Articles tagged "Japanese Literature"
Translator Relay: Stephen Snyder
Our "Translator Relay" series features a new interview each month. This month's translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. John Balcom passed the baton to Japanese…...
On Bugs and Buttons: Translating “Ladybirds’ Requiem”
It's not just the dearth of young girls in sailor uniforms with big eyes, tiny noses, and hair so long as to render actual movement nearly impossible that separates Akino Kondoh's work from that…...
Translation Roundup
READ Honors and Awards Congratulations to Sharon Olds, this year's winner of the UK's TS Eliot Prize, for her poetry collection Stag's Leap! Check out the International Prize for Arabic…...
The Real, the Familiar: An Introduction
Tokyo was unnervingly cool and pleasant early in July. The rainy season had only just begun, and yet, after a single, massive, unseasonal typhoon, there was no rain for at least a week. The peculiarity…...
That Morning, When It
Tokyo Metropolitan Highway No. 14 is less congested at 4 a.m. than it is during the day. And with fewer lights to get stuck behind at this hour, people tend to drive fast too. As I inhaled the smog-infected…...
From the Archives: Ghosts on the Bridge
As a transition between the two parts of our double issue of Japanese writing, you might want to revisit Michael Emmerich’s essay "Beyond Between: Translations, Ghosts, Metaphors," from our May 2009…...
The Decline and Fall of a Translator’s Brain
Just when you think you’ve figured out what is going on in the Toh Enjoe story “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire,” you trip on another oblique reference to some…...
The Reality of Dreams: An Introduction
A little more than a year has passed since a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck forty-two miles off the coast of northeastern Japan, raising a tsunami that swelled as high as 131 feet in places and left nearly…...
The Hole in the Garden, Part III
“Hello?” There was no answer. I put the phone back down. I turned to go back to the kitchen and it rang again. I picked it up, wordlessly this time. Again nothing. As soon as I hung up it rang…...
The Hole in the Garden, Part II
The woman showed up exactly one month to the day after the pigʼs arrival. I had just finished cleaning the house and was thinking about feeding the pig before I started waxing the floors when the…...
Japan, One Year Later
On March 11, 2011, Tokyo was rocked by a violent earthquake and tsunami that triggered an accident at a nuclear power plant. We mark the anniversary with poems by two Japanese writers, both translated…...
Do Not Tremble
It trembles It is trembling again today I did not know that the earth Is an unruly cradle A cruel cradle that lets Neither adult nor child sleep It is March, it is spring It should be a gentle…...
The Hole in the Garden, Part I
I stared up at the moon, large and round in the sky, clenching a fistful of pebbles. I donʼt know what time it was. I suppose it must have been around midnight. Just beyond the cinder-block wall all…...
The Navidad Incident: The Downfall of Matías Guili
The Navidad Incident takes place in the fictional South Sea island republic of Navidad. The novel opens as a delegation of Japanese war veterans pays an official visit to the ex-World War II colony, only…...
Shigeru Mizuki’s “Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths”
The Japanese story form known as manga—with its extended plotlines and distinct pictorial style—falls somewhere between graphic novel and comic book. Widely read in Japan, where it is a $4…...
I am I
I know who I am Now I am here I might disappear at any moment But even if I do I am still I The truth is that not being I would be fine too I am to some extent a blade of grass Perhaps to some extent a…...
Director’s Notes on “Sway”
I based my first film on a dream. A dream also inspired my second film, made three years later. Through a gloomy thicket in the shadows of a tree bathed in white light, I witnessed a scene still clearly…...
The Last Picture Show
I’d just come up to Tokyo from a Kyushu port town that had a U.S. military base and was living with some friends in a crummy little apartment in a wooden building north of Inokashira Park. These…...
Narcissus
I read “On the Conduct of Lord Tadanao” when I was thirteen or fourteen, and though I’ve not had an opportunity to reread it since, I still remember the plot some twenty years later.…...
The Kiso Wayfarer
You know, Karuizawa at the time was a veritable ghost town. It was autumn of Meiji 24 (1891), and the area appeared to be at the height of decline. At any rate, the once thriving post town on the Nakasendo…...
Walking the Keihin Factory Belt with Stuart Dybek
As usual, the boy missed the fly ball that anyone else would have caught with his eyes closed, and it rolled into a thicket of reeds by the river. The audible sighs of the other kids were like knives…...
From The Stories of Ibis
Called Ai no Monogatari (AI's Story) in Japanese, Hiroshi Yamamoto's The Stories of Ibis is a grand tour of science fiction and an excellent example of how science fiction as a genre is collectively…...
Introduction
Over the past several decades, a steady stream of fascinating writers from Japan have appeared in English, including two Nobel prize winners, Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe, as well as the now wildly…...
from “Sentimental Education”
The woman gave birth to a baby girl at the maternity hospital and then disappeared the very same day. Located not far from downtown Isezaki-cho, the maternity hospital was well known as a place where many…...
from “Manazuru”
I walked on, and something followed. Enough distance still lay between us that I couldn't tell if it was male or female. It made no difference, I ignored it, kept walking. I had set out before noon…...
- Keywords
- poetry
- from 2000 to present
- europe
- death
- spanish
- war
- translation
- family
- writing
- sex
- love
- childhood
- marriage
- memory
- chinese literature
- language
- asia
- immigration
- travel
- literature
- middle east
- nature
- americas
- china
- french
- communism
- mexico
- arabic
- animals
- families
- africa
- spain
- poland
- russian literature
- polish
- polish literature
- cities
- spanish literature
- loss
- german literature
- mexican literature
- italian literature
- murder
- the end of things
- israel
- poverty
- japan
- villages
- italy
- paris
- france
- aging
- relationships
- from 1950 to 2000
- dutch
- iraqi literature
- irony
- exile
- romanian literature
- netherlands
- work
- french literature
- islam
- music
- egypt
- money
- japanese literature
- graphic literature
- friendship
- iraq
- argentina
- chinese
- turkish literature
- politics
- germany
- korean literature
- argentinian literature
- forum thread
- israeli literature
- violence
- meaning
- wisdom
- crime
- greek literature
- russia
- catalan literature
- review
- tranquillity
- brazilian literature
- lies
Sections
