Interesting Author Spotlight: 円城塔 (Enjoe Toh)

I came across this author by chance. I was looking through the Shinchou literary magazine's Twitter feed and noticed it mentioning a book that I thought had a very interesting title:

「これはペンです」
"This is a Pen"

I'm not going to lie—I'm a sucker for titles. The description on Amazon is interesting though:

"Uncle is a letter. Literally. A man who invented an automatic sentence generator and his brother who has vivid memories of a town that doesn't exist. A tale of twins that illuminates the origins of reading and writing."

Definitely sounds like something I would want to read. I did a little more research, and found out that "This is a Pen" was a finalist in the Akutagawa Prize earlier this year.

Then shit got real! In a strange instance of serendipity/coincidence/it's-a-small-world-after-all-ism, I actually own two pieces by Enjoe Toh. In the January 2011 issue of Bungakukai, he has a short story called "Magnitude," and he has a story (novella, perhaps, it's very long) in the Best Sci-Fi of 2007 collection "Imaginary Engines," the same collection that contained the 2010 Kurodahan Translation Prize piece "忠告."

Anyway, he sounds like an interesting author. He graduated from Tohoku University studying physics, and then went to Tokyo University for graduate school. Wikipedia doesn't specify him as anything besides a novelist, but he definitely seems to have a sci-fi bent. For instance, another short story title: "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire."

He's had other pieces nominated for the Akutagawa, but he has yet to win it. However he has won the Noma Literary Prize and the Bungakukai New Writer's Prize, and has been nominated for the Gunzo New Writer's Prize and the Yukio Mishima Prize. 

I started reading "Magnitude," but it's...confusing. I'm not even sure I can explain it. It starts by explaining some sort of weird number theory. Here's a very short, probably poor translation of the very beginning:


"9


In twenty years, we learn the world approaches ten.


Now is still nine. They say a hundred years ago was eight. China and India, nine. The entire planet, nine. Only Japan is eight. Next, they say, decline will begin, and in time, it might be seven. It was seven a hundred years ago.

I am 0..."

It goes on to explain a very strange theory about zero and it's relationship to other numbers, and how zero is also known as, you guessed it, "magnitude."

I...don't even know. I plan on spending some more time fighting my way through this story, but I'm not sure what I'm going to get out of it. "Palimpsest" is quite long, but since I have it, I might as well take a look.

If you want to try reading some Enjoe Toh for yourself, he has a serialized Twitter novel at the username @EnJoe140, separate from his own Twitter account @EnJoeToh. I think it's all done; it hasn't been updated since September 17th.

You can also pick up Kurodahan Press's Speculative Japan 2, which has a translation of Enjoe's story "Freud" (haven't read it, but of course, now I want to).  

Enjoe Toh might be a name to look out for in the future.

September 2011 Japan Book News

Fall has (basically) arrived and with the changing of the seasons comes a new issue of Japan Book News.

If you don't know, Japan Book News is published quarterly by the Japan Foundation. It's full of articles and news about the current Japanese literary culture, as well as a list of notable new releases. It's a great resource for finding out what books are making a stir in the Japanese literary community.

Volume 69 is now up, but unfortunately, the link to downloading the full PDF of the issue is broken, so you can't read the news and articles just now. They do have links to the summaries of the new releases though, and they've highlighted a couple very interesting seeming books. Here's a look at what I'd be interested in getting my hands on:

(Unfortunately, they use Javascript to link to all their internal pages, so as much as I'd like to, I can't give you a direct link to everything they're talking about. You'll have to go the main page, and click your way through to the index for Volume 69 to see more information about these titles. All links are to Amazon Japan product listings.)

1)雪の練習生 ("The Apprentices of Snow," their translation not mine)
by Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada has a number of works out in English. I read The Bridegroom was a Dog a while back, but I just read the short story collection Where Europe Begins put out by New Directions, and now I've become a huge fan. Tawada is so surreal and inventive, and she can manipulate these qualities into something either extremely beautiful or extremely disturbing, sometimes practically instantaneously. She writes in both German and Japanese (Where Europe Begins was mostly her German work), but I'm assuming that she wrote this one in Japanese.

Anyway, it's about polar bears. Not just about polar bears, narrated by polar bears. And not just any polar bears. A polar bear trained for the circus who writes a memoir and becomes a famous writer, for one.

Writing from the point of view of a personified animal seems to be in vogue right now in Japan. Belka, Why Don't You Bark? by Hideo Furukawa follows dogs (I think it's narrated by the dogs but I'm not sure), and Kenshin by Rieko Kawakami is about a woman who is turned into a dog. Either way, interesting premise, great writer—I'd love to see this come out by New Directions, who has published a lot of Tawada in the past.

2) 生首　("Severed Heads")
by Henmi Yo

There's a pretty robust poetry scene in Japan, some of which gets across the Pacific Ocean. The Best Translated Book Award has always had at least one Japanese poet on their shortlist save their inaugural year. I'm not familiar with Henmi Yo really, but I don't think Japan Book News highlights a lot of poetry, and I do like the little excerpt they put in their description:

One evening in early autumn
Across the darkening blue of the western skies
I watched a severed head fly across the heavens.

Not a lot to go on, but worth checking out I think. 

3) 日本語ほど面白いものはない　(Nothing is as Fun as Japanese)
by Naoki Yanase

I can't imagine anything like this would EVER get published in English, but it sounds interesting to me all the same. It's based on a series of lectures given by Yanase to a sixth grade class on why Japanese is a cool language. The reason why it's interesting to me is Yanase himself, who did Japanese translations of Roald Dahl and Lewis Carrol, as well as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Finnegans fucking Wake! I would LOVE to learn more about this guy.

Hey, and maybe since it's written for sixth graders, it would be pretty easy to read, and it might make a good supplementary textbook for American high school or college students learning Japanese. Maybe there's a market for this book after all.

4)　日本の刺青と英国王室　("Japanese Tattoos and the British Royal Family")
by Noboru Koyama

Title sort of explains it all. About British Princes in the late 19th century that did some tourism and got some badass tattoos, and then more about the history of Japanese tattooing. I don't read a lot of history books, but this sounds pretty fascinating.

5)　文豪の食卓　(Great Writers at the Dinner Table)
by Tokuzo Miyamoto

OK, this one might appeal to me only. I love food, and I love to read about famous people talking about food. So from what I understand of the description of this book, it's part profiles of famous writers through their documented experiences with food and part exposé about regional Japanese food. It seems like it profiles a lot of French and American writers (though there must be something about Japanese writers). I love this kind of stuff, though I can't imagine it ever being published in translation.

6)近代日本奇想小説史：明治編　(A History of the Japanese Imaginative Novel: Meiji Era)
by Jun'ya Yokota

Another history book, but this one about science fiction, speculative fiction, and other genre fare of the Meiji Era. It's 1200 pages though—I'd never get through it. I'd rather read about the neat stuff No-sword digs up.


There's also a new book by Yuko Tsushima, who I was never a fan of, and a history of Japanese mystery novels, which they hilariously call "much-neglected," cause seriously, what is being translated in America besides mystery/crime/thrillers and Murakami?

Anyway, good selection of cool stuff. Check it out, especially you publishing types if you're out there—let's get some cool stuff translated into English!

1Q84, Murakami, and His English Translations

Greetings again. I've come back from the void that was the summer with some (hopefully) more regular posting.

So the big news in the Japanese literature world, of course, is Haruki Murakami's forthcoming English translation of 1Q84, coming out October 25th. And if you're impatient, there's all sorts of stuff out there to get a little amuse bouche before the 900-page smorgasbord arrives.

A few months ago The Millions had the first paragraph, but that was usurped just a few days ago by Murakami's Facebook page, which now has the entire first chapter for you to read (the only caveat being you have to first "Like" Haruki Murakami's page to gain access). There's also a nice standalone excerpt in the latest New Yorker called "Town of Cats."

If you're interested in reviews, you can see The Literary Saloon's extremely favorable review of the first two books (scroll down), Publisher's Weekly's starred review, The Japan Time's reviews for parts 1 and 2 and then 3, and even fellow bloggers How to Japonese's less than favorable reaction and subsequent review at Neojaponisme and Nihon Distraction's (the lucky sun of a gun who got an advanced review copy) take on book 1.

I haven't actually read any of these, because for some reason I've started feeling very spoiler-averse to the point where I don't really want to know any more about the plot than the little I already do. The only thing I know is pretty much everyone (with the lone, possibly lonely, exception of Daniel from How To Japonese) loves it.

There's also a book trailer, but it's pretty lame.

The English translation has been long-coming. The Germans for example have had a translation out for like a year now, and the French are beating us by a month or so. If you didn't know, the English translation is being done by two people: Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. Jay Rubin started on books 1 and 2 before it was clear that there was going to be a book 3 coming out, where they hired Gabriel to speed up the process and to facilitate a one gigantic volume release. (I speculated about the implications about this a long time ago at Three Percent. Almost two years ago actually: notice how they initially planned on publishing the translations in two separate volumes).

This is all a relatively long and pointless segue leading to something I found regarding Murakami and his thoughts on his English translations. In「そうだ、村上さんに聞いてみよう」("Hey Yeah, Let's Ask Murakami!"), the collection of Q&As Murakami hosted on his website where you could ask such pressing questions as "Do you like Nicolas Cage?", one reader asks about Murakami's feelings towards his English translations. Keep in mind that this is from 1997. Translation follows:

---
Pressing Question #46
Thoughts on Your English Translated Works?
At 12:46 AM 1997.08.09


I live in New York. Since I've been in Japan I've read almost all of your works. After I came here I tried reading them in English. Have you ever read your novels in English translation and thought anything like, "Hmm, that's not quite right"? There's a lot of problems with my English comprehension skills, so I feel pretty lucky I can read your novels in Japanese. (TV Director, 33 years old).



Hello. For me, translation is all-around approximation. And filling that ditch of approximation is a matter of love of devotion. If you have love and devotion, you can overcome just about everything. What I mean by this is that I trust my translators, and I think that's the most important thing. At least to a certain degree, of course.
As a rule, I don't reread what I've written, so even when I flip through the pages of the English translation, I completely forget what even the original was, so I skim through it going, "Hahaha, isn't that interesting?" I think that's better for my health. 

From 「そうだ、村上さんに聞いてみよう」と世間の人々が村上春樹にとりあえずぶっつける282の大疑問に果たして村上さんはちゃんと答えられるのか?, Asahi, 2000, p. 43.