I met Yūki Nagae in Tokyo in July 2018, as part of a contingent of international poets invited by Shiga University Professor and scholar Rina Kikuchi to participate in a translation workshop and a multilingual performance in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara. Each of us was randomly paired with a contemporary Japanese poet, and Yuki and I were fortuitously conjoined.
Since most of us international poets did not speak Japanese and knew neither the logographic kanji nor the syllabic kana, we spent the first part of our time together groping towards a holistic understanding of how poetics are embodied both visually and lexically, and what our partner poet's aesthetic might be. Luckily Yuki does speak English and had translated her poems into the simple phonetic foxtrot that then became clay for my shaping as we conversed. Some words had multiple meanings and allowed for ambiguity and the language was left-branching, accumulating connotation very differently than in English. Those differences notwithstanding, I found that her mind actually worked similarly to my own, employing metaphors from geology and chemistry alongside a formal and playful experimentation. Many of her poems show the incursion of civilization into the natural world and the melancholy of machines. I saw the urbanism of Frank O'Hara and tinges of Neruda in her work, echoes of where the Chilean poet needed a break from "stone and wool, institutions and gardens, commodities, eyeglasses, elevators."
What really helped me polish these translations was performing with Yuki at a launch event for the Tokyo Poetry Journal. She is an amazing performer who has developed an improvisational poetic style that she terms "Steric Poetry," and her work involves movement, intonation, and a responsive fusion of dance and utterance. Seeing the physicality of that work on stage helped me channel the final forms in English. Yuki's translations of my poems were published in one of Japan's most important contemporary poetry journals, Gendai-shi-techo, so I am very pleased that we are able to share two of her poems in English here.
- Ravi Shankar
Japan | Japanese | Travel Essay
April, 2019Toriko Wakasugi was a renowned journalist and fiction writer who wrote extensively on traveling alone in Japan as a woman. Though not directly mentioned, this account of her stay at active volcano Mount Asama was primarily to recuperate from ailing health caused by her imprisonment in Tokyo the year before for violating the security maintenance law (which sought to stamp out socialism, labor movements and unions, communism, anarchism, and essentially liberalism) by attending the wake of a socialist contemporary. By publishing the piece in the popular national newspaper Miyako Shimbun in late July of 1934, she managed to share via subtext her post-detainment suffering and refusal to cease reporting on socialist issues such as rural poverty in spite of the oppressive political climate of the time.
- Marissa Skeels
Takarai Kikaku was a Japanese haikai poet and among the most accomplished disciples of Matsuo Bashō. His father was an Edo doctor, but Kikaku chose to become a professional haikai poet rather than follow in his footsteps. Kikaku's poetry is known for its wit and its difficulty. Whereas Basho, especially in his later years, focused on the countryside and espoused an aesthetic of simplicity, Kikaku preferred the city and the opportunities it provided for extravagant play. He also preferred a more demanding form of poetry, one laced with wordplay, allusions, and juxtapositions of images that defy easy explanation. At the time of his death, he was perhaps the leading poet in Edo (today's Tokyo), which then had a population of around one million, making it perhaps the largest city in the world at the time.
- Joshua Gage
Jun Tsuji’s mother was born in Edo--old Tokyo--to the mistress of a daimyo advisor. His father, a one-time government official, came from an affluent farming family in Saitama. Tsuji grew up prosperously until the age of thirteen, by which time his father, prone to illness and bad business bets, and his mother, prone to lavishness, had squandered the family’s money. Tsuji thus ended his formal education, and began a lifelong course of self-study--reading broadly, taking night courses in English, working menial jobs, socializing and playing his flute on the streets of Asakusa, a neighborhood historically renowned both for its religious institutions and festivals, and for its entertainment offerings (revue shows, cinemas, theatres, bars, nightclubs, hostess clubs, and brothels).
Though perhaps most famous for his seminal influence in Japanese Dadaist circles, Jun Tsuji was, at different times in his life, infatuated with Christianity (during his stint in Sunday school as a boy) and, later in life, with German philosophy and Buddhism. In the early 1920s, just before the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, Tsuji encountered Dadaism and did much to popularize this European school of thought across Japanese intellectual and artistic circles, christening himself “Japan’s first Dadaist,” a title more fairly belonging to a group of publishers and writers, including, most crucially, the poet Shinkichi Takahashi (1901-1987), with whom Tsuji had a supportive relationship that soured over time due to Tsuji's zealous support for German philosopher Max Stirner’s egoist anarchist philosophy--which Takahashi dismissed--and to Takahashi’s gravitation away from Dadaism toward Zen Buddhism and a life of productive domesticity with his wife and two daughters. While hospitalized for alcohol-induced psychosis in the 1930s, Tsuji came to embrace his own brand of Buddhism, inspired by Shinran, founder of Jōdo Shinshū, a rival sect to Zen (now one of the most popular in Japan), which bears a degree of similarity to Christianity in its belief in a savior, grace, and a world beyond this life.
- Ryan C. K. Choi
Japan | Japanese | Novella (excerpt)
October, 2016Author Tatsuhiro Ōshiro—who once served as the director of the Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum—is best known for storytelling that has made Okinawan history and culture accessible to a wider audience. He is credited with reinvigorating the traditional narrative dance form known as kumi odori by exploring themes of cultural hybridity and gender. His masterpiece, The Ryūkyū Disposition: A Novel, relates the buried chapter of world history in which the Ryūkyū Kingdom (present-day Okinawa) was annexed by Japan during its 19th-century modernization campaign.
Ōshiro is no stranger to controversy when it comes to current affairs. The Cocktail Party—which broaches the subject of rape committed by U.S. servicemen—is one example of Ōshiro’s efforts to portray the complexities of life under occupation for the natives of Okinawa, which hosts more than 70 percent of the U.S. military bases in Japan and is the nation’s poorest prefecture. Such works attest to the sense of injustice and betrayal harbored by a cultural group that lost a third of its civilian population in World War II and underwent a forced linguistic shift to Japanese that has resulted in the Okinawan dialect being listed by UNESCO as an endangered language.
Published in 2011, the novella To Futenma takes its title from Air Station Futenma, a U.S. marine base located in Ginowan, a city with a population of just under 100,000. The base has been at the center of a deadlock for two decades: local opponents of the U.S. military presence have organized mass protests aimed at shutting it down, while Tokyo has pushed forward with a relocation plan that would move it to a different part of the island, bringing with it the same adverse effects—aircraft accidents, noise, pollution, crime. Told through the eyes of a young woman who practices the art of kumi odori, To Futenma reveals a family’s intergenerational struggle to preserve their indigenous culture amid turmoil.
- Bonnie Huie
Japan | Japanese | Short Fiction
November, 2014The famous opening line of "Under the Cherry Blossoms" is certain to cross a few minds every spring in Japan.
Widely considered one of Kajii's major works, the story was first published in December 1928. It appeared in the journal Poetry and Poetics (Shi to Shiron), which set out to introduce readers to contemporary modernist writings from the West through translations and critical discourse. The debut issue had carried an essay by Louis Aragon, and the magazine later went on to publish the work of Paul Valéry and André Gide. The second issue, which featured "Under the Cherry Blossoms," sought to explore the notion of a poetics beyond verse.
The early work "Lemon" (1925) illustrated a surrealist ethos arisen from the dingy back alleys of Kyoto, and it was in this internationalist context that "Under the Cherry Blossoms" was also conceived. Kajii, who began but never completed a degree in English literature at the top-ranked Tokyo Imperial University (what is today the University of Tokyo), is known to have read Baudelaire's Paris Spleen in an English translation. A portion of the text was found transcribed in his notebooks around the time when the story was written.
Among such literary coteries Kajii himself founded a journal called Blue Skies (Aozora) while the editors of Poetry and Poetics included at least one bookseller-cum-tastemaker with knowledge of the latest foreign titles. Paris Spleen served as the exemplar of a kind of urbanite experience, the work that many a fledgling author aspired to write when prose poems were the form and decadence the theme of the day.
"Under the Cherry Blossoms" is a stylistically mature work that depicts a coming to terms with mortality and its accompanying dualisms through an exposition of the sub rosa, a revelation that starts with the creeping notion that beneath such beautiful flowers, something lies hidden.
- Bonnie Huie
Japan | Japanese | Novel (excerpt)
December, 2008One of Japan’s most revered mythological creatures, the tengu is believed to inhabit mountainous regions, where it exacts revenge for wrongdoings committed against community members. It is often blamed for abducting people and animals to later return them endowed with heightened senses and abilities, and for playing pranks on priests who have strayed from Buddhist precepts.
The reader is introduced to Keiichi Michihira—an investigative journalist on a journey to unearth the truth behind a series of murders that occurred a quarter-century earlier in Shikamata. Residents of this secluded hamlet are convinced that the culprit is the fabled tengu, and though Michihira is skeptical, their belief compels him to dig deeper, leading him on a wide-ranging investigation from the supernatural to the geopolitical.
(Christopher Southward)
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).