Of Dreams and Dames: Ted Goossen on Translating Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighborhood

What Westerners . . . call magical realism … [is] a way of normalizing that which doesn’t easily fit into our categories.

Last month, we were delighted to bring you award-winning author Hiromi Kawakami’s latest in translation. Like much of her writing, our August Book Club selection tackles the everyday with a deliciously fantastic twist. In this interview with assistant managing editor Lindsay Semel, the inimitable Ted Goossen gives us a fascinating glimpse into the Japanese canon and the author’s place within it. He also shares his aversion to labels like “magical realism” or “women’s writing”: there are as many forms of the real and the female as there are cultures, he suggests, and that’s quite a gift.

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Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve mentioned in interviews (mainly in connection to MONKEY, the magazine of Japanese literature you co-edit) that you strive to bring non-canonical Japanese writers to Anglophone readers. Do you think there’s a difference between the Japanese literary canon and the Western canon of Japanese literature in translation?

Ted Goossen (TG): That’s an excellent question, and of course there’s a difference. Regarding the Western reception of Japanese literature, one of the earliest works was The Tale of Genji: a 1,200-page, thousand-year-old novel written by a court lady, whose manuscript was initially hand-copied and circulated among her female peers. The first English translation, Arthur Waley’s, was published around 1920. At that time, Genji was highly exotic, even for the Japanese, because it was written in a way they couldn’t read. So Waley did us all a great service with his beautiful translation, and since then, there have been four or five more.

Other than that, Japanese literature didn’t really gain a Western audience until the 1960s; at that point, the US had made Japan—its enemy in World War II—an ally, and it had tried to resurrect its reputation. Because of the war, Americans thought of the Japanese as cruel and heartless, so the US needed to make them more “human,” render them more attractive. Not only was there an element of exoticism when it came to Japanese culture, then, but also a need to rehabilitate it. When Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in 1968, Japanese literature was prized for the kind of poetic, Zen-like quality present in his writing. Kenzaburō Ōe, who won the Nobel in 1994, distanced himself from that whole stream, and his literature is unlike any that preceded it; it did garner a Western audience, albeit a relatively small one. Now, of course, it’s Murakami. He dominates the West to such an extent that when we speak of “non-canonical,” it’s almost like we’re saying “non-Murakami.”

You’ve mentioned MONKEY, and the paradox there is that Murakami is one of our biggest supporters; he and my co-editor Motoyuki Shibata are very close, I know him as well, and Jay Rubin, a frequent collaborator, is one of his best translators. So ironically, we’re using the magazine to highlight the work of writers who aren’t Murakami, but we use Murakami to draw attention to it by publishing lots of interesting interviews, essays, and dialogues about or with him. Still, certain authors like Mieko or Hiromi Kawakami are getting lots of buzz in their own right, simply because they’re so good. There are others, too, so we’re seeing the rise of quite a few Japanese writers in the English-speaking literary world.

LS: Working off that, could you talk about Hiromi Kawakami in relationship to the dominant trends in Japanese modern literature? I’m referring to the trends that Murakami pioneers, but also those that came before—the Zen-like tradition, as you put it, or the ancient, more epic traditions. How has Kawakami evolved from them?

TG: When we speak of non-canonical, of course, we’re speaking in terms of the Western audience, as you made clear; but I suppose you could call Kawakami canonical in Japan. She’s sitting on the boards that decide on literary prizes, has been publishing steadily for about thirty years at least, has a large number of readers, etc. So she’s very well-established, and the fact that she was willing to publish this series of short stories with MONKEY has been a tremendous asset to us. (As an aside, I’ve had a chance to meet her and she’s a wonderful person, very humorous. I don’t know if she still does this, but when I knew her ten years ago, she was a great drinker; she could outdrink most men! She stands out in a crowd.)

Back to your question about how she fits into certain literary traditions, there’s a phrase you used in your review that I thought was excellent: “nonchalant magical realism.” I really loved that. In a way, realism itself is a suspect category; every society has its own form of it, and I think that what Westerners have tended to call magical realism (starting with One Hundred Years of Solitude) has been a way of normalizing that which doesn’t easily fit into our categories. Dreams, for example, are such an important part of our lives, and they’re real; when we wake up in the morning and go back over what we’ve dreamed, or share it with someone, or write it down, we’re describing our subjective reality. There’s a natural interpenetration of the two that is very much part of the Japanese literary tradition, and Kawakami certainly plays into that.

LS: On a related note, could you comment on the femininity of her voice, the way it engages with questions of gender? I found that striking, how it appeared in the first story and then evolved as she described her friends and her role within the community. I wonder if the feminine or perhaps even androgynous quality of her voice relates to these trends she’s evolved from.

TG: Well, if you want to genderize, I suppose you could say that the tradition I’ve just described is part of women’s literature . . . it certainly harks back to Genji, which, as I’ve mentioned, was written by a woman. But it’s not just that; all writers, in a sense, draw from the same pool, and women’s writing includes much more than this. While Western readers may see Japanese women in a particular light, it’s quite different from the light in which they see themselves. In that sense, feminism is a bit like realism, too: there’s a different kind within each culture.

At any rate, women in Japanese literature today probably do have a slight edge. There are more of them, and the readership is there; they write very comfortably within a well-established, highly successful venue. It used to be that you’d walk into a Japanese bookstore and they’d have one large shelf labeled “women’s writing.” You simply wouldn’t see that now, because there’s just so many of them. Besides, the clear distance between “male” and “female” writing that used to exist in the public’s mind is not nearly as prevalent now, and the male-dominated literary establishment is a shadow of its former self. People like Hiromi Kawakami or Yoko Ogawa, for instance, are the great writers of their generation; they’re maybe ten years younger than Murakami, but they’re crucial within the literary “establishment.” So women’s writing is mainstream at this point. If you want to narrow or classify it, you run into problems: it’s too protean, too large, too central.

LS: That’s fascinating, and it deserves a lot more attention . . . but I want to dive a little deeper into the text. Let’s talk about time: it tends to be expressed unspecifically. Sometimes this fluidity serves the theme of memory—the adult memory of childhood, in particular—and other times, it’s a tool in the repertoire of this “nonchalant magical realism” we’ve referred to. Did that question of time pose a challenge to you as a translator, and if so, how did you deal with it as it came up?

TG: I think I have to answer in two parts. The issue of time in general pertains not just to Japanese literature, but also to Japanese film and to many non-Western cultures in various ways (I’m thinking of the indigenous peoples of North America, for example). It’s such a tricky concept, and modernity has packaged and limited and boxed it; we’re all forced to accommodate time in a way that allows our modern systems to work efficiently. When it comes to literature, though, we’re operating in a somewhat different arena, and I think we take pleasure in being free from the dictates of modern, waking time. Kamakami certainly accomplishes that in this collection: if one tries to read it in a very narrow, linear way, it’ll be frustrating. We tried to rearrange the stories a little bit for the comfort of the English-speaking reader, but we didn’t want to do too much of that. Besides, there are more stories on the way; she’s still writing them, and I’ve just translated two new ones for MONKEY. I hope she never stops, because I love translating them!

As for the second part of your question, whether I found the issue of time challenging as a translator, absolutely not. Kawakami writes in a very accessible way. I’ve been reading her for a long time, and I’ve been translating these stories since the very first issue of MONKEY (then called Monkey Business) came out ten years ago. Every year, I get to translate at least two or three new stories, and it’s become incredibly pleasurable. I’m sure that when she sits down to write a new one, she is able to reenter that world completely; one doesn’t sense any break. Usually, if a writer works on something over a long period of time, one does notice that their writing changes, their surroundings change, their style changes. Not with these stories: Kawakami just magically reinhabits that world, and as a translator, I get to walk through the door and right into it as well. Nothing could be more fun than that.

LS: You’ve already started to touch on this, but I’m curious and would love to go deeper. As you’ve said, some of the stories (and later, their translations) were published separately in MONKEY over a long period of time. Then came a collection of them in Japanese, and finally this English version—which, if I understood correctly, isn’t exactly analogous; some stories are different. So how did you curate it, and do you think that it’s meant to add up to more than the sum of its parts? I mean, is there a cohesiveness, a takeaway from the collection as a whole, rather than just each individual story?

TG: There are two separate issues here. One is cohesiveness, and I think the stories do cohere; everyone who’s read them has had that feeling. But the other issue is, going back to this linear principle, that they clearly don’t fit into a nice, Aristotelian “rise-to-a-climax” model. On the contrary, they could be rearranged in many ways. In fact, the arrangement may not be the main point: they don’t follow chronologically, they jump around like little Kanae and her sister—there is, again, a dreamlike quality that allows for that. The collection doesn’t follow our expectations, the kind of structural principle that we’re most familiar with, so we have to give ourselves up to the “waves” as we go up and down.

LS: So what was your favorite story to translate, and why? You can pick more than one, of course, and for different reasons. I just want to know what you love about them, about translating them.

TG: I’ve actually never thought about that. Let’s see . . . Everyone mentions “Pigeonitis” because it’s connected to the pandemic, seeing as it deals with a highly contagious disease. But of course, Kawakami wrote it and I translated it way before any of this happened. I like it mainly because of how it deals with the issue of memory: although it paints this very dramatic, humorous picture of the village (the community where pigeonitis is rampant), the fact that almost no one mentions it once it’s over is revealing of communal memory at large—how communities wish to remember and present themselves, and what they choose to forget.

LS: She does that a few times—for instance, with the rebellion that two of the kids start. They instigate a full-fledged revolution, and then it all just kind of evaporates; things go back to normal.

TG: Yes, exactly! And then I also like “Weightlessness,” because ever since I was a child, I’ve had dreams of being weightless. They are very joyful dreams, where I’m able to float and float all the way up to the top of the room . . . And then, of course, Kanae is such a wonderful character. She’s a brat, but she’s also a liberating force: the children in the story are being herded by their teacher, and she breaks away from that and drags the narrator—who’s more of a herd animal herself—along with her. So I guess I particularly like certain characters.

Kanae’s also the juvenile delinquent, who’s disparaged as she grows up (people badmouth her, gossips say she’s sleeping with boys, etc.), and then once she’s made it big in fashion and comes back from Paris, they’re all extremely proud of her having been part of the community. That’s also true of many communities in general, right? They carp and they exclude, but when someone who used to be reviled returns wreathed in flowers, they celebrate them; they think, “we must be something, because we produced this.” And of course they’ve produced it, because they alienated that person so totally that they had to reinvent themselves in a creative way. There’s a lot of that in the book, as wacky as things seem to get: a dispassionate, non-moralizing recognition of how neighborhoods actually work.

Theodore (Ted) Goossen teaches at York University in Toronto, Canada. He is the general editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories and co-editor (with Motoyuki Shibata) of Monkey: New Writing from Japan, formerly Monkey Business. He has translated numerous works by Haruki Murakami, Naoya Shiga and Hiromi Kawakami, among others.

Lindsay Semel is an assistant editor for Asymptote. She daylights as a farmer in North-Western Galicia and moonlights as a freelance writer and editor. 

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