In Translation

I have just finished reading The Nakano Thrift Shop, the second Japanese novel I have read in recent months, the other one being Convenience Store Woman  # 134 on my 2018 book list. Both were written by women, Hiromi Kawakami (Nakano) and Sayaka Murata (Convenience Store), and both feature a female protagonist.

Finishing the second one brought back memories of a long ago class I took my first year at the University of Chicago: Modern Japanese Novels in Translation. 

The class was taught by Eric J. Gangloff, then a young professor in the Foreign Languages Department. I had spectacularly failed in Japanese I, also taught by him, and he had kindly advised me to withdraw from the course rather than take an F on my transcript. His words, to the best I can remember some 44 years later, were "Japanese is a very difficult language for graduate linguistic students, so don't take it as a sign of failure that you can't grasp it as a freshman." 

[For those who are wondering why Japanese?, the answer is I had a Japanese aunt (a post-World War II bride) and,  even more important, I loved and had read many times the 1961 novel Miss Happiness and Miss Flower by Rumer Godden. What more did I need?]  

By the spring of that freshman year, I was ready to try an elective and Modern Japanese Novels in Translation was what I wanted. We started with Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki, a 1914 novel, and read forward into the mid-century, ending with Mishima and Kawabata.  

Gangloff had a penchant for the works of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, an author he felt was cheated out of the Nobel Prize for literature because the Nobel Committee was reluctant to honor a Japanese writer after world War II. The class assignment was The Makioka Sisters; under the influence of Gangloff's strong recommendations, I went on to read more of Tanizaki's translated novels and for a long time, owned a small collection of them.

We read Thousand Cranes and either Snow Country or The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata, who became the first Japanese Laureate in Literature. To this day I cannot remember the novels or anything about Kawabata's writing, other than it wasn't Tanizaki.

Back in that era (the 1970s), Edward Seidensticker was the translator of Japanese novels to English. I believe almost everything we touched in class was translated by him; certainly the Mishima, Kawabata, and Tanizaki were. Both of the modern novels I read were translated by women: Allison Markham Powell and Ginny Tapley Takemori. 

I still owned a battered copy of The Makioka Sisters, Tanizaki's brilliant and heartbreaking portrait of pre-war Japan (written post-war) and a way of life that was rapidly disappearing even before the horrors of Japan's wartime actions. I like to think he would have enjoyed the two novels I talk about here; certainly he would enjoy their blunt, direct writing. 

That class turned out to the the sole A I would earn that first year at Chicago. Perhaps more than any other class (with the exception of Rocks and Stars, Katrina!), it is the one that I have carried forward all these years. And, in a goofy alignment of stars, Warren was taking a similar class at Ohio State at about the same time. I asked him as I worked on this what he remembers about the class: some Mishima, The Woman in the Dunes, and "not much else." 

It's enough.