Memorandum

GRANTA

04 JUNE 2014 | INTERVIEWS | FRAN BIGMAN, MOTOYUKI SHIBATA

Interview: Motoyuki Shibata

Although he’d just flown in from a trip to Toronto, San Francisco and New York City to launch the English translation of the third issue of his literary journal, Monkey Business, Professor Motoyuki Shibata was kind enough to sit down with me in his office at the University of Tokyo last September for a chat about Western writing on Japan as well as Japanese literature today. Below is a transcript of our conversation.

Fran Bigman: So many American and British novels seem obsessed with imagining Japan, from Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle to David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I’ve read some arguments that these Western depictions of Japan follow a chrysanthemum-and-sword pattern, meaning that they cycle between romantic images of a feminized Japan and images of a masculine, aggressive, devious nation that provokes anxiety in the West. I’m interested in how these depictions have changed from the years of ‘Japan Panic’ – the period from the early 1980s until around 1995 when the West made a lot of noise about how Japan was going to take over the world – to the post-bubble world of today.

Motoyuki Shibata: I translated Richard Powers’s first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, a book that came out in 1985. My translation came out in 2000 and I talked to the author, Richard, about it, and the book hasn’t really dated except for one thing. In that book, Japan is depicted as a menace, economically. ‘America in the ’80s produced ten lawyers for every engineer . . . Japan, on the other hand, produced ten engineers to each lawyer,’ so Japan is sort of taking over. I am a specialist in American fiction, so I can only think of American examples, but do you know Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II? There is a description of Midtown Manhattan early on, and most neon signs have the names of Japanese companies.

FB: And in White Noise the main character’s daughter repeats the words ‘Toyota Celica’ in her sleep, and it’s quite menacing, so he seems to have a thing about that. I’m interested especially in literary depictions, because there seems to have been a lot of work written on pop culture, like Rising Sun and Back to the Future, that depicts Japan as a menace.

MS: So in popular fiction the depiction of Japan is simpler, you think?

FB: It’s more straightforward, or at least people might assume that the same blanket stereotypes that are presented in popular fiction might not apply to literary fiction, but it would be interesting to see how literary fiction reflects some of the same anxieties in a subtler way. I think that if you look at Ishiguro, for example, themes of suicide and reticence and other stereotypes of Japan are still really present in his work.

MS: That’s true. Even after he stopped writing about Japan, there were still possibly Japanese elements in his novels. These could also be seen as British elements. This idea that everyone is a butler and serves someone else at the top, that could be called a very Japanese idea too.

FB: It would be interesting to look at how British and American writers see Japan – if they see Japan differently.

MS: Certainly writers like Ishiguro couldn’t have appeared from the US. Well, maybe.

FB: The form of his works is so similar; no matter what the topic is, you have an unreliable narrator.

MS: False memory, too. I feel he’s moved on to new forms now, though.

FB: Even though the protagonist of Audrey Hepburn’s Neck, a 1996 novel by American novelist Alan Brown, is Japanese, and the story is set in Tokyo, the narrator refers to dorayaki, a common Japanese sweet, as ‘damp cake filled with red bean paste’. This sounds like the way a Westerner who doesn’t like dorayaki might describe it. In this case, translation creates distance between a Western author and the Japanese protagonist he is attempting to write. For you, when you translate, how do you manage elements that a Japanese reader might not know about? Some novels leave the foreign word and include an explanation – like ‘mochi, a rice powder cake’ – but those translations are often awkward. Also, Ruth Ozeki’s recent novel A Tale for the Time Being, which is supposed to be the diary of a Japanese girl, uses Japanese words normally, but then has footnotes to explain things to the Western reader.

MS: A writer like Junot Díaz uses Spanish words in his novel, and he doesn’t bother to explain them. And that seems to be one of his points, that this is told from a Dominican point of view. And that seems to work, more or less, even though American readers don’t get some of these words, they can mostly tell from the context. As a translator of American fiction, those kinds of problems I have are mostly quite mundane, words like ‘driveway’ . . . or ‘porch’; mostly about houses. And usually they are not that important, so not worth a footnote. Footnotes break up the rhythm, so you like to do without them as much as possible. But if it’s a crucial term or concept you’ll of course have to explain it in some way. I don’t encounter that difficulty all that often. Probably because I translate only fiction. Poetry might be something else.

FB: I was noting that in Monkey Business there are some footnotes to explain, for example, a kanji (Japanese character) being used in a slightly different way. Or as a kind of pun.

MS: Aha. Like in the tanka poems of Mina Ishikawa.* I think translators of Japanese literature into English would encounter these difficulties much more often. Like in Japanese fiction, you see a depiction of a room with six mats of tatami, or eight mats, or 4.5. In Japanese, 4.5 feels small, six is regular, eight slightly bigger, but that’s of course lost in translation. That kind of thing must occur quite often.

FB: I’m interested in Western writers creating Japanese characters, and the politics of that. Do you come across Japanese writers who make American characters their protagonists sometimes, or is that quite rare?

MS: I think that’s quite rare. I think in Japan, traditionally, Japanese have been learning from the West, so we have been looking up to the West. So the Westerners are the Other to be learned from and in that kind of context it’s very hard for a Japanese writer to create an American or British narrator.

FB: For a Western writer to put himself or herself in the position of a Western traveller in Japan makes a lot of sense, but there is something slightly uncomfortable for me about their Japanese characters. I guess I feel divided about it.

MS: When I read the David Mitchell book, his Nagasaki novel (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), I thought that the last hundred pages were excellent. I thought Mitchell did a really wonderful job. Usually if you’re Japanese, you feel kind of condescending towards Western writers trying to write from a Japanese point of view. And sometimes, they give themselves away. But in that novel, Mitchell is really thorough, and it reads like a wonderful English translation of a Japanese novel.

FB: I have a British friend, Laurence Williams, who’s a postdoc at the University of Tokyo, and he’s looking at British cross-cultural contact with Japan during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There’s this idea, of course, that Japan was so isolated before it ‘opened up’ to the West, or ‘was opened up’. But Laurence thinks that’s prevented scholars from looking at the relationships that did exist between Britain and Japan in this period. 2013 saw lots of events to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the first English ship to reach Japan, but even though the trade post established in 1613 closed just ten years later, Britons carried on buying Japanese goods, and even visiting the country from time to time. Writers carried on thinking about Japan, as a fellow ‘island nation’ on the far side of the world. Jonathan Swift describes Japan in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), of course: even Robinson Crusoe tries to reach Japan, in the sequel Daniel Defoe wrote to the first novel. So a more interesting thing for a novelist to do might be to look at the actual encounters that took place between the two nations, and show that Japan was not as closed off as people imagine.

MS: Do you know the novel The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn by Roger Pulvers? Roger is an interesting character. In fact, Roger is the reason I went to New York this time, because he received this translation prize and I was the judge. He received the award for his translations of the poet Kenji Miyazawa, and the collection is called Strong in the Rain and came out two or three years ago from the British publisher Bloodaxe. The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn was published by Kurodahan Press, a small publisher in Fukuoka, in the southern part of Japan. It’s written from the viewpoint of Lafcadio Hearn, who, as you know, came to Japan 150 years ago and collected Japanese folk tales and didn’t speak any Japanese but heard all the tales from his Japanese wife and left a wonderful collection of stories. He actually taught English here, in the English department of the University of Tokyo, so we have his photo on the fifth floor. And in Roger’s novel, Hearn is not really in love with Japan any more. He is disappointed by so many things like bureaucracy, arranged marriage and a lack of freedom, especially on the part of women. As the title suggests, he’s in Japan but he’s not really of Japan. He’s sort of looking at people and the country from a distance.

FB: Hearn also seems part of a pattern of romanticizing the past Japan. So everyone seems to do that when they come, from Aldous Huxley to Alex Kerr. I think it does create this pattern of a retreat from a Japan that is seen as the future into this idyllic past. But I also think it’s a way of containing the threat of Japan, if you accept the idea that some threat remains after the 80s. It’s a very narrow perspective to see everything contemporary as a betrayal of the past.

MS: This is a very broad question, but do you think Westerners in general still see Japan as a threat?

FB: It does seem, of course, that a lot of that fear has transferred to China. I heard an interview with a female Chinese astronaut on an American radio station recently and the interviewer asked her, ‘Should Americans feel threatened by the Chinese space program?’ But there are instances in the post-bubble years where Japan-bashing has come back, like when Japan was blamed for the 1997 economic crisis. Some American commentators even said that the decline of the 1990s was an elaborate deception and that Japan was actually doing fine. So I think even after the circumstances changed, people’s ways of thinking continued. I also think that even if Japan isn’t seen as a threat at this moment, there’s still a sense of distance, so Japan is still seen as somehow really very different, or even the most different. I was interested in a recent Roland Kelts piece in the New Yorker that suggested that Japanese and English are so far apart linguistically that translation is futile. I wonder what you think.

MS: That’s the kind of feeling you encounter at one point or another if you translate, and it’s certainly a viable starting point, but I’m sure Roland would have wanted to elaborate on it had he had more space.

FB: The article he wrote really focused on Murakami, and I know that in past interviews you’ve mentioned that the popularity of Murakami in the West represents a really good opportunity for Japanese literature in the West. I can understand, but I also wonder if it doesn’t narrow the kinds of narratives that get translated. There is this focus on Japan as a source of the surreal, you get horror films and anime and manga, and I wonder about other writers who don’t fit into that pattern.

MS: Haruki identifies with the Japanese baseball player Hideo Nomo, and the other Japanese baseball players who came after him, like Ichiro or Matsui, did a greater job, probably, as ballplayers. But Haruki respects Hideo because he created a path where there wasn’t any path for Japanese baseball players to play in the major leagues in the US. Haruki is a bit like that. It’s true that so many publishers are looking for the second Murakami, but, you know, the second Murakami doesn’t have to be exactly like Haruki. Even if this new Japanese writer is quite different from Haruki, simply because he or she is Japanese, maybe the American audience will be quite receptive, or at least there will be fewer barriers for him or her.
                                                               ・
                                                               ・
                                                               ・