What's the attraction of the Woman in the Purple Skirt?

 Unlike much recent Japanese fiction in translation—The Factory, Terminal Boredom, Slow Boat—The Woman in the Purple Skirt takes place in a recognizable, relatively realistic if unnamed Japanese city. 

It begins, “There’s a person living not too far from me known as the Woman in the Purple Skirt. She only every wears a purple-colored skirt—which is why she has this name.” The entire story is narrated by a woman who (mostly) identifies herself as The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan.

The book’s narrator, who seems to have no family or close friends, becomes obsessed by the Woman in the Purple Skirt. They both sound as if they are in their late twenties or early thirties and are single. The Woman in the Purple Skirt commands a bench in a neighborhood park and disappears periodically from the park, presumably to work.

The Woman is a neighborhood fixture and indulges the children who screw up the nerve to tap her on the shoulder and run away, a game we sense the narrator finds charming while envying the Woman’s easy relations with the children.

The narrator plants an employment magazine where the Woman in the Purple Skirt will find it. She’s turned down a page and circled a listing, and after a few attempts to nudge the Woman toward the job, she finally takes the hint. She’s interviewed and is hired as a hotel housekeeper at the same hotel in which the narrator works.

The narrator had hoped that working together would enable her to be closer to the Woman, but it doesn’t work out. “The day after she completed her training, the Woman in the Purple Skirt was assigned to the thirtieth floor, where TV celebrities and idols often stayed. Each floor had specific cleaning teams, which meant I could hardly ever just pop by to see her. It was now extremely rare that I caught sight of her at work. In recent weeks, I was more likely to be able to get an idea of how she was doing from my sightings of her in the park and on the shopping street.”

Until the end of the book, the narrator stays as close to the Woman as she can—close enough to covertly pat the Woman’s butt and tweak her nose on a packed bus—but does not try to make friends. She notices the hotel’s gift chocolates the Woman shares with the children, the smell of the shampoo the hotel stocks in the bathrooms, the rides to work their boss begins to give the Woman.

With the narrator we watch the children play in the park, listen to the talk among the hotel employees, follow the Woman’s moods from a distance. All is not well at the hotel. The manager announces,  “Ten bath towels, ten hand towels, five bath mats, ten sets of cups and saucers, five wineglasses, five champaign glasses, and three teapots . . .. It’s not clear whether these items were taken by hotel guests, or whether they have bon missing within the hotel itself. . . .” Suspicions are raised. Gossip spreads.

Midway through the book I began to wonder where is all this daily minutia going? I’m not going to spoil it for you and tell you where it does go, but hang on for the ride. It’s terrific.

Natsuko Imamura was born in Hiroshima in 1980 where she attended high school. She later moved to Osaka to attend university. She wrote her first story, a novella, while working a temporary job. It won the 26th Dazai Osamu Prize in 2010. In 2017, Imamura received the 5th Kawai Hayao Story Prize for her 2016 book Ahiru, which was also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize but did not win. Her next book was also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize and also lost. In 2019, after her third Akutagawa nomination, she finally won with The Woman in the Purple Skirt. 

The Asahi Shimbun reports that after graduating college Imamura got a part-time job as a hotel housekeeper in Osaka. “She enjoyed the job of cleaning the hotel and she thought it was right for her. One she was told, ‘You should rest tomorrow,’ and she decided to write a novel. She began writing in a messy notebook that was in her house.” It became her prize-winning Koko Amiko, published when she was 29 years old. 

The Woman in the Purple Skirt is the first of Imamura’s four books to be translated and I would not be surprised to learn that the translator Lucy North (who is not credited on the cover—shame!) is hard at work on one or more of the earlier books. If they are as engaging and thought-provoking as The Woman in the Purple Skirt, I look forward to reading them.

Homeless in Ueno Park

The book begins, "I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there's the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered [?], but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end."

So what then is Yu Miri's book Tokyo Ueno Station? It's glimpses of the life of a laborer, Kazu Mori, born in 1933, the same year as the Emperor. The book includes history—the firebombing of Tokyo, Saigo Takemori's role in the Meiji Restoration . . . Japanese funeral rituals—the death of the narrator's 21-year-old son . . . a picture of contemporary Japan most tourists don't see—the lives of the homeless . . . and an unusual narrator—"Things like [hydrangeas in bloom] always made me feel lonely when I was alive." 

And because the narrator is dead, it raises questions about an afterlife I'll touch on in a moment.

Yu Miri's background

Miri was born to Korean parents in Yokohama in1968. The Encyclopedia Britannica says, "Her father was a compulsive gambler who physically abused his wife and children; her mother was a bar hostess who frequently took the teenaged Yū along to parties, where Yū was occasionally molested. One of Yū’s sisters became an actress in pornographic films. Yū became so confused about languages—when to use Japanese or Korean—that she developed a stutter. Her parents separated when she was 5 years old; she repeatedly tried to commit suicide as a teenager and was eventually expelled from high school."

Nevertheless, she's been celebrated as a playwright and novelist, winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for her novel Kazoku shinema (Family Cinema) in 1997. She's received threats from Japanese right-wingers who see her as defaming the country and being an ethnic Korean and non-citizen does not help. Gold Rush, a violent story of children in a dysfunctional family, was her first novel to be translated into English.

Kazu Mori tells his story, much of it in dialect in the original, making Morgan Giles's smooth translation even more impressive. Kazu left his wife and children in Fukushima to find work in Tokyo building structures for the 1964 Olympics. Because there was still no work in the northeast even during the boom years, he stayed in Tokyo, returning home long enough to sire a son and a daughter. Eventually he moves back. His son dies. His daughter marries and moves away. His wife dies. His granddaughter moves in with him to care for him. However he thinks, "She shouldn't be tied down here with her granddad,' and slips away to live as a homeless person in Tokyo's Ueno Park.

Much of the novel's action takes place in Ueno, which has the zoo and a number of museums. It is a favorite spot to picnic during cherry blossom viewing. The cops clear the park of the cardboard and vinyl tarp shelters when the royal family has an official occasion to visit. At the end of the book Kazu dies, which is hardly a spoiler because he's told us on page 33 he's dead.

Tokyo Ueno Station is short; you can read it in a single sitting. It's an interesting presentation of what I'm willing to believe is a possible—representative? emblematic?—Japanese life. As such it does not have a conventional plot. But the claim of a dead narrator made me consider.

Questions about an afterlife

Kazu talks as if he were alive and recalling events from his life. But at one point he notices a bird, "and I wondered if perhaps the bird was Koichi," his dead son. Certainly a thorough-going Buddhist could well his son has been reincarnated as a bird. But, if so, why hasn't the narrator been reincarnated? (Okay, maybe he's in the bardo if you want to bring in an idea that does not exist in the book.)

But there's more. The family are Pure Land (Jōdo) Buddhists, and the book emphasizes they are not Shingon, Tendai, or Sōtō Buddhists. In this teaching, "if one repeated the name of Amida Buddha, countless other Buddhas would surround you and bring you happiness. These would be the dead, who had returned to the Pure Land, and who would now protect us." But there is no indication Kazu has returned to the Pure Land and he does not protect anyone. 

So what is being dead like? Like being being alive but without a body? Like being reincarnated as a bird or some other creature? Or like going to the Pure Land which is "inhabited by many gods, men, flowers, fruits, and adorned with wish-granting trees where rare birds come to rest"? 

I am, I know, asking far too much of Tokyo Ueno Station. None of these questions reduce the power of the book. Giles is currently translating another Yu Mori novel, The End of August, "an experimental, semi-autobiographical epic spanning Korea and Japan over several decades and generation." I look forward to reading it.

What childhood was like in Meiji Tokyo

Desperate for more to read and having read through the pile of library books I'd checked out as the library was closing indefinitely behind me, I pulled a small book off my shelves that I'd been planning to read for a while, The Silver Spoon (Gin no Saji) by Naka Kansuke and translated by Etsuko Tarasaki. I believe I bought it when it was published and have had good intentions to read it ever since. It was published in 1976, which says something about my good intentions.

The back cover blurbs the novel as "A modern Japanese classic. The Silver Spoon is an extraordinary evocation of childhood and a memoir of the daily life, folk manners and children's games of pre-World War I Japan." By the book's internal evidence, Naka is evoking the Meiji-era Tokyo in the 1890s.

Naka Kansuke, (1885-1965) was born in Tokyo. Other than living in Hiratsuka (a city between Tokyo and Mt. Fuji) from 1926 to 1932 and evacuating to Shizuoka Prefecture during World War II, he spent most of his life in Tokyo. His father was a steward for the former feudal lord of Imao in Mino province (modern Gifu prefecture), who had a residence in the Kanda district. According to Wikipedia, Naka was one of the students taught by Natsume Sōseki at the University of Tokyo before Sōseki gave up teaching to write for the newspaper Asahi Shimbun. Sōseki arranged the serial publication in the paper of Naka's first novel, "a nostalgic depiction of his childhood and teens . . . The Silver Spoon. The novel is popular in Japan . . . replete with historical details as well as a contemporary sense of isolation; it follows Naka's psychological journey from childhood to adulthood."

I believe The Silver Spoon would be classified in Japan as a "shi-shosetsu"—an "I novel." There is only the narrowest gap between the narrator's account account in the book and the known facts about the author's life. In the West we would call it a memoir.

As the translator writes in her useful introduction, "The first part of The Silver Spoon consists of fifty-three short sections and deals with the preschool and early-school periods of the narrator's life. The second part, twenty-two sections, deals largely with his early adolescent years at school and ends when the youth reaches sixteen years of age." The past is truly another country, and Meiji-era Japan is perhaps more foreign than most. Here are two examples taken at random from the book:

—"One of my favorite amusements [at a neighborhood festival grounds] was watching the wrestling match between a man and a camel. A man wearing a twisted towel around his head and a fencing girdle would challenge the camel in the manner of an attacking bird, causing the angry beast to kick at him in response. Sometimes the camel lost, its neck pinned to the ground; at other times, the man, having been thoroughly kicked, ran away crying 'I surrender, I surrender!' . . . .

—"Nearby lived an old peddler of millet jelly who did some farming and local trading. When the weather was fine he came without fail, blowing a street vendor's flute as he pulled his wagon. The metallic, discordant sound of the pipe strangely stirred the children. Those in their houses came out; those who were playing stopped their games, some sheathing swords made of broken sticks while others pushed dirty spinning tops down the fronts of kimonos. All rushed clamoring to the wagon. Besides millet-jelly candy and other kids of sweets, the old man sold riddles. Everybody scrambled for these, turning over the red and blue papers to play the guessing games. . . . "

But while The Silver Spoon does describe scenes from childhood, it also shows the narrator at first "as as sickly, introverted child," writes Terasaki in her introduction. "He is often fretful and easily bursts into tears. This could be annoying and tiresome . . ." It certainly was for this reader. Bursting into tears seemed to be the only way the narrator could deal with disappointment, frustration, confusion—life's ordinary bruises. Terasaki notes that "small children, especially those who are sick are often given to weeping. but this trait is especially accepted by the Japanese people, for even as adults they are traditionally accustomed to expressing their emotions, both grief and joy, in tears when the occasion cals for it. Japanese literature is full of such instances." That may be true, but I am afraid it did not make The Silver Spoon less annoying and tiresome for all the pleasures it offers.

My road to KEEP - Part II

I went to KEEP twice in 1957. My father as an active member of St. Paul's East Cleveland Episcopal Church had written to tell me about the organization. He had read about KEEP in, I believe, The Reader's Digest. Because KEEP was Episcopal-affiliated, I asked the Episcopal Army chaplain at the camp about it. He was aware of it, and had a liaison with it in Tokyo. In time, someone from KEEP's Tokyo office telephoned me and I went into the city (my camp was on the outskirts), met with KEEP's assistant director, and they agreed to have me visit. The plan was that I would take take pictures, write a description, and my father would use the material to raise money for KEEP.

The author and the KEEP pickup

It is now sixty-three years later, so my memories are fragmentary and limited. But in early June I obtained a weekend pass to take a bus from my camp to the Narimasu train station, the train to Tokyo's Ikebukuro station, the train to Tokyo's Shinjuku station where I met my guide/interpreter a young Japanese man, Michi who was no older than I. He and I took a train to Kofu, a small city in the central Japanese mountains. From Kofu we took a bus to Kiyosato, the poor rural village in which KEEP was located. The road was an unpaved, one-lane track up the side of the mountain, so narrow that if a vehicle was coming down, the bus had to back up to a spot wide enough for the other to pass.

We stayed in one the camp's cabins, our beds were foam mattresses on the floor. Compared to an Army cot, the ten-inch-thick foam was like sleeping on a cloud. Michi took me on a tour. Paul Rusch wanted more than a summer camp; he wanted to improve the lives of rural Japanese. I toured the hospital, the school, the barn, and on Sunday morning attended the Episcopal church service. No pews; congregants sat Japanese-style on the tatami-mat floor, and the little children were free to run about, even play by the altar during the sermon.

Church service in the KEEP church

I wanted to see more of the countryside, so Michi borrowed a (the?) KEEP pickup truck and allowed me to drive it. The roads were mud and I, totally inexperienced, managed to put the truck into mud up to its axels. Michi managed to obtain help from several local farmers who pulled us out. I wanted to thank them with money; he suggested a big bottle of sake would be more appropriate, so he drove us into Kiyosato and I bought one. (By comparison to the local farmers and Michi, I was rich, although only an Army sergeant; in those days a dollar bought 360 yen; the sake was probably ¥500.)

By 1957, Rusch had imported a dozen or so purebred heifers from North Texas to establish a dairying business at KEEP. Although the Japanese had little taste for milk, butter, cheese, even beef before the war, the market was growing. KEEP's land was too high to grow rice on, too rocky for ox-driven plowing. With a bulldozer, however, KEEP was able to clear the rocks and plant grass for cattle. When I arrived, there was a thriving dairy business and at dinner that night in the virtually-rebuild Seisen Ryo lodge, I was served a glass of the raw milk.

I grew up knowing that unpasteurized milk could kill you, which is why milk came in bottles. Should I insult my hosts by refusing to drink? Or should I risk it? I drank. It was like drinking cream but better.

One other memory from that night: An older Japanese guest, also up from Tokyo (and probably a senior executive in a major corporation; who else do you wine and dine if you need money?), taught me the game of go. It is one of the easiest games to learn in the world. It is, like chess, one of the most difficult to master. We played three games, and while he was patient, he easily wiped me off the board.

A final memory: In August 1957, when the Prince and Princess of Japan were coming to KEEP for the dedication of the new Seisen Ryo lodge, I was returning to camp and our paths crossed at the Kofu train station. The street outside and the station was mobbed; hundreds of people wanted to see the royals. As a Westerner and as a head taller than most Japanese, I stood out, and when the waiting press corps saw me they attacked. What did I think of Japan? Of Kofu? Of the Emperor? Since these radio and press reporters had little—or no—English, and my Japanese was, to be charitable, limited, I probably said something like, "Nihonjin mo nihon mo suki desu," I like Japan and the Japanese, and caught my train.

My road to KEEP - Part 1

The picture below is from a book published in 1969, The Road to KEEP: The Story of Paul Rusch in Japan by Elizabeth Anne Hemphill.

In May 1957 I took the picture below three months earlier at an earlier dedication of the new Seisen Ryo. Paul Rusch is the third man in a dark suit on the right.

I spent most of 1957 and much of 1958 as a GI in Japan. In 1957 was a personnel clerk stationed at a camp outside of Tokyo, and because I was a sergeant I was able to obtain a weekend pass virtually every weekend. Somehow my father back in Cleveland heard about an Episcopal-affiliated organization in Japan, the Kiyosato Educational Experiment Project—KEEP, a project Paul Rusch started and headed. He suggested I look into the group. I called the Tokyo office and was invited to visit the project. I went twice.

Rusch (1897-1979) went to Japan in 1925 as a missionary for a one-year stay. He fell in love with the country, the culture, and the people (although he never married) and stayed on, becoming a teacher at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. Rikkyo was founded in 1874 as St. Paul's School by the Episcopal Church missionary Bishop Channing Moore Williams. It was a private school that taught Christian Bible studies and English. At that time, Japan was rushing to catch up with the advanced nations of the West, and the field of education also had a strong utilitarian tendency. Today Rikkyo has 20,000 students and 2,700 teachers and staff.

In 1927, on a fund-raising tour in the States, Rusch was exposed to the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, an international lay Christian religious organization with historical roots in the Episcopal Church. When he returned to Japan in 1931, he became active in the Brotherhood and in 1933 was key in obtaining land on the slope of a mountain in central Honshu and raising money with which to build a clubhouse and student center, naming the camp Seisen Ryo (清泉寮), "pure spring hostel." That first building was dedicated in July 1938.

Rusch stayed on in Japan while most Americans who could leave in 1940-41 left. In December 1941 he like other enemy aliens were interred in a former girl's school in Tokyo where they were held for six months and finally exchanged for Japanese who were stuck in America when the war broke out. I found the first half of Hemphill's book—Rusch's life as a missionary, building Seisen Ryo, and internment—more interesting than the second half, perhaps because the life was more interesting.

He returned to Japan with the Occupation as a U,S. Army Lieutenant Colonel in the Civil Intelligence Section, although he never learned to speak or read Japanese. His unit's work laid the background the war crimes trials that opened in April 1946, but "he had no intention of staying in the army any longer than necessary." He intended to restore the camp and remain in Japan.  "The camp had originally been just for the boys who came to the summer sessions; now he thought about the community itself and he called the development plan 'The Kiyosato Educational Experiment Project.'"

By the time I arrived in 1957, 800 acres had been added to KEEP's original land. There was a church, a 20-bed rural hospital (the only medical facility in a couple hundred square miles of rural, mountain landscape), an experimental farm, a vocational school to teach Western agricultural techniques, a nursery school, and a library.
                                                   —To be continued

Just what you want, a transgressive first novel

Thanks to my interest in all things Japanese, I picked up a copy of Hillary Raphael's 2004 novel I [Love] Lord Buddha at a book sale recently. According to a Wikipedia entry last edited in October 2018, "Raphael (born April 12, 1976) is an American novelist, fashion and children's book writer. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Hunter College in New York City." At Hunter she won the MFA Thesis Prize for the novel, which was published by now defunct Creation Books.

"Although Raphael wrote cult transgressive fiction under her own name, she has made a complete pivot," says Wikipedia. Since 2014 she writes and illustrates children's books under the name Shoshana Banana. Her debut title Family Ties was named one of the Best Jewish Children's Books of 2015 by Tablet Magazine. Her second children's book, Picture a Chinchilla, incorporates vintage textiles. [Her third}  Levi & Aya was published in 2016."

In a 2005 interview to promote I [Love] Lord Buddha, Raphael said, "I have been, professionally: a model, dancer, hostess, journalist, grant writer, bartender, diplomat, waitress, dance critic, CEO’s personnel assistant, backpacker, fashion trend scouter, kept woman, and editor, over the years. I’m originally from New York, but have been resident in Tokyo, Phnom Penh, Rome and Mexico City for long stretches and have travelled throughout the world, from the Sahara to the Himalaya, the Negev to the Alps." She was, at the time, 29 years old.

Asked whether she thought the Japanese male’s motivation for attending a hostess bar—the world of I [Love] Lord Buddha—is the same as a foreign man's, she said, "Lingerie and hostess bars have always been an accepted part of Japanese culture, however I think their current incarnation is more standardized and business-like than it has been in the past—you could say the industry has standardized—and therefore reveals itself in a fresh way even to the Japanese. As for Nihonjin vs. Gaijin clients: the difference boils down to expectation paradigms. Japanese go to hostess bars because they want the service provided there. Foreigners go because they are fence-sitting vis-à-vis the idea of seeing a whore, and would like some risk-averse, easy-ingress prostitution. They are confused. A high-end hostess does not waste her time with foreigners unless they are obviously special."

I [Love] Lord Buddha is, to quote the back jacket, "set in the late-90s Tokyo; it recounts the history of the Neo-Geisha Organization, a sex-and-death cult with an anti-consumerist, pro-hedonist, sub-Buddhist ideology." I quote the back jacket because Raphael does not make it easy for the reader. The 187-page paperback consists of 92 chapters. She does not use capitals to start sentences or for most proper nouns (tokyo, japanese) but uses all caps for the main character HIYOKO. Chapters may be in the first or third person, narrative or haiku, apparent non-fiction or transcribed interviews.

Raphael writes the book from the inside; i.e., with the knowledge that an American woman would gain by working in Tokyo's water trade—promoting drinks and entertaining men in hostess bars. (For another view of that life, read People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Perry.) Hiyoko (or HIYOKO) (formerly Heather Peterson) is a charismatic hostess who recruits other foreign bar hostesses into a cult-like organization and (I believe) initiates a mass suicide to make a point. Not every woman follows Hiyoko. Here is Angelique, an older hostess who think Hiyako is a fraud,  at work:

angelique crosses her legs in a practiced fashion, and looking over yamada's head, makes eye contact with herself in the beige-tinted mirror of the club. she likes to judge herself objectively in moments like these, when she's fully dressed and made-up for work, natural, busy, and taking a light drag on her lite cigarette, and holding the smoke in her lungs, she carefully considered her face. "i'm well preserved," she concludes, "for my age". yamada gently shoves an ashtray toward her, she starts slightly, trying to delicately ash her cigarette, which is burning down to the filter. "anjyariku-chyan, are you dreaming?" "indeed, about you!"

I [Love] Lord Buddha is not an easy read but it does have its pleasures, although I'm not sure I agree with the back jacket that the novel "paves the way for a new literature of undiluted aesthetics and ecstasy." I'm not even sure what that means. I was happy to see that Raphael did use capitals in her 2008 novel Ximena. 

The translation reader's dllemma

"Around 1916, I decided to devote myself to the study of the Oriental literatures," writes Jorge Luis Borges in a fat collection of Selected Non-fictions edited by Eliot Weinberger. "Working with enthusiasm and credulity through the English version of a certain Chinese philosopher, I came across this memorable passage:

"'A man condemned to death doesn't care that he is standing at the edge of a precipice, for he has already renounced life.'

"Here the translator attached an asterisk, and his note informed me that this interpretation was preferable to that of a rival Sinologist, who had translated the passage thus:

"'The servants destroy the works of art, so that they will not have to judge their beauties and defects.'

"Then, like Paolo and Francesca, I read no more. A mysterious skepticism had slipped into my mind."

Mysterious? Skepticism? How about outright disbelief?

The translator's dilemma, Part VI

In the story I'm currently translating, Yusuke, a 36-year-old salesman, becomes unemployed when his company goes bankrupt. His wife goes back to work and Yusuke becomes a house-husband, cooking, cleaning, and caring for their four-year-old son. Shortly after the bankruptcy, Yusuke's former boss, Yamashina phones the house to tell Yusuke about a new company at which there may be a job. Yusuke is not sure he's interested and the conversation ends with the boss saying something and hanging up. Yusuke then thinks briefly about what the boss said. My first, very literal, version was this:

—Yamashina said, bursting with confidence, "There is aoyama any place there are people," and hung up the phone.
    Yusuke, section chief, it was a different way to read it. First of all it was "seizan" not "aoyama" . . . he was about to say but was prudent. A thing of more than twenty years that he'd read differently, it was better to leave alone.

Here's the original:

—山科は鼻息荒く「人間いたるところに青山ありだ」と言い、電話を切った。
　裕輔は、いや部長、それは読み方がちがいます。まず「アオヤマ」じゃなくて「セイザン」で．．．と言いそうになったが自重した。間違い続けて二十年以上物件は、そっとしておいたほうがいい。

My problem was the boss's finally words. The word 青山 can read either as "aoyama" or "seizan." My dictionary gives two definitions: "faraway mountains in a blue haze" for aoyama or "a burial place" for seizan. In the context of the story, neither makes a lot of sense. ("There is a burial place anywhere there are people" is at least English even if doesn't fit the context.)

My dictionary, in addition to defining the word, adds a proverb that uses the word, the proverb the boss quotes: "One's native village is not the only place where there is a green hill fit to be buried on." In other words: "You can make your fortune anywhere in the world." Those words are not even close to the original.

But it does make sense that Yusuke's former boss would tell him he could do well anywhere. But then what do I do about Yusuke's silently correcting the boss's confusing "seizan" with "aoyama"?

Change the proverb. Here's my revised version:

—Yamashina, bursting with confidence, quoted a proverb, "You can make your fortune anywhere but home," and hung up the phone.
    No boss, thought Yusuke, that's not how it goes. It's "You can make your fortune anywhere in the world," but he said nothing. He'd heard the proverb differently for more than twenty years, and it was better to leave it alone.

What if feels like to write in a foreign language

Jhumpa Lahiri wrote In Other Words (In altre parole) for me personally.

Or to put it another way, I can think of few books with which I identify so closely. Lahiri is in love with the Italian language; I'm carrying on an affair with it. Lahiri writes fiction; I write fiction. Lahiri has thought long and hard about translation (and has translated Domenico Starone's Ties (Lacci) among other works); I think long and hard about translation (and translate Japanese fiction).

In Other Words was  translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, an editor at The New Yorker, and is the translator of, among other works, the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan quartet. It's a book for me because the left-hand pages are Lahiri's Italian, the facing pages are Goldstein's English. Readers with Italian can read the original; readers with only English can read Goldstein; readers like myself who have some Italian can read the Italian (although as I do so, my lips move and I subvocalize) and compare the English. Why didn't Lahiri translate it herself?

Because, she says, "When I write in Italian, I think in Italian; to translate into English, I have to wake up another part of my brain. I don't like the sensation at all. I feel alienated. As if I'd run into a boyfriend I'd tired of, someone I'd left years earlier. He no longer appeals to me." Moreover, "the translation doesn't sound good. It seems insipid, dull, incapable of expressing my new thoughts."

The book includes personal history, observations about language learning in general and Italian specifically, anecdotes about learning Italian, and original fiction. (Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies and has published three other works of fiction.) Most of the chapters are short, and because only half the 233 pages are in English, it's a quick read—unless, like me, you struggle with the Italian.

I love the book, which is why I gave it five stars on Amazon. I find myself agreeing with thoughts I've had but never expressed. ("I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, spike us to our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music? We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we weren't aware of before. We want to transform ourselves . . . ."

I'm delighted Vintage Books published it and I plan to return to it periodically to read the Italian and immerse myself in Lahiri's sentences. What I wondered as I read however was: Who is the reader for this book? How many people care about a writer wrestling with a foreign language? How many can identify with a writer who is able to move with her husband and children to Rome to submerge herself in the language?

I rarely look at a book's reviews before I write about it. I don't want to be influenced even subtly. In Other Words is an exception. A number of the reviewers who gave the book one star complain that the book is boring and the Italian is not of a native speaker's, and they don't like Lahiri. One reviewer wrote: "The best thing this book does is give insight into a very self centered human being who feels like she is a 'victim' of her circumstances and the world. She is a perfectionist who can't fit into to the Italian language or culture because she doesn't fit. She gets upset that her husband seems to fit because of how he looks and his name, but really it's because he has the attitude of an Italian in him the ability to flow and not worry too much. He must be a saint to live with this woman actually! The amount of self-absorption is amazing to me—how does she even find time to be a wife and a mother? The book goes on and on about her inability to really get the Italian language and her fear of losing it and so on . . . ."

Another critic wrote: "Let's leave alone motivation and talk about her Italian, her prose, her style. Undoubtedly, she has an advanced knowledge of the language. Yet her short memoir gave me the goosebumps. She piles up awkward adjectives that in Italian don't work, one after the other, all synonyms of sad, frustrated, confused and so on and so forth. Adjectives used perhaps by Verga, or Petrarca, or whomever she read, but that make little sense now . . . "

To be fair, at this writing, 62 percent of the 185 Amazon reviewers gave the book four or five stars. Saying, once again I guess, that different people bring different backgrounds to a book and take different experiences from it. I'm going to go with the San Francisco Chronicle's observation blurbed on the back cover: "In Lahiri's hands, these essays and stories become an invaluable insight into the craft of writing not as storytelling but as speaking the self into existence."

What happens if you're possessed by a fox spirit?

In Spirit of the Fox by Matthew O'Connell, a brief Prologue shows a family is being driving out of their remote, rural Japanese village in 1945. The unnamed point-of-view character is a young girl who has a younger brother. She has no idea where they are going, but any place would be better than where she's been.

Jump to present-day Tokyo. Meiko Wright has just finished her undergraduate degree in psychology at UC Santa Barbara, is taking a year off before deciding what she wants to study in graduate school, and has come to Japan with her father David to spend a year teaching English. David is a professor of anthropology with a special interest in folklore, who will be teaching in a Japanese university for a year. Meiko's  mother, Chieko, is Japanese and a successful Tokyo psychologist. Chieko divorced David nine years earlier and returned to Japan, abandoning Meiko, at least in Meiko's eyes.

The story really gets going when Meiko goes to Kyoto for a weekend on her own. She visits the Fushimi Inari Shrine, a real place famous for its tunnel of red torii gates. Inari is the god of rice, fertility, sake, tea, and prosperity. The god's messenger or avatar is the fox and every one of the more than three thousand Inari shrines in Japan has one or more statues of a fox. The Fushimi Inari Shrine parent shrine of all Japanese Inari shrines.

Walking alone in the woods near the shrine, Meiko sees a fox, falls, and hits her head. When she wakes up, she has no memory of who or where she is (although she can still speak Japanese and English). She has no purse, no cell phone, no wallet, nothing to identify her. A priest from the shrine assists her, gives her his card, a prepaid cell phone, ¥50,000 so that she can eat and find a place to stay, a good luck charm to wear, and a special tea blend she should drink regularly to calm herself. The priest gives her a name, Hana, and sends her off to a nearby soba restaurant for a meal.

In short order, Hana, who radiates pure sexual desirability and erotic opportunity, has seduced the married restaurant owner and persuaded him to buy her sexy lingerie; expensive, brand-name clothing; and put her up in a hotel.

Back in Tokyo, David grows concerned when Meiko does not return to their apartment and does not answer her cell phone. Because he is not fluent in Japanese, he has to join forces with his ex-wife, who is after all a native. They contact the Kyoto police, who are not particularly concerned about a young foreign woman who may be shacking up with an attractive man and is not answering her phone.

The police however are interested in a soba restaurant owner who kills himself by jumping off a building. A handwritten note in his pocket says, " . . .My life is ruined. If I had never met you, Hana, would my life be better? . . . Now that I can't be with you, what's the point of living? . . ." We readers know that Meiko/Hana has moved on to another target. Could it be that Meiko has been taken over by a fox spirit? Would that explain the fox tattoo on the dead man's ankle? What has happened to Meiko? She herself does not know.

David, the anthropologist, wants to keep an open mind about the possibility of spirit possession. Her mother, the psychologist, has no sympathy for spirits, shamans, or fox possession. Chieko's mother, Aiko, has her own ideas. And the Kyoto detectives are on the trail of a seductive young woman who is leaving a trail of death and destruction and Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Chanel boxes behind her.

Spirit of the Fox is an interesting story that incorporates Japanese folklore and culture in a mystery for which I was willing to suspend my instinctive disbelief. I do have some quibbles. O'Connell devotes an entire chapter to a class David gives at the international division of Waseda University in Tokyo. While the material is interesting for itself, it has little relevance to the main thrust of the book and slows things down.

On the other hand, a Shinto priest says, "People have a need to believe in something beyond themselves. I would say that it is fundamental to our being. I believe this small omamori [good-luck charm, amulet] is more than an attractive piece of silk and wood. I believe that it helps protect me and guide me along a purer path. Can I prove that? Is there scientific evidence to confirm it? No, of course not. But does that make it any less powerful to me? Again, the answer is no." Here the priest's words do help to move the story along.

By putting every chapter into the point of view of the central character—David, Chieko, Aiko, Meiko, Hana, Detective Nomura—the action for the most part does move along briskly. I found Spirit of the Fox a diverting mystery that held my interest.

Something we can't do in English

In a Japanese short story my conversation partner and I are currently translating, I came across something I don't think we can do.

A young father is taking his four-year-old son to nursery school and the boy asks why his mother isn't taking him and has gone off to work. Because, the father says, "Papa's company has gone bankrupt." I.e,:

「パパの会社は倒産しました。」　("Papa no kaisha wa tousan shimasita.")

The kid responds by asking, "Bankrupt?" I.e,:

「トウサンって？」　("Tousan tte?")

Why, I asked, did the author write "tousan"—bankrupt—in kanji when the father spoke and in katakana when the child responded?

It's because a four-year-old would not know the kanji for the word. By four years old he might know the two syllabaries, katakana and hiragana, but would not know the kanji. By writing the kid's dialogue in katakana, the author indicates visually that it's a child speaking.

I don't know how you'd accomplish the same effect in English.

Polite Lies: How Japan is different from America

Kyoko Mori has interesting qualifications to compare and contrast Japanese culture and society with American. She is a Japanese woman who grew up in Kobe, moved to America to attend Rockford College in Illinois and the University of Wisconsin. She published her first novel, Shizuko's Daughter, a New York Times Notable Book, in 1993 and published Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures in 1997 when she was teaching creative writing at St. Norbert's College in De Pere, Wisconsin.

She says that when she wrote Polite Lies her life was split neatly half: twenty years in Japan, twenty years in the American midwest. The book consists of a dozen essays titled Language, Family, Secrets, Rituals, A Woman's Place, Bodies, Symbols, School, Tears, Lies, Safety, and Home. And by page 5 she's pointed out bilingual announcements on a plane take twice as long in Japanese as in English because "every Japanese announcement begins with a lengthy apology," It's an observation one can make (a) only if you speak Japanese and (b) are sensitive to the implications. Because while the polite apologies fall like spring rain, the "politeness is a steel net hauling us into the country where nothing means what it says."

I thought I knew something about Japan and its culture, but in every chapter Mori told me something new or articulated something I knew but had never put into words or both. For example: "In Japan, there is no such thing as a purely personal choice. Everything you do (or decide not to do) is a symbolic message directed at the world, a manifesto of a philosophical cause you support. Even your rebellion, then, will be interpreted as a sign of your belonging to another group. . . ."

In her essay on Tears she writes that no one in Japan "expects a cab driver to show—or even experience—any emotions in the presence of his customers. That is part of the paradox about emotions in Japan. We are caught to refrain from expressing our feelings in public because to do so is rude, intrusive, and selfish, and yet it is all right for six hundred people to cry together at a funeral, or for an important company official to break down in public in the middle of delivering a eulogy. . . ."

That leads naturally to an essay about Lies, which are "fascinating because there are so many possibilities for invention and embellishment. In a liar's mouth, facts are no longer boring and predictable, but interesting and surprising . . .  My Japanese friends and I were not brought up to lie on all occasions. What we received was a very mixed message: lying is all right under some circumstances, and yet honesty is also very important . . . "

I have been interested to talk to businessmen and America tourists returning from Japan who report that "Tokyo is just like New York" or that "The Japanese are so polite." Polite Lies conveys a much more complex, much richer, much more interesting reality, one that Mori describes as both an insider and outsider. She is also an individual with a unique history and perspective. So while I do not question her generalities, I also suspect there may be individual variations.

More seriously, I wonder how many of her twenty-year-old observations hold up. What effect, if any, do the recession and general economic malaise, the rise of China next door, the spread of the internet and cell phones, the Fukushima disaster, the aging population, the less-than-replacement birth rate, climate change and more have on the culture? I suspect not much, but it would be nice to know. In the meantime, Polite Lies is a fascinating introduction to Japanese culture and society.

Why can't you just say what you mean?

Recently my Japanese conversation partner and I were talking about Japanese culture as reflected in the language itself. In the story I'm currently translating, I had come across anmoku no ryokai (暗黙の了解) which means "a tacit or a silent understanding." 

That led her to teach me the word inginburei (慇懃無礼) which according to my electronic dictionary means:

—insolent under one's civility

—rude under a veneer/mask of politeness

—rude under the surface

—politely insolent

—rude while preserving the outward forms

—studied insolence.

In other words, someone may appear polite, but beneath they are seething. That's when you'll need some tacit understanding.

An all-fired cat lover and his cat's observations

Hiro Arikawa's The Traveling Cat Chronicles (旅猫リポート) is an delightful novel on a couple levels. First, it has an interesting structure. Second, Philip Gabriel has done an impressive job of rendering Arikawa's Japanese into English. (Gabriel has also translated Kenzaburo Oe's Somersault and four Haruki Murakami novels including Kafka on the Shore, so he's got some chops.) Third, as a small book—about 5.5" x 7.5"—it is a pleasure to hold.

The novel begins "I am a cat. As yet I have no name," which is the opening sentence of Natsume Soseki's 1906 novel I Am a Cat. Soseki's novel is a satire on Meiji upper-middle-class society. The Traveling Cat Chronicles is a very different animal. The cat who narrates much of the novel is a stray who is adopted by a young man, Satoru, after the cat is hit by a car. By the time of the accident, the cat and Satoru had established a relationship of sorts because Satoru allowed the cat to sleep on his van's hood and has been feeding him.

Once he adopts the cat, Satoru names him "Nana" because, from the top, his tail "looks like nana—the number seven." Because the character for nana is 七, I have trouble visualizing this, particularly because Satoru's earlier cat had two marks on its face that resembled the character eight—八—and was therefore named Hachi—8. Maybe the tail is the Arabic 7. In any case Nana it is.

Satoru's landlord does not allow pets, so "Satoru moved with me to a new place in the same town. Going to all that trouble to move just for the sake of one cat—well, maybe I shouldn't say this, being a cat myself, but that was one fired-up cat lover."

After five idyllic years, Satoru hits the road in the silver van to find one of his friends who will take Nana. It's not clear until late in the novel why Satoru wants to give Nana up. But after Nana narrates the first chapter describing how he and Satoru connected, Arikawa shifts to a third person point of view to tell the story of Kosuke Sawada, a school chum of Satoru's, who is trying to make it as a photographer and who is separated from his wife. Satoru and Nana visit, we learn about the boys' childhood adventures, about Satoru's devotion to Hachi, and, in first-person POV, Nana's take on the relationship and its history.  Kosuke cannot adopt Nana, so Satoru and Nana travel on to the farm of Daigo Yoshimine.

Similar structure. Third person POV to convey information Nana cannot know: "About three days after Yoshimine had arrived home, both his parents, surprisingly came home from work early. His mother cooked them dinner, a rare thing, and the three of them sat down together to eat." It's hardly a spoiler to reveal that his parents are getting divorced. This material is interspersed with Nana's first-person observations. And although a cat is a good animal to have on a farm, Satoru again takes off with Nana.

The third stop with a similar structure is with Shusuke Sugi and his wife Chikako who run a bed and breakfast that accepts pets. They too have a history with their high school friend Satoru and we learn more about him and the relationship between the three of them. (Satoru was sweet on Chikako.) They, however, already have an elderly cat and a young rambunctious dog. Here's Nana's first encounter with the dog: "Every single hair on my body was now standing on end. If you're going to pick a fight with Satoru, then I—a cat with a strong sense of pride—am not going to just sit here and take it! If you don't want that nose of yours cut to shreds, then apologize right this instant, you mangy mutt!" Satoru again cannot bear to part with Nana, however, and they end up in Hokkaido with Satoru's aunt and where the book comes to it's moving conclusion.

I mentioned Gabriel's translation, which manages to give Nana a recognizable cat-like attitude. For example, here's Satoru at the beginning greeting Nana who has been sleeping on his van:

"Do you always sleep there?" he asked
I suppose so. Do you have a problem with that?
"You're really cute, do you know that?"
So they tell me.
"Is it okay if I stroke you?"
No thanks. I batted one front paw at him in what I hoped to be a gently threatening way.

The Traveling Cat Chronicles will be catnip for readers who are interested in Japanese fiction, or who like cats, or who want to know more about contemporary Japanese society, or all three.

What you get when three people translate the same poem

Translating simple prose—a news article, an instruction manual, a contract—can be difficult. Translating literary prose ups the ante. And translating poetry is fraught.

(Just to see what would happen, I ran my second sentence above through Google Translate which  came up with, "Tradurre la prosa letteraria aumenta la posta." Back translate that and you get, "Translating literary prose increases the mail." In Japanese the sentence becomes, "文学的な散文を翻訳することは、分かります." Back translate that and you get, "I understand translating literary proses.")

Martha Collins, in her Introduction to Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, writes that seeing "what different translators have done with the same poem immediately eliminates easy assumptions that beginning translators often make: that there is a single way, a most correct way, or a best way to translate a poem."

To disabuse beginning translators (and anyone interested in translation or in poetry or both) Collins and her co-editor Kevin Prufer have produced a fascinating book. It contains twenty-five commentaries on as many poems. The poems all appear in the original language and these include ancient Greek, Latin, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, French, modern Greek, German, Turkish, Russian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Hebrew, Arabic, Swedish, Romanian, and Haitian Creole. The poets include Sappho, Virgil, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Cavafy, Rilke, Akamatova, Pasternak, Vallejo, Garcia Lorca, Celan, Szymborska, Amichai. Tranströmer.

What makes Into English unique is that there are three translations (and sometimes more) of each poem and commentary by a fourth scholar/translator/poet. These give background on the poet and the poem, an indication of the translator's challenge, and a discussion of the different translations.

"A translation may go smoothly for a while," Collins writes, "and then come upon a section or a line that, for any number of reasons (semantic, syntactic, stylistic, cultural), runs into trouble. The trouble spots are the places where multiple translations are most apt to differ. Looking at them carefully can take us more deeply into the nuances of both the original language and English—and, more generally, challenge our assumptions about how language works." That last point alone is worth the price of the book.

I was particularly interested in a 1680 Basho haiku: 枯枝に烏のとまりたるや.秋の暮　(Kare'eda ni karasu no tomaritaru ya aki no kure).

Here's the 1902 translation by Basil Hall Chamberlain:

The end of autumn, and some rooks
Are perched on a withered branch.

 Here's Harold G. Henderson's 1925 translation:

     On a leafless bough
A crow is sitting — autumn,
     Darkening now —

And finally Nobuyuki Yuasa's 1966 translation:

A black crow
Has settled himself
On a leafless tree
Fall on an autumn day.

Three versions of the poem's four nouns and one verb—all valid. Hiroaki Sato's commentary points out the translator's immediate challenge is that most Japanese nouns don't distinguish between countable and uncountable, so one crow or many. Also, aki no kure means either "an autumn evening" or "late autumn" or both. So, as in many haiku, the meaning shimmers.

I am not a poet, and I do not translate poetry. Into English however is wonderfully stimulating with fascinating discussions of the poets, the poems, and the different attempts (always attempts, never final realizations) to render them in English.

Cheryl Pallant gets oriented in South Korea

In 2007 Cheryl Pallant accepted an offer as Visiting Lecturer at Keimyung University in Daegu, South Korea. She had "no images of its landscape and architecture, no familiarity with its language, people, history, or culture" other than that American soldiers fought against communism there in the 1950s. Pallant, in the middle of a divorce after a 15-year marriage, was moving from Richmond, Virginia, population 223,000 to Daegu, a city of 2.5 million people in south-central Korea. Ginseng Tango is a memoir of her year there.

It joins a tradition of naif Americans who go to a country they know nothing about to teach and write a book to explain the culture, customs, and people to the folks back home. (Learning to Bow: An American Teacher in a Japanese School by Bruce S. Feiler explained Japan.) Because Pallant is such a good writer—she currently teaches writing at the University of Richmond—and because she was a mature woman when she went to Daegu—the book's internal evidence puts her in her late 30s—Ginseng Tango is a superior example of the genre.

That she is in the middle of a divorce, that she comes to Korea with a background of Zen meditation, Buddhist practice, and dance, and that she is open (relatively) about her fears and flaws makes the book more than a simple report of what it's like to spend a year teaching in a Korean university. The title comes from ginseng—"a major ingredient in many a medicinal cocktail. Korean ginseng is known for its potency in treating ailments like high blood pressure, allergies, diabetes, sexual dysfunction, and fatigue"—and her involvement with tango and the people with whom she becomes friendly at tango club.

One of these is a doctor who invites her to his clinic and who tells her "My soul knows yours." He treats her with acupuncture and chiropractics, and says, "Curve spine I straighten." No western doctor "ever offered me a chance of removing the curve, only preventing it from getting worse. Is this the eastward pull I felt from the States, my body somehow clued that the idiopathic conditions contributing to my curvature might be alleviated?" She begins to visit the doctor's clinic regularly and they become friends.

Unfortunately, the doctor is married to a paranoid woman to whom Pallant is an insult and a threat. When the wife calls Pallant's university, the chair of the department, agrees the woman is crazy. However she tells Pallant, "In our culture, regardless of the facts, a woman such as yourself is guilty. You're a foreigner. Rumors and scandals cannot be tolerated at our school. If you don't stop visiting his clinic, we may have to let you go." Pallant's friendship with the doctor, his wife/s attacks run as a thread through the book making it more than a collection of set pieces.

The set pieces include Pallant's initial struggle with a Korean washing machine, a rock-climbing experience, a visit to a public bath, a day with a shaman that includes fascinating background on Korean shamanism, tango lessons, drinking with the ex-pat colleagues from the university, student interactions, Children's Day adventures, and more. She is aware from day one that this is another country. "Already I've sliced up a small orange sphere, thinking it a type of tomato. I added it to my salad sprinkled with soy sauce, not my preferred dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, items which, if available, I have yet to locate. The tomato greatly disappointed, given its true identity as a persimmon, a sweet untomatoey fruit that never passed my lips before."

She comes to realize that she is not, and probably never can be entirely welcome. A colleague who has lived in Korea for seven yers tells her he has yet to make a Korean friend. "Every foreigner I speak with says the same thing. We're treated with civility in the classroom, office, or during mandatory after work drinking parties, but sincere lasting friendship is rare. Koreans welcome us foreigners, but only to a point."

At one point, the doctor introduces her to a group of his (male) friends. A woman schooled in dance, poetry and the arts; able to talk on a wide range of topics; considerate of local etiquette she could almost be a modern gisaeng, Korea's equivalent of geisha. Pallant writes, "A poor fit among my western colleagues and a novelty to the doctor's friends, I don't know where I belong nor what, given the choice, I want. Identities that once held sway in Richmond don't carry the same traction her. Here I exist on the margins, a foreigner in a culture that prizes homogeneity and ancestral purity." At the end of the book, she has returned to the States and is settling into a new home—alone.

Ginseng Tango is an engaging introduction to the culture and society of a country that is in the news regularly but one few of us know much about and Cheryl Pallant is an appealing guide.

We are not, after all, harmless

Because a friend whose taste I trust recommended Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, I wanted to like the book. And there are many things I did like about the novel. One of the two main characters is Yukiko Oyama, a Japanese girl whose parents brought her to New York (her father was "a director of the East Coast branch of Japans most successful car company"). We meet Yuki when she is in high school in 1968, suffering from being neither an all-American girl nor a proper Japanese one. Her kanji is crude, her Japanese inadequate.

She makes a best friend, Odile, who lives with her single mother, Lillian. A romance writer, Lillian is much more casual about parenting than Yuki's mother and when Yuki's parents return to Japan Yuki petitions to stay on in New York with Odile and her mother. The adults all agree, and the girls are then on largely their own. Eventually, Odile connects with a fashion photographer and takes off for Europe where she becomes a top model. Yuki is seduced by—or takes up with—Lillian's boyfriend/lover Lou and moves in with him. That Lou is perhaps twenty years older, is a frustrated sportswriter (a frustration he expresses smacking Lillian and then Yuki around), and can be violently territorial do not seem to be issues with Yuki. 

Eventually, Lou decides he wants to marry someone else and evicts Yuki from his apartment. She finds shelter with Edison, a good, gentle, kind man she'd met some time earlier. He marries her, buys them a house in Connecticut, and they have a child, Jay. Unfortunately for Jay, Yuki cannot tolerate Edison's kindness, solicitude, or motherhood and she abandons Edison and Jay to live as an artist in Germany. Which brings us to Jay.

The novel follows Yuki's story and Jay's, and two chronologies, 1968-1983 and March-October 2016. When we meet Jay, he's a gallery owner, a new father, and dependent on a 17-year-old, diabetic, hairless Sphynx comfort cat he's needed since high school to keep from fainting. His kindly, gently architect father has just been killed in a car accident leaving the Connecticut house to Yuki, and Jay's wife has delivered an ultimatum: The cat goes or the baby and I go. It's a function of Jay's disability that these feel like genuine alternatives to him. 

Unfortunately, to me, Yuki comes across as a masochist. She has seen Lou smack Lillian (another masochist) and does not mind getting smacked herself. She feels, I think, the pain is something real, like the pain you get from cutting yourself. But I think that's hard to make sympathetic, let alone understandable. Jay comes across as a jerk, not only for his indestructible connection to his ancietn cat but for fucking one of his gallery's artists late in his wife's pregnancy.

It's tough. Readers don't have to like a main character to be engaged. (Who would like Humbert Humbert?) I believe Buchanan wanted to show the harm Yuki's abandoning infant Jay did to him, but I don't think it works. Buchanan wanted to show Yuki's torment growing up as a young Japanese girl in New York City, and those chapters are convincing. She wanted to keep a reader's attention so she switches back and forth between Yuki (written in the third person) and Jay (written in the first). Although she labels each section with the character's name and heads each chapter with the time it takes place, the reader is constantly being jerked forward and back in time. It makes me wonder if putting the chapters in strict chronological order would have helped. 

All that said, I'm glad I took my friend's suggestion and read Harmless Like You. For all my quibbles, it's an interesting portrait of two people I would not have known otherwise.

What does it take to inspire you?

The Avon Free Public Library in Avon, CT, is running a Local Author Festival this summer, the fifth year in a row that the staff has promoted Connecticut authors. I have just participated in a fiction author panel in which six of us answered questions about inspiration (or Inspiration).

The June Fiction Author Panel at Avon Free Public Library

Questions like: Where do you get your ideas for a story? What do you do when you're not inspired? Do you write every day? Do you do any research in writing your books? How do you choose character names? And more.

I am always interested in hearing other writers answers to these perennial questions. After all, there is no one answer. Ideas come from everywhere, anywhere—personal experience, news stories, reading, conversation. I am hard put to say exactly where a story idea originates, although every one of my books and short stories has some connection to my own life.

And when we're not inspire, some of us write anyway—a journal, a letter, an essay, a poem. And some knit, read, watch a movie.

Not everyone writes every day. One panelist has written one book and has no plans to write another. The working writers on the panel, however, are doing something related to writing—researching, recuperating, recharging—when they're not.

Because it was an opportunity to share tips and thoughts with other writers, I thought the experience was valuable. I hope the people who attended our panel got as much out of it as I did.

What I did on my summer vacation

What do you do at a translators' conference? If it's the week-long Middlebury Bread Loaf Translators' Conference, from which I have just returned, you work your buns off.

Classes, lectures, and social events during the translators conference were held in The Barn
on the Middlebury Bread Loaf campus in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

You can start with an hour-long yoga session at 6:30 a.m., (I started with breakfast at 7:30) and end with readings and socializing at 10:30 p.m. In between there are lectures, workshops, talks, and meetings. To be admitted, every one of the fifty or so translators at this year's conference submitted a translation and its original. Translations of literary fiction and poetry, and the underlying assumption is that the translator knows the language well enough to understand the original. You don't—for the most part—try to re-translate a work.

For one thing, who could? My workshop leader was Bill Johnston who teaches literary translation at Indiana University, who has published over 30 book-length translations from the Polish, including poetry, prose, and drama, and who (by the evidence in our workshop) has a reading knowledge of French and German. The workshop to which I was assigned did have translations from French and German, but for the rest we were pretty much on our own.

Our workshop considered two translations from Japanese (mine was one), two from French, two from Spanish, and one each from Swedish, Vietnamese, and German. Each translator read a paragraph or so from the original to give the group a sense of the sound of the piece and then discussed any problems/questions/issues she/he was having with the translation. Some of us—and I include myself—felt that the work we'd submitted was relatively polished. It did not read like a translation.

I was mistaken. By the time Bill and the group had finished discussing my prose, my first page and a half were covered with red edits. One key lesson learned last week: When you're having a problem with the English, the solution is not to return to the original but to spend more time, thought, tears, and sweat on the English. As one of my fellow translators said, "Take it all the way to English."

So the translation workshop turned out to be as much a writing workshop as a discussion of translation. What makes a good translation? How close should you be to the original? Not so close that the English sounds clunky or unnatural. Not so close that the dialogue sounds as if spoken by aliens (unless of course the characters in the work are aliens).

There is an argument to make it "translatorise" so a reader can follow along with the original, but how many readers what to do that? It's hard enough to find readers for a translation at all—Elena Ferrante, Steig Larsson, Haruki Murakami being exceptions—why make a reader work? And anyway the translations of Ferrante, Larsson, and Murakami are engaging English novels.

In my next post, I'll talk about some of the practical issues surrounding literary translation. I.e., how do you get published?

Why the traitor can use some sympathy

Faithful readers of this blog may recall posts in which I have talked about the translator's dilemma. Because I have been using translation to improve my knowledge of Japanese, I have occasionally had a problem with a term that is familiar to native speakers but would mystify most Western readers— "natto" for example.

My dictionary defines natto as "fermented soybeans." But to stick closely to the original Japanese and translate that a character was eating fermented soybeans at breakfast does not convey the reality that natto (with a burning hot yellow mustard) is seen by many Japanese as promoting health and regularity. Perhaps an analogy would be say that the character was eating muesli for breakfast. But if readers don't know "muesli"—which in content, texture, and odor is entirely different from natto—I'm not sure you've accomplished much, aside from distorting Japanese breakfast dishes.

For this reason and more I will be attending the Bread Loaf Translator's Conference in Vermont this year. This is "designed to provide training and community to beginning as well as experienced translators in the pursuit of translating literary texts into English—or to those aiming to be more sophisticated readers of literary translation and to incorporate it into the classroom." I will be in a workshop with nine others in which we will be exposed to "some of the recurring questions, problems, and pleasures of the activity of literary translation."

And in preparation for all this, I've just read Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto by Mark Polizzotti, which The MIT Press recently published. Polizzotti is the publisher and editor-in-chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, according to the flap copy, has translated more than fifty books from apparently French and Spanish. 

The translation issue of course goes back to the third century B.C. when seventy (or seventy-two) Hellenistic Jewish scholars translated the bible into Koiné Greek—the Septuagint. Seven hundred years later, Saint Jerome "undertook a new Latin translation based on the Hebrew and Aramaic source texts, bypassing the Greek." St. Augustine of Hippo criticized it because it wasn't based on the orthodox Greek version. And about a thousand years later, Martin Luther translated the New Testament into "a radically simplified, 'sweet and good' German that was intelligible to the common man" which "aroused the ire of the Church fathers."

There are two translation issues with the Bible: What is the source? And: Does the translation convey the sense (meaning, implications, intentions, message) of the original? (Plus, in the 16th Century there was another question: who should be able to read the text at all?) 

Polizotti believes that in general a translation should convey meaning and, to radically simplify his argument, be easy to read. If the translation is a chore to read in English, why read it at all unless you are dragooned into doing so for grade in class? I would like the translations my conversation partner Naoko Miyazaki are doing to be enjoyable for what they evoke of Japanese life and culture and for the English to be unnoticeable.

Because Japanese is so different in grammar and syntax from English, because I believe Japanese in fact has fewer words than English, because Japanese can be so allusive, and because cultural references—like natto—can be mystifying for Western readers, translating is challenging and stimulating. I'm looking forward to my week in Vermont to learn much, much more.