What's the right word for "wife"?

In the Japanese short story I am currently translating with enormous help from my conversation partner, I bumped on the word for "wife."

A bride and groom at Meiji Shrine in Tokyo

In the story, the protagonist is introducing his bride of less than six months to his grandmother. He says, ぼくのお嫁さん ("Boku no oyomesan") "[This is] my wife."

I bumped on "oyomesan" because it sounded like a polite form that would be inappropriate for a younger person use to identify his wife to an older, and therefore senior, relative. For example, I've been taught that when speaking of another person's wife—"your wife"—you use "okusan" (奥さん). When you refer to your own wife—"my wife"—you use "kanai" (家内). One is polite, one is humble. One would never say, "Boku no okusan," so where does "oyomesan" fall in this continuum of politeness?

The dictionary is not a lot of help. The definitions include "a (young) wife," "bride," "daughter-in-law." It gives the expression "yome o toru" (嫁を取る) to mean "to marry; take a wife." I asked conversation partner about it.

She said that "yome," unlike "okusan" or "kanai," carries nuances of "the woman who will care for my parents, homemaker, and mother of my children." Apparently the other two words are much less freighted with meaning.

Because it has all those nuances, of course, it is impossible to translate without stopping the story. It's what makes translation impossible and, as I slog through it, so interesting.

Adventures in Japanese - III

To slowly, slowly improve my ability to read Japanese, I have been translating a book of short stories that my conversation partner bought me on one of her trips home. This is not "literature." The author, Hirao Okuda, is appealing to a popular audience. Nevertheless, the book contains sentences that are well beyond my ability to turn into English. For example:

絵里 は 鼻 の 奥 が つんときた。

Stick with me for a moment, and we'll go through it. 絵里 is a girl's name, Eri. 鼻 means "nose." 奥 means "inside," so 鼻の奥  means "inside [her] nose." つんときた  means "to become irritated" or "struck by a pungent odor."

So, my translation, which made some sense in the context (Eri is talking to her brother in his hospital room): "A pungent odor was in Eri's nose."

Google Translate's version: "Eri the back of the nose was Tsunto come."

My native-speaking Japanese conversation partner says the sentence means, "Eri felt she was about to cry." (The irritation in her nose is the precursor to crying.) Who knew? 

Notice that the only word in common between the original and my partner's translation is "Eri."

What all this means is that not only am I slowly learning to read, I continue to increase my respect for the scholars—Donald Keene, John Nathan, Ted Goosens, Philip Gabriel, Jay Rubin, Juliet Winters Carpenter, and more—who are able to translate Japanese into lively English. What they are able to do is astonishing.

Adventures in Japanese - I

A Kyoto yakitori chef prepares a meal.

I have been engaged in (interested in? consumed by?) the Japanese language for a long time. Although I doubt I will ever return to Japan, I continue to meet weekly with a Japanese conversation partner and continue to learn slowly, slowly the characters with a goal of eventually being able to read a magazine or newspaper. I will never be fluent. I cannot, for example, understand a news broadcast. But my spoken Japanese is good enough to function as a traveler in Japan.

Because I have been learning and using Japanese for a long time, and because I find the language so interesting, I plan to write about Japanese and some of my experiences with it in a series of periodic blog entries, this being the first. I hope that if you have observations or questions, you will take a moment to comment.

Like many Western visitors to Japan, I was disoriented when I got off a troop ship in Yokohama harbor years ago and discovered that, while Japanese shops, posters, and billboards were a riot of writing, I was entirely illiterate. I might also have been deaf and dumb because everything I heard was only noise. On the one hand, it seemed impossible to learn enough to, as a friend said, "exchange ideas." On the other, Japan is filled with children who have learned the language, so it cannot be impossible.

Indeed, I learned almost immediately how to say "hello," "thank you," and "how much?" As a GI, I didn't need much more; the Japanese I came in contact with spoke (some) English. While the Japanese education system requires several years of English study (and did so right through WWII)—and I have a story about English instruction in a moment—in my experience, few Japanese are comfortable in English and appreciate the foreigner who has bothered to learn some of their language. The Japanese are not, generally, language snobs unless or until you gain native fluency, which will never be my dilemma.

The story: One time in the 1950s was on a train somewhere in the countryside. At a stop, a group of schoolboys and their teacher came into the car. I was an American in civilian clothes, fairly unusual at that time and place. The boys crowded around me and dragged their teacher over to sit across from me. He was clearly embarrassed by what the boys insisted. Because I spoke virtually no Japanese, I could not help him much. Finally, by consulting the pocket dictionary I always carried and the dictionary he had in his brief case, were able to establish that (a) he was the boys' English teacher, and (b) I was the first person he had ever met for whom English was his native language.

While I know that the level of English-language instruction in Japan has improved dramatically in the last 50 years, I also know that for many Japanese English is a trial and a burden. An American who is able to speak some Japanese, even poorly, therefore has an enormous advantage in gaining access to the "real" Japan, whatever that is.

The Translator by Nina Schuyler

The translator in Nina Schuyler’s novel, The Translator (Pegasus Books, 352 pages), is Hanne Schubert. She is widow in her early 50s; her Japanese husband died of a heart attack several years before the book opens. She has two adult children: Tomas, a lawyer in New York, and Brigitte, with whom she has had no contact for six years and does not know where she lives. Hanne is multi-lingual; her parents were translators and interpreters and she moved around the world with them as a child. She makes her living translating Japanese fiction and teaching the language in a San Francisco college.

The book opens with a few pages of Hanne’s translation of a (fictional) Japanese novel. That novel had done well in Japan, in part because the author, Kobayashi, had revealed in an interview that the main character, Jiro, was inspired by the famous (fictional) Noh actor, Moto Okuro. We watch Hanne struggling to convey in English the improbable or incomprehensible Japanese. She understands the language well enough: “Yariba no nai ikidoori, meaning an unfocused anger. But also yaru se nai kimochi, a helpless feeling, or a feeling of no way to clear one’s mind… She pauses, baffled. How can Jiro be experiencing an unfocused anger and a helpless feeling? And just a moment ago he was frustrated. It doesn’t make sense.”

In the past Hanne has written Kobayashi for clarification. He had written back in Japanese, “I’m not the translator, you are!” so Hanne is on her own in her attempts to express not only the story's surface meaning but to convey the character’s deeper feelings. She spends more than a year living intimately with Jiro and finally sends the English manuscript off to the publisher and Kobayashi.

While waiting for a response, a bad fall and concussion puts her in the hospital. When she has recovered enough to talk, she can no longer speak English, only the language she’s been living with so intimately for the past year—Japanese. This inability to speak one language is apparently a rare, but real affliction. Fortunately her son Tomas speaks Japanese; both her children were raised to be multi-lingual like Hanne herself, but he is in New York. Because Hanne cannot communicate easily with anyone in San Francisco, she accepts an invitation to speak at a Tokyo literary conference.

After her Tokyo talk, Kobayashi confronts her: “You were supposed to translate my words, my story, not rewrite it and make your own story in the hopes of uniting mankind. I don’t know where you get your ideas about translation, but no author in his right mind would want you to translate his work. I put my trust in you to bring my story to the English-speaking world. My story. Not yours.” Kobayashi accuses Hanne of ruining his main character. “Turned him into an asshole…I am ashamed of what you did to my Jiro…. You should be ashamed….” If Moto, the person on whom Kobayashi based Jiro, were to read her translation, “he’d hate it.”

Hanne tries to defend herself : “‘If this Moto saw what I had to work with, he’d give me a medal.’ She loved Jiro! She understood this character better than Kobayashi did himself.” Nevertheless, Hanne is devastated. A reaction like this from an author means the end of her translation career. She’s particularly shaken because Kobayashi’s attack is so unexpected. She is trapped in Japan until her English returns—if it returns—and decides to find Moto himself to see what he is like.

To say much more would spoil the pleasure of the book, and The Translator offers a great many pleasures. There is the issue of translation itself. I have been translating Japanese fiction as a way to learn the characters and improve my fluency. I am regularly troubled by the possibilities a single phrase suggests. Schuyler gives an example: hito no kokoro no hana ni zo arikeru could be translated as “the heart of a man, like a fading flower” or “a flower that fades, like a man’s heart,” or “a single flower fading, like the heart of a man.” All three are correct. It suggests that translation is also an act of creation.

There is also the pleasure of watching the author explore the differences between Jiro, the character in the novel, and Moto, the real person. Jiro is not Moto and vice versa although Jiro and Moto share traits, features, attributes. The resonances between Hanne’s translated Jiro and the Moto Hanne meets are rich and rewarding.

Hanne Schubert is a fascinating character—intelligent, capable, passionate. At the same time, she like the rest of us, is a victim of her history. She’s been the best parent she knows how to be, but like the rest of us she’s made some bad decisions. She’s translated Kobayashi’s novel as faithfully as she knows how, but like the rest of us her experience has, in this case, misled her.

Moto, as a famous Noh actor, is also fascinating. He too is intelligent, capable, and passionate. But he refuses to be what Hanne expects, refuses to conform to her assumptions. And when we finally see him performing on the Noh stage, he becomes someone else entirely.

Nina Schuyler teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco. Her first novel, The Painting, was named a “Best Book of the Year” by the San Francisco Chronicle. If it is half as fine as The Translator, it deserved the honor. I am going to go look for it.

A Room Where the Star Spangled Banner Cannot be Heard by Levy Hideo

This short novel in three parts (only a little over 1l0 pages) comes with high praise. From Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo: "Have we failed to catch the calm but earnest tone that echoes like music through Levy Hideo's prose? With his unique literary voice, this writer clearly represents a new kind of novelist for Japanese literature...." And from Tawada Yoko, author of The Naked Eye: "Discovering this book is like meeting a fascinating person. Never before and never since have I encountered such a magical book...."

The author, Ian Hideo Levy, writing as Levy Hideo, is the first white American to write a novel in Japanese. He was born in 1950 to a Jewish father and a Polish mother in Berkeley, California. He grew up in the United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan where he went to live with his father in the American consulate in Yokohama when he was 17. He went to Princeton, earned a doctorate there, and joined the faculty as an assistant professor of Japanese literature when he was 28. His novel was published in Japan in 1992, it was translated (by Christopher S. Scott) in 2011.

Start with the title, A Room Where the Star Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard. The Japanese title is Seijoki no kikoenai heya (星条旗の聞こえない部屋). "heya" is "room"; "kikoenai" is "cannot be heard"; and I had to look up "seijoki" which means "the Star Spangled Banner." (I was impressed that Japanese has one word for our national flag.) So the English title is about as literal as you can get.

The story is set in 1967, a time of student protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and 17-year-old Ben Isaac is living in the Yokohama consulate with his strict father, Chinese step-mother, and 4-year-old half brother. He wants to learn Japanese and begins classes at W University. Ben becomes consumed by the language, the difference between what he's taught in class and what he learns on the street, the difficulties with reading Japanese, and the attitudes of the Japanese toward this blond, white American boy. He is befriended by an slightly older W University student, runs away from home, burns his identity card, and in the novel's third section finds work as a waiter in a Shinjuku restaurant.

As Scott says in his thought-provoking translator's introduction, "...Levy's work is about the struggle or productive tension between writing in Japanese and not being Japanese, or the dilemma of being a writer of Japanese but not a Japanese writer.... " Ben's father makes a familiar point when he tells Ben, "No matter how much you learn to speak their language, in their eyes you'll always be like me: a dumb gaijin who can't speak properly and never wanted to. Even if you go to the plaza in front of the Imperial Palace and scream 'Long live the Emperor!' in perfect Japanese and slit your stomach open, you'll never be one of them."

Perhaps not, and that tension between what Ben rejects—the America of his counsel father and his divorced and troubled mother—and what he wants—immersion in an entirely different language and culture—give the novel its power. As Scott says, "....it also looks back at postwar America and the sense of loss and disillusionment that the 1960s brought about. It is an elegy to a lost home, a requiem for a missing mother tongue."

I am finishing a new novel tentatively titled Mt. Koya. While the story is very different from Getting Oriented, Japan still plays a significant role in the lives of the characters. Because Japan plays such an important part, I wondered about a Japanese translation. My Japanese is nowhere good enough to translate it myself, so I wondered what would happen if I ran some of it through Google Translate. Here's the beginning of one of the chapters:

    I’m sitting quietly reading in a Tokyo coffee shop called L’Ambre and only vaguely conscious of the young Japanese woman at another table until she comes over to me and asks hesitantly, “Are you American?” It’s a raw early September Saturday and I’m off duty until eight o’clock tomorrow morning. I’ve taken the train up to Tokyo’s Shibuya station, a half-hour ride from Sagami-shi. I need to get away from the hospital and the Army for a while, if only to sit in a coffee shop and read a book or to walk around Shibuya, so different from Sagami. The big city versus a village.

Here's the result:

     私はL'AMBRE呼ばれる東京のコーヒーショップで読んで静かに座っていると、別のテーブルで若い日本人女性の唯一の漠然と意識し、彼女は私に上に来て、ためらいがちに要求するまで、"あなたはアメリカ人ですか？"だ
      それは生の9月初旬土曜日だと私は8時に明日の朝まで義務をオフだ。私は、東京の渋谷駅、相模市から時間半乗りへの電車を撮影した。コーヒーショップに座って本を読んだり、相模とは大きく異なるため、渋谷を歩くようにする場合にのみ、私は、しばらくの間、病院や軍から離れて取得する必要があります。村対大都市。

My Japanese is good enough to quibble with the translation. My biggest would be the woman's question, "Are you American?" That's what the translation says, but it seems too direct, almost impolite, for the situation. It really gets interesting, however,  when you ask Google to back-translate. To take the Japanese and turn it into English. Here's what I got:

     When sitting quietly reading a coffee shop in Tokyo called L'AMBRE, the conscious vaguely only of young Japanese woman in another table, to come on to me, until I request hesitantly she , "Are you? American?" It
      It's off duty until tomorrow morning at 8:00 I am that it is early Saturday September raw. I have taken the train to a half hour ride Shibuya Station in Tokyo, from Sagami city. In order to read a book while sitting in a coffee shop, to differ materially from the Sagami, only if you want to be walking Shibuya, I, for a while, you need to get away from the army and hospital. Village-to-large cities.

If there is ever going to be a translation, I think I'll need a human being to do it.

What Does That Mean?

One of the many decisions I had to make in writing Getting Oriented was how to handle the Japanese language. I knew I didn't want to provide instant translations that you sometimes see, something like: "Ichiro picked up his hashi [chopsticks] and dug into his katsudon [bowl of rice and pork]."

My answer: When a character is speaking Japanese, the text is in italic. It becomes a little awkward sometimes when the characters are switching from Japanese to English and back, but I believe readers can follow.

As a result, there are almost no Japanese words in a 240-page book set in Japan. I did leave a few: moshi moshi, which I trusted most readers to understand from the context; sokaiya and dotera, for which there are no good English equivalents, and which I explain as soon as I use them. Toward the end of the book, my tour guide begins to tell a Japanese joke in Japanese, but when his American guests demand to hear it in English, he beings again in English.

To show that this is a novel about Japan, however, I did use Japanese at the beginning of each chapter:

第一章、第二章 etc. and I've been asked what it means.

It says "Chapter 1," "Chapter 2," etc. My way of giving a genuine Japanese flavor to the novel.

Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere

John Nathan is a brilliant translator of Japanese and he has written a fascinating memoir, Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere. "Carelessly" is a key word here because by his own account he has abandoned or thrown away one opportunity after another. In some ways, I found it a sad book as Nathan looks back on roads not taken--and on roads taken he might have been better off ignoring. (At one point, when he was rolling in money, he and his wife bought a giant white elephant of a house north of Boston; they were saved only because, after an expensive year in the house, a rock band decided they wanted it.)

Nevertheless, if someone is interested in Japan, in Japanese literature, in the Japanese language, or all three this is a wonderful book, very funny in places and lively and fascinating. Nathan was hired to translate an early Yukio Mishima novel. The title in Japanese, Gogo no Eiko, means something like "An Afternoon Tug." Eiko is the verb "to tug" or "to tow a boat." An Afternoon Tug was not going to work for an American edition, and after trying a number of alternatives, Nathan went to Mishima to ask about it. Mishima had a number of suggestions, one of which could almost be translated word for word and became the English title: The Sailor Who Fell From Grace from the Sea.

Nathan has translated a number of Kensaburo Oe's novels and was with him in Stockholm when Oe won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The memoir includes a wonderful scene of Oe and his family with Nathan and his children in the Oe home in Tokyo. Nathan also tells the story of chiding Oe for writing "the sea urchin raised its head" because sea urchins do not have heads. Oe pointed out that Nathan's translation had confused ウ二 uni, or sea urchin with ワ二 wani, or allegator. That one little eyelash at the top of the first character makes all the difference.

It's been a full, rich life and Nathan writes about it with verve and grace. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Google Translate

I continue to learn new Japanese characters and review grammatical forms. I'm working with a couple Japanese friends, helping them with their English and they help me with my Japanese. One of the our texts is a book of useful sentences that illustrate various patterns. I just came across the following:

社長はだれのことをどなたのですか？("Shacho wa dare no koto o donata no desu ka?")

The text translates that as, "Who did the boss shout at?"

Because the verb "shout" is not in the sentence, I decided to check it with Google Translate. The program translated it as "How is anyone to be president whom?"

I think I have to check this one with my friends.

Through the Language Glass

One reason to study Japanese (or Chinese or Korean or Guugu Yimithirr) it seemed to me was that because we think in a language, our language affects what we think. You have one picture of reality when you think in English, another when you think in Japanese. And because Japanese is so different from English, it expands what you can possibly know. My analogy would be the difference between my walking through the woods or walking with a trained botanist who can identify all the plants and trees. It would be a much richer experience with someone who knows the language.

Guy Deutscher, an honorary Research Fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures in the University of Manchester, has written Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, which explores these questions. I found it fascinating, although if you read the article in the New York Times Magazine, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" you have most of the book's meat.

Yes, language does shape how you think, but not in the way that linguists had thought. Just because a language does not have a future tense, for example, does not mean that native speakers cannot imagine the future. Just because a language does not have plurals (Japanese has almost none) does not mean that native speakers cannot distinguish between one book and five books. Your language determines not what you can say, but what you must say.

For example, I cannot talk about my "brother" in Japanese; I must talk about either my "older brother" (ani) or "younger brother" (ototo); there is no single word for a male sibling. Similarly, I cannot say "I went out with a friend," in Italian without identifying the sex of the friend (amico or amica).

Deutscher's book is an interesting account of the intellectual debate over these issues. It does seem clear that our language colors our reality. (And color words are particularly troublesome for linguists: Did Homer really see world in black and white because there are no color words in the Illiad and the Odyssey? What color is a wine-dark sea?) The book is filled with interesting facts about languages. German, for example, has seven ways to form a plural. Speakers of certain Aboriginal Australian languages do not talk about something in "front" of you or "behind" you, but to the north or the south, which changes as you move through space; as a result these people seem to always know which way is north.

I would recommend the book to anyone who has more than a passing interest in language. I would recommend the Times Magazine article to those who have only a passing interest.