Posts Tagged ‘Japanese literature’
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 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 MoreLemon
An impenetrable curse lay heavy on my heart. Call it an uneasiness, call it ill humors—like a hangover after drinking, you drink every day and there comes a time when it all might as well be a hangover. Well, that time had come.
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 MoreThe Lists of a Lady-in-Waiting
A thousand years ago a lady-in-waiting in the imperial court at Heian Kyo (modern-day Kyoto) dipped her brush into the well of her inkstone and watched the bristles swell with ink. She lowered the brush onto the paper spread in front of her and moved her hand rapidly…
Read MoreFreedom Within Bounds: A Conversation with Donald Richie
Unlike many writers on Japan, Donald Richie advances no social theories. By portraying Japanese as individuals, and by doing so with insight and often with sympathy, Richie gives the lie to conventional notions of uniformity.
Read MoreA Swarm of Japanese Flies
…Flies, like crows, are generally not very well-liked. They are diurnal, but associated with the night and darkness; they are spawned in the heady days of summer but are attracted to the stench of decay…
Read MoreOn Genji Monogatari: A Conversation with Setouchi Jakucho
“I started translating The Tale of Genji after turning seventy, though I had well prepared to start for many years by then…”
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