IN TRANSLATION
A Familiar Environment | Translator Ginny Tapley Takemori
Murata Sayaka’s short novel, Convenience Store Woman, a thematically-propelled distillation of the author’s experience working in konbini, has achieved extraordinary success in English. Kyoto Journal speaks with the novel’s Ibaraki-based translator, Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Read MoreThe World in English
For Levy Hideo, the first Western author to write Japanese literature, the past speaks in tongues…
Read MoreA Familiar Environment
“Women authors in Japan are more or less par for winning the big prizes, and they’re publishing easily as much as men, but they’re not appearing in translation. There’s a movement to try and do something about it.”
Read MoreCloudburst by Fujisawa Shuhei
In the daytime, Kakichi worked as a knife sharpener. He made his Edo rounds carrying a box of grindstones and files — the tools of his trade — and he sharpened kitchen knives, sickles, and scissors. Occasionally he was asked to set the teeth of a saw, and he carried the files for that purpose. And when a promising house caught his eye in the course of his rounds, he’d pay that house another visit in the dead of night.
Read MoreWhile the beans are cooking
Grandmother was cooking kidney beans in a big pot. Sayo’s father had gone to Kitaura to buy groceries. Takara Hot Springs had no guests. The hot spring inn deep in the mountains was soaked in rain and silence.
Read MoreLast Light
In the late afternoon, while magic-hour light poured through the bay window opposite his desk, I watched the greatest translator of Japanese literature at work translating its most important modern novel, heretofore undiscovered by readers of English…
Read MoreTroopers’ Inn
The boy Hisashi was drawing a picture of horses. He was drawing three military mounts galloping together, seen from the side…
Read MoreFilmmaker and Activist Kamanaka Hitomi
Like other artists and activists before her who have unequivocally opposed nuclear technology in all its forms, Kamanaka Hitomi doesn’t regard her own ideology as a matter of present-day left and right.
Read MoreGrand Master
An was wandering about in an unsettling dream when he suddenly awoke. Right before awakening, he was being chased by a suspicious stranger who had sneakily followed and approached him.
Read MoreThe Unyielding
Okamoto began to write prose of lyrical and, at times, hyperbolic intensity, exploring modernist concepts of the artist and/or the individual in collision with society, spiritual alienation, and the moral, ethical, and political dilemma of the abandonment of tradition.
Read MoreBehind the Folding Screen of “Japan’s Modern Divide”
The history of Japanese photography underwent a significant change in the 1930s. The traditional pictorial-influenced movement merged into New Photography (Shinko Shashin)…
Read MoreThe Art of Translation
A number of years ago several of our Japanese-related journals carried an ongoing debate on the art or techniques of translating the prose literature of Japan. Some of these manifestos and arguments often degenerated into a subtle, or not so subtle, academic name-calling. But two distinct groups did emerge…
Read MoreNotes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin
Notes of a Crocodile is not a book that shows teenagers how to live a straight life, in any sense of the term. And yet it is intended to be a survival manual for teenagers, for a certain age when reading the right book can save your life…
Read MoreDoctor Stories: Excerpts from the journals of Kenjiro Setoue
Dr. Setoue was a successful surgeon who agreed to take a job at a clinic on a small rugged island off the west coast of Kyushu. For many years the only surgeon on the Lower Koshiki Island, he was the last and only line of defense when there was a medical emergency.
Read MoreThe Hojoki : Witness in a Torn World
The times are calamitous, and it is scarcely less frightening to look back than forward. A horrific earthquake turns the world upside-down.
Read MoreEmperor Meiji’s Clock Poem
When Emperor Meiji, 122nd Emperor of Japan, reigned from 1868 to 1912, Japan was beginning its modern explosion towards the modern world.
Read MoreThe Last of the Smokers
Sitting on the roof the National Diet Building, under attack by tear-gas fired from the Defence Force helicopters circling above, I am smoking my last cigarettes.
Read MoreRevealing the Invisible
The Hawaiian word ‘mãnoa’means “vast and deep,” and is a literal description of the lush green valley on O‘ahu that is home to a unique bi-annual publication of the same name…
Read MoreCrow Home
The sky seems to be a mix of dust and smoke, laced with an urban haze: something gray, something muddy, not blue at all. Maybe it had been blue once…
Read MorePoetry, Love, Enlightenment
Eight hundred years ago, in a northeastern town of the Persian kingdom, a boy was born. When he was twelve years old, he chanced to meet the great Sufi master and Persian poet Attar, who told the boy’s father: “The fiery words of this boy will kindle the souls of lovers all over the world.”
Read MoreThe Wrong Paradise
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize, is widely considered the greatest Bengali poet of all time. He is certainly one of the finest writers of the world in the past century….
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