Hiroko Oyamada is a master of the uncanny. Though she made her English-language debut in only 2019, her surreal atmospheres and psychological insight has gained significant traction and acclaim, and we were delighted to introduce her third and latest work, the collection Weasels in the Attic, as our book club selection for the month of November. In the interconnected series of three narratives, Oyamada explores parenthood, fertility, and the demarcation between human and animal worlds with signature precision and intrigue, rendered into a graceful English by her long-time translator, David Boyd. In the following interview, we speak to Boyd on his relationship with Oyamada’s works, the challenge of idioms, and his approach to her singular style.
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Laurel Taylor (LT): David, this is technically the third title from Oyamada you’ve translated into English, but the stories in this volume originally appeared separately—did you translate them all in one go?
David Boyd (DB): No, definitely not. In Japanese, the stories in Weasels in the Attic can be found in the book versions of The Factory (Kōjō) and The Hole (Ana). They were written around the same time as those novellas — between 2012 and 2014, I think. In 2019, when we published The Factory in English, Oyamada came out to New York and Boston to support the book. At that point, I was already working on The Hole, and New Directions wanted to know what was going to come next. When we talked to Oyamada, she told us that she’d always considered these three stories—“Death in the Family,” “Last of the Weasels,” and “Yukiko”—to be a trilogy. It was never printed as a single book in Japan, but that doesn’t mean Oyamada didn’t view it in that way. Anyway, that was where we got the idea to collect the stories into a single volume: from Oyamada herself.
LT: That’s fascinating to hear, because I was very curious about whether these stories were originally meant to go together.
DB: Absolutely. Oyamada wrote them that way. In my mind, too, they form a single novella, just like her other two books, even if there’s no single volume in Japanese that contains all three. Novellas in Japan are usually published with accompanying shorter stories, and that’s how “Death in the Family” ended up as part of The Factory and “Last of the Weasels” and “Yukiko” ended up as part of The Hole.
I translated them in the order that they were published in Japan—“Death in the Family” right after working on The Factory. That had to be around 2018, or maybe early 2019. It was kind of refreshing, because “Death in the Family” feels nothing like The Factory. Then, after I translated The Hole in the summer of 2019, I came back to Saiki and the others, working on “Last of the Weasels” then “Yukiko” back-to-back. I didn’t mean to do it that way, but it worked out well to have some space between the first story and the other two. A fair amount of time passes in the narrator’s world; he’s older in “Last of the Weasels,” and even older in “Yukiko.” That being the case, I didn’t go back to make sure that they sounded identical. I didn’t feel like there was any need.
LT: Did you find yourself revisiting earlier translations of Oyamada for things like tone and voice?
DB: No, and there was a good reason for that. These stories are Oyamada’s, to be sure, but they belong in a different universe. On the page, Oyamada’s fiction often looks like a wall of text: paragraphs that can go on for five pages or so, maybe more. Take The Factory, for example. That was Oyamada’s debut work. It’s full of long paragraphs and it also has multiple narrators—three people working at the same factory. The long paragraphs are there to help the reader lose track of who’s narrating, which is to say the blocked structure served a very clear purpose in that story. The Hole wasn’t quite as dense as The Factory, at least as I remember it, but it still had a lot of long paragraphs. Stylistically speaking, those novellas have quite a bit in common. Then there’s Weasels. I can think of a section or two in which Oyamada returns to the wall of text that we saw in her other books, but those moments are rare. For example, there’s a dream sequence of sorts near the end of “Yukiko,” the final story in the series, in which Oyamada turns to long paragraphs as a way to shift gears. In other words, Weasels has a fundamentally different feel to it. I’m not just talking about paragraph length, by the way. It works on other levels, too. That being the case, I felt it was important to forget about what I’d done in the other books. I didn’t want to rely on those choices when working on Weasels. I wanted to start over—to a degree.
When I’m working on Oyamada’s books, she and I don’t talk very much. She’s very supportive and gives me a lot of room to do what I want. That said, when we decided to move ahead with Weasels, she suggested something that deeply influenced my approach: that this book’s tone was more modern than contemporary. This idea played a part in a lot of the choices I ended up making, especially with the titles of the individual stories, none of which could be directly translated with much success.
For example, in Japanese, the third story is called “Yuki no yado.” I’ve seen it translated online as something like “A Place to Stay in the Snow,” but that really doesn’t work for me. Snow is a big part of story, but so is the fact that yuki has multiple meanings—not just “snow.” The baby in the story is named Yukiko, and we’re explicitly told that the yuki in her name means something other than snow, which the narrator’s wife has some difficulty accepting. At any rate, “Yuki no yado” doesn’t commit to one specific meaning for yuki, and I wanted to keep that going in the English. Also, in terms of sounding “more modern than contemporary,” calling the story “Yukiko” felt like a throwback to an earlier period of Japanese-English translation, when for example Anthony Chambers’ translation of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s Chijin no ai (literally “A Fool’s Love”) was published as Naomi. Well before that, Sakae Shioya and E.F. Edgett did the same with their 1905 translation of Roka Tokutomi’s Hototogisu (literally “The Cuckoo”), which was published as Nami-ko, named after the character at the heart of the novel.
Throughout Weasels, I tried to work in all kinds of elements that, to me, could be traced back to Edward Seidensticker’s time. The book is of course set in the twenty-first century, but as a lifelong fan of Japanese literature in English translation, I saw this as an opportunity to pay homage to some of the giants.
In addition to the story titles, we had to come up with a title for the entire collection. Since these stories had never been collected in a single volume, the trilogy didn’t have an “original title.” Oyamada, the publisher, and I discussed options over email. As we went over different ideas, it was once again clear that Oyamada viewed this as a different kind of book from The Factory and The Hole. That being the case, she wanted a different kind of title—not The X, as we’d done with the others.
Sorry, it took a while to get there, but, in response to your question, I didn’t go back to Oyamada’s earlier novellas when working on the book, and I felt like I had the author’s permission—maybe even encouragement—to stay away from them. I did, however, spend some time going back to other people’s translations, which was something I really enjoyed.
LT: I think one of the things that left an impression on me, especially upon rereads, was how carefully Oyamada maintains tension throughout the book. Can you talk a little bit about maintaining that kind of tension as you’re translating, and how you keep that energy bubbling?
DB: Maybe this isn’t really a direct answer to your question, but I listen to the same song. Whenever I’m translating, I need music. Sometimes I’ll listen to the same song over and over; it helps me keep track of things, or keep the same energy. As you know, translators are rarely working on a single author or a single work at a time, so music helps a lot. It can help you remember where you’ve left something. For Weasels, I went with a song that kept the tension all the way through, with no resolution offered: “Baby’s On Fire” by Brian Eno. Eno is best known for his contribution to ambient music, but this song, from his 1973 album Here Come the Warm Jets, is pure rock. That said, it doesn’t develop like a typical rock song. It’s five or six minutes long, with something like eight verses and no chorus. It’s also nothing if not constantly intense. That was the perfect match for the energy in Weasels, at least in my mind.
LT: I can’t imagine translating with lyrics in the background.
DB: That makes sense. I’ve talked to a lot of translators about their listening habits, and I think you’re in the majority here. Most translators want to stay away from songs with lyrics. For me, it’s more or less a necessity. I want the lyrics to influence my diction. That’s why I need to be careful when choosing a song or an album to work to. It has to have the right energy or it’ll end up getting in the way.
LT: Does that have an impact on the way you translate idioms? Do you have a process or a go-to method for that?
DB: I’d say the impact is minimal, actually. I don’t typically translate the idioms when working on everything else. Larger things tend to get set aside, then revisited at a later point. That being the case, I don’t think they’re that affected by my music choices. For me, the best way to approach idioms is to live with them for a really long time. Most of the time, I’ll skip over them in my first draft, then plug them in much later. At some point, usually in the middle of the night, I’ll wake up with something that feels right.
LT: And what about culturally specific concepts, like the weasels in the middle story? Obviously the English-language folkloric image of a weasel is very different from the Japanese one. A weasel will trick you, but there’s nothing supernatural about that at all. I was curious about how you balance that difference without, for example, adding an entire paragraph about cultural background.
DB: Some translators prefer to explain that kind of thing, but I never felt like there was any need—not with the weasels, at least. Everything you need is already in there, in the atmosphere. If I slowed down to explain in the translation what goes unexplained in the source text, we’d never get anywhere. I guess I thought that would damage the tension you were talking about earlier. I’ve always felt like Oyamada has a way of saying a lot between words—in The Factory, in The Hole, and in Weasels, too—and I wanted to make sure that what she was doing came across. In other words, lengthy explanations would endanger the mood or feeling of the work.
LT: Oyamada is from Hiroshima, and she still lives there, which is interesting in the Japanese literary context. So many authors move to Tokyo once they’ve broken into publishing. Do you have a sense from her writing that she values the outsider’s perspective by keeping herself away from the writing center?
DB: Hiroshima has clearly been an important place for Oyamada as a writer and a human being. You’re right that pretty much every other writer lives in Tokyo—at least that’s how it looks to me. I don’t know if Oyamada is or is not writing from an outsider’s perspective, but she definitely knows what she values, and she knows her own voice. She’s a writer who participates in the broader literary scene, but does it without compromising—on her own terms.
David Boyd is assistant professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. He has translated fiction by Mieko Kawakami, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, and Izumi Suzuki, among others. His translations of novellas by Hideo Furukawa (Slow Boat; Pushkin Press, 2017) and Hiroko Oyamada (The Hole; New Directions, 2020) have won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. In the last five years, he has translated eight children’s books, all of which are published by Enchanted Lion Books.
Laurel Taylor is a translator and Ph.D. candidate in Japanese and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her writing and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Monkey, the Asia Literary Review, Mentor & Muse, and more.
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