Mariko Nagai
 

A Preface

Translating the dead is easier than translating the living, be it a life or a text. The dead, with their body of work laid out, their secret thoughts hidden in letters and journals do not shift or change the way the living do – who constantly yearn to discover better versions of stories or of themselves. My father, who died nearly a year ago – no, eleven months ago – is easier to understand, to unfold, because he is quiet in a way he never was while alive; his emotions do not shift at the most unexpected moments, terrifying all around him. He does not move – the pages of his journals stay still – and I can pick and choose a moment or two and examine him from many angles.

Writers I have translated in the past – Takamura Kotaro, Natsume Soseki – are all dead. Their copyrights expired after seventy years. In cases like those an oeuvre of work lies like a dead body in an anatomy auditorium – earlier versions of translation, a body of scholarship done on them. Like a surgeon, I can refer to their journals, essays, their earlier as well as later work, and others’ views on them, and I can dive into my own translation of a text. The act of translation is an act of rediscovery, and we, as translators – “traitors” – can jump from one text to another, taking the best and ignoring the worst, because it is life already done, and we can forgive, in a way we cannot forgive the living….

When we talk of contemporary Japanese literature, we must first talk of the geography of Japan. Japan is, and has always been except those years before and during World War II, when it wanted to expand its boundaries, clear in its demarcation. Here is the land; here is the ocean. The boundary of the nation is already set by geography, unlike Europe, where the boundaries of nations are fluid, unstable, defined by religious, political, and sometimes ideological lines. And because of its geographical limitation, Japan, throughout its history, filtered what was imported – taking the best, ignoring the worst – while unconsciously resisting those imports from fully taking roots like dandelions. What is Japanese are imported ideas domesticated through rigorous metamorphosis. What seems on the surface something familiar to Western eyes is, underneath, startlingly different. Take, for example, Christianity. As Novala Takemoto’s novella, A Child Abandoned by Deus, traces, Christianity came to Japan with Francisco Xavier in the sixteenth century. The Japanese government of the time banned it because it seemed to represent something worse than the spirituality it propagated. For three hundred years, Japan closed its doors to the West (except in Nagasaki) while the offspring of Xavier’s converts went underground. They prayed in secret to a God who did not hear them. When Japan opened its ports once again in the nineteenth century, crypto-Christians emerged from their hiding, and whispered, “My heart is at the same place as yours,” to a startled Bernard Thadee Petitjean in 1865. However, their prayers, their chants, even their rituals, were unrecognizable, so transformed during their hiding that they bore no resemblance to what Xavier imagined would have happen to the glorious word he had carried with him along his journey to Japan via India and Macau.

Yankee subculture is another example of the modified import. In the Yankee subculture, a group of under aged boys with slick, oiled hair, ride motorcycles that sound the theme song from The Godfather. They smoke and suffer from teenage angst reminiscent of James Dean in A Rebel without a Cause, all in the sprawling suburbia of Tokyo – the replica of the glorious age of Eisenhower America. Once these boys have managed to drop out of high school or have maybe been thrown into juvenile prisons, they graduate from their gang. Some join right-wing groups to drive around Tokyo in dark colored trucks decorated with a gigantic chrysanthemum – the emperor's insignia – replaying the right-wing rhetoric of patriotic, anti-American, pro-emperor slogans. Their appearance – Yankee – does not match their rhetoric – Yamato-damashi, or Japanese spirit, anti-American.

So it is with Japanese literature. Western readers, reading what seems, at a first glance, to be a novel or short story, may find themselves disappointed because they do not find the familiar formula of storytelling. The American reading audience as well as graduates of creative writing programs are taught that a novel or short story must contain plot, characters, sympathy toward the characters, climax, all of that. In the tradition of Japanese novels, starting with Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji to 20th century masters such as Kawabata Yasunari and Tanizaki Junichiro, nothing seems to happen to the main characters (see the famous last line of Tanizaki Junichiro’s The Makioka Sisters, where the main character, Yukiko, is suffering from diarrhea), or, if something does happen, it is so subtle, so slight, that there is no sense of a climax as in Western writing. Most of the memorable characters are unlikable (Niki Jumpei, the bug/desert aficionado in Abe Kobo’s The Woman in the Dunes; the cat-killing “I” in Amanuma Haruki; the god-hating Amakusa Shiro in Takemoto Novala’s A Child Abandoned by Deus; and most importantly, womanizing, pedophile, Oedipally complexed Prince Genji in Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji). But what marks Japanese literature as different from its Western counterpart, is that it demands the sense of being – not doing – from the readers. It insists on praising shadows, not light, as Tanizaki said; it insists on exploring the psyche of the dark, of sitting still to enjoy the fireflies, or gazing at the moon, as the Makioka sisters do in Tanizaki’s novel. Nothing happens on the surface, but there is an internal landscape that may or may not shift. These novels are not about doing, about things moving chronologically, but they perhaps faithfully portray a life lived – living, after all, is organic, fragmented in memory, unresolved, most of the time about being, where nothing seems to happen and we are living a waiting life.

Translating the work of living Japanese writers poses problems. First, the dialogue with the living must start, and while the work itself might be interesting, it is, after all, a work in progress for the writer, who will work in new things. This is the case of Hirano Keiichiro (1975 - ), already a recipient of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize at age 23; he has little less than ten years of work behind him. Two stories translated for this issue are from his latest collection of short stories, Anata ga Inakatta Anata (You, of the Absent You) (2007). To him, literature is a vehicle that challenges the reader’s concept of the world as well as language. While he resists the words “literary” and “experimental,” each book he has written so far betrays the reader’s expectation of him. He is shifting – his earlier work obsessively explored death, but now that he is in his thirties, he is interested in the idea of life. Secondly, a problem arises from Western expectations of Japanese literature. Hirano says, “In the academic world of Japanese literature, they still love Mishima and Tanizaki. But commercial translators and students are interested in Murakami Haruki. And then, there’s the Japonisme movement dominated by Anime and manga. They read Murakami as a middle ground… in Europe, Japanese books that have been translated are uneven… only few of Mori Ogai or Natsume Soseki’s work have been translated into German, but they love Ogawa Yoko. As to contemporary writers, the work, because it deals with Japan and its culture, tends to be incomprehensible when it is translated. They lose the meaning of their intent, as well as the codes they operate in” What is being published today in America and Europe as translated Japanese literature is nearly a decade old in Japan. Kirino Natsuo’s (1951 - ) Grotesque, first published in 2003, was published in English in 2007. She says that though she started out writing crime fiction and is marketed as such in the U.S., she is beyond that now. Translated works of Mishima Yukio, Kawabata Yasunari, the writers that most Western readers think of as the modern Japanese writers, read archaically, their language stuck in the language of the time when they were first translated. But that is the expectation of Western readers; contemporary Japanese writers, if deemed translatable as well as marketable, must follow that path. The third major problem in translating contemporary Japanese literature is the fundamental issue of translation itself. Can we translate culture and its nuances without sounding like a scholarly translator? Amanuma Haruki (1953 - ), himself a German translator as well as novelist, understands that translation is a difficult act. For example, the setting of Water Cat is the time right before the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. This time period for a Japanese reader connotes a time of economic expansion, a time when the war-torn nation (albeit 20 years after World War II) showed to the world that it was ready to step into the global arena. However, this time is also marked with a sense of nostalgia, when a father worked hard to provide refrigerator, house, and car, three dream items, to his family; when children were allowed to be children without fearing pollution, molestation, cram schools, and capitalism. “Will Americans understand that?” he asked me worriedly in the interview. “Will Americans understand the cruelty of children, since they believe that children are innocent and happy? Do you think it’s cultural that we understand children can be cruel precisely because they are innocent?” I thought about Kirino Natsuo’s American version of Grotesque, and how she had to change the ending because it did not satisfy – or convince – the Knopf editor or her translator; I thought the Japanese ending was bleak, yes, but conclusive. I did not know the answer to Amanuma’s question; I still do not. 21 year old Gonza (baptismal name Damien Pmorchev), the writer of the first lexicon of 12,000 Russian-Japanese words (1738), brought to the making of dictionary not just a 21-year old understanding of the world (a decade of it spent in Russia), but also the regional dialect of southern Japan, nearly incomprehensible even in contemporary Japan. He translated brothel as “a place where you do bad things” and “virgin” as “someone who is not married,” and God as “Buddha”. But when he translated “translation” as “moving word to another,” I think he understood that each word contains the universe of a certain culture, and sometimes, words are not linearly compatible because the cultural codes behind these words are irreconcilable.

I am sitting in the studio – at the top of a former granary now converted into studios for visual artists - in Umbertide, Italy, as I write this. We are eight artists drawn together for six weeks, conversing in three different languages – Italian, English, and Japanese – though English is the primary language amongst us. It is a tower of Babel, not because we are striving toward heaven, but because all of us yearn to communicate, to understand. The desire to understand each other spreads into something as mundane as the ingredient of a mysterious fish at a dinner. First, the Italian chef brought out a tray full of fried white fish, and rapid Italian ensued between her and an artist. The artist turned toward us, “Animal… in sea. Four legs…. Jumps,” she said in English as she gestured, with her hand, something hopping. “Shrimp?” someone offered a noun. No, no, jumps. “Lobster?” someone else offered. The fish in our mouths transformed into lobster. “Toad,” someone else offers, confidently, and the artist nods. There is a sudden discomfort but we kept eating. “Frogs legs are very good,” “a toad… hmmm,” we murmured but some of the forks had slowed down. The taste once again metamorphosized into the unimaginable, a taste like no other, because there was no reference point. We settled for toads until the chef came out again and someone asked tentatively, not accusingly. She laughed, “No, no, it’s fish, flat, white, I don’t know how to say in English. Swims,” she gestured with her hand nearly touching the table, imitating something swimming, “low, at the bottom.” A sole? Yes. That’s what we agreed on, until the next day, one artist looked up the word in a dictionary and sent us a link: a monkfish. Despite our separateness – God has separated us by language and race – we want to be universal, global, share the human experience. We know that we are constrained by our languages, cultures, but we yearn to communicate, to find a common language, to understand that despite the differences, we are alike. The human condition is constantly at war with universality. We want – we yearn – for connectedness against the knowledge of our limits imposed by language, gender, religion, culture, class mentality. Our prejudices, likes and dislikes, have been molded; our understanding of literature and language has been limited by our upbringing, no matter how we try to deny that aspect of ourselves.

An act of translation is an attempt to go back to the time before the construction of the Tower of Babel. It is a collective effort between translator and writers, both dead and alive, and readers. It is an attempt to understand, to communicate, a yearning despite the limits, an act that defies the wrath and the curse god brought down for humanity’s insolence.