthcoming in Wordgathering. The Hopwood Awards are a major scholarship program at the University of Michigan, founded by Avery Hopwood.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, will be giving on June 11 for the third year in a row a computational performance titled #GraphPoem at the world’s most important digital humanities event, DHSI 2021.

Editor-at-Large for Japan David Boyd’s new co-translation with Sam Bett of Mieko Kawakami’s novel Heaven will be published later this month on May 25.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new short story in Arts & Letters and a short craft essay on Tobias Wolff in Fiction Writers Review.

Chief Executive Assistant Rachel Farmer‘s translation from the German of an extract of We Have Lived Here Since We Were Born by Andreas Moster appeared in the anthology Elemental, published in March by Two Lines Press.

Interested in joining the team? Watch this page next week for a very important announcement!

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…

Am I Really A Woman?: On Cho Nam-Joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 and Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs

November 19, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Darren Huang

Both protagonists ask with yearning and desperation, what sort of woman can I be?

Two East Asian authors, whose debut English-language translations were published this year, have been hailed for their bestselling feminist works: South Korean author Cho Nam-Joo, whose novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 tells the story of a woman that gives up her career to become a stay-at-home-mother; and  Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami, whose novella Breasts and Eggs recounts the lives of three women as they all confront oppressive mores in a patriarchal environment. Both works give voice to female protagonists and explore female identity in their respective societies. In this essay, Asymptote Editor-at-Large Darren Huang considers how both of these texts offer explicit critiques of male-dominated societies and argues that these authors are ultimately concerned with the development of female selfhood. 

In Han Kang’s acclaimed 2007 South Korean novel, The Vegetarian, translated into English by Deborah Smith, Yeong-hye, a housewife who is described as completely unremarkable by her husband, refuses to eat meat after suffering recurring dreams of animal slaughter. Her abstention leads to erratic and disturbing behavior, including slitting her wrist after her father-in-law force-feeds her a piece of meat, and a severe physical and mental decline. She becomes more plant-like (refusing all nourishment except water and sunlight,) turns mute and immobile, and is eventually discovered soaking in the rain among trees in a nearby forest. Increasingly alienated from her family and society, she is committed to a remote mental hospital and supported only by her sister. Kang’s disturbing parable is characteristic of a number of South Korean feminist novels for its portrayal of a woman suffering from a form of psychosis that is incomprehensible to others, as well as its pitting of a protagonist against the oppressive mores of a rigid, patriarchal society.

Kang has disputed the characterization of her novel as a direct indictment of South Korean patriarchy and has preferred to focus on its themes of representing mental illness and the corruption of innocence. But two recent East Asian debut novels—Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by South Korean screenwriter-turned-novelist Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang, and Breasts and Eggs by the Japanese songwriter-turned-novelist Mieko Kawakami and adeptly translated into English by Sam Bett and Asymptote Editor-at-Large David Boyd—employ similarly oppressed middle-aged, female protagonists to form more explicit critiques of male-dominated, conformist societies. One of the defining qualities of both novels is that their protagonists attempt self-actualization by liberating themselves from traditional gender roles. These novels, which can both be characterized as bildungsroman, are ultimately concerned with a woman’s development of selfhood in opposition to societal conventions about motherhood and middle age. Both protagonists ask with yearning and desperation, what sort of woman can I be? 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…

A Linguistic Emigration: Chinese Women Writers on Their Translation Practices

July 29, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Jiaoyang Li

You want to learn a language not only to fit in, but to create something new in it, like any native speaker would do.

Recently, I came across an interesting comment, that despite the fact that more POC writers are being published, the English publishing world will not actually become more diverse, as the editors and gatekeepers who select them for publication continue to be predominantly white.

Asian writers have perhaps heard similar feedback from their editors: “Your story is not Asian enough,” or: “Why don’t you write more about your family’s immigration stories?” Sometimes the endeavors of white editors to market POC writers may in fact reinforce stereotypes. The same could be said for translations: if the translators of foreign literature continue to be exclusively white, native English speakers, then English readers would likely continue to receive material that reinforces their expectations, rather than that which may broaden their perspectives.

The word translation is rooted in the Latin translātus (to carry over); it’s always about appropriation and transition, but that doesn’t mean we should stop thinking about how we can strive for a more inclusive and dynamic future in publishing—trusting and bringing in more POC translators to deliver English translations may be one solution.

Jianan Qian, Na Zhong, and Liuyu Ivy Chen are all millennial Chinese female writers who have received higher education in both China and the US. They write bilingually and translate between their two languages, having already introduced several talented contemporary Chinese experimental writers and young female authors to the English world. Their work has been tremendous thus far, and one expects their futures to be even greater.

                                                                                          —Jiaoyang Li, July 2020

Jiaoyang Li (JL): All of you were writers before becoming translators. What is the relationship between writing and translation for you? Is translation a kind of creative writing?

Jianan Qian (JQ): For me, the purpose of literary translation is twofold. First, the work pushes me to do intensive reading. Usually I choose my own translation projects, so I can take the time to appreciate the author’s writing on a granular level. I also consider translation to be a writing practice—it might be a sort of creative writing, but for me, it is more like an opportunity to see how beauty comes into being differently in the two languages. I work with a wonderful co-translator, Alyssa Asquith, and I always learn a lot about linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural differences from our exchanges.

Na Zhong (NZ): A great translator should think like a writer, and to be a great writer you have to be a great reader. Translation provides the reliable gymnastic exercise for me to maintain, stretch, and become aware of my linguistic muscles. A rich text demands that I pay maximum attention to its diction, syntax, voice, and many other elements of writing. And a carefully chosen word can lead me into the depths of the story that would be impossible to reach if I were only engaging with it as a casual reader.

And yes, translating is a kind of creative writing, as imitation lies at the heart of all art forms. In the most literal sense, translating is rewriting the story in another language. It allows me, the translator, to adopt a voice and way of storytelling that I have never embodied before. The writer creates the characters imaginatively; the translator recreates the implied writer imaginatively.

Liuyu Ivy Chen (LC): For me, writing in my second language is an act of translation; living in a foreign country is a daily work of translation. Reading a new book, meeting strangers, falling in love, visiting an old place, or forgetting about the past are all translations to be enacted or retracted. This distance to cross and reduce is not so much between two languages, but between me and the world. There is so much I don’t understand, and translation is one way to cope with the unknown, to stay open-minded, and to bring seemingly unattainable beauty closer to touch. I read, write, and translate to touch the world. Translation is not only a kind of creative writing; it is a way of living. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2020

April 13, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Austyn Wohlers, Clémence Lucchini, Jacqueline Leung, and Sarah Moore

New literature from Algeria, Guadeloupe, Italy, and Japan!

In the newly ruptured world, the questions that arise all seem perplexingly novel. It is somewhat of a tonic, then, that one turns to literature to find that the queries that confound us now are more specific reiterations of questions that have plagued humanity for a long, long time. What is freedom? How do we persist through the turmoil of our nations? What does the past mean for the present? And, perhaps most pertinently, what survives? In this month’s selections in translated literature, four astounding works from around the world encounter and contend with these problems in their singular styles. Below, discover a passionate novel about a real-life Algerian bookseller, a Guadeloupe-set fiction that intermingles personal and national revolution, the latest English-language volume in Roberto Calasso’s grand series on human civilization, and a Japanese literary sensation which contends with feminine pain and perseverance.

our riches

Our Riches by Kaouther Adimi, translated from the French by Chris Andrews, New Directions, 2020

Review by Clémence Lucchini, Educational Arm Assistant

Though one cannot truly stress all the qualities of Our Riches, Kaouther Adimi’s first translated novel into English by Chris Andrews, within the limits of a book review, Adimi has certainly proved that she is able to convey Edmond Charlot’s life long passion for books in less than two hundred pages. In this historical fiction, recognized with two French literary awards, Adimi finds a new way to portray her native Algeria: through Edmond Charlot’s many literary endeavors.

For those who do not know Edmond Charlot (I was among that group before reading this book), he left a great gift to the publishing world by being Camus’ first publisher, by publishing under-represented authors, and last but not least, by pioneering the design of book covers as we know it today in Western Europe, referred to as “the talk of the publishing world” in Adimi’s work. READ MORE…

Translation as an Exercise in Letting Go: An Interview with Sam Bett and David Boyd on Translating Mieko Kawakami

April 1, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

What reading and writing have in common, and what makes translation possible, is listening.

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. READ MORE…