The Magical Art of Translation: From Haruki Murakami to Japan's Latest Storytellers

uh it's a great honor to be here tonight at the Japan Society I want to thank um the Japan Foundation the neom foundation and a public space our partners in New York and of course this wonderful Cadre of of artists Scholars translators and writers who are here with us tonight um as you know we're going to talk a bit about uh Japan's most famous living novelist uh iuki marami uh and all of these artists and Scholars and translators have something to do with Haruki murakami on one level or another so you're you're going to hear

some very interesting stories about mami's work but also we're going to talk about translation and writing creating fiction creating art creating poetry uh viav language and art so it's an incredible uh like I said a great team we've got here tonight from Tokyo from Seattle from Toronto um all amassed here at the Japan Society I really want to thank tomomi seia who I've worked with before for putting this together this evening It's a Wonderful show uh again the Japan Foundation has been a great supporter of us the neon Foundation as well public space is our

partner here in New York City and without much further Ado I'm going to introduce Professor Ted gusen from York University who is currently translating Mr mami's work into English uh the last book was uh uh came out in December it's called The Strange library and two more books are coming out later this year in August I believe hear the wind sing and pinball 1973 Ted is also a co-editor of monkey business magazine which is here tonight the only English language magazine uh of Japanese literature that comes out once a year Ted is also the uh

editor of the Oxford book of Japanese short stories we're honored to have him with us tonight turn it over to Ted gusen well I just first of all I want to say I this this is like a dream come true because sitting to my left is Moto Yuki shibata and to my right is J Rubin and I've learned more about translation from the two of them than I have from anything else uh in my life uh they they're both amazing translators and they've helped me a great deal so this is this is feels good um

yeah and and my uh luck I suppose at being able to translate Haruki murakami um is also a bit uh unexpected or it was uh I remember I was sitting uh in my I have a Country Place North of Toronto where I live and I was sitting there one day and the phone rang and I picked it up and this this voice with slightly accented English said uh this is Haruki murani and I said masaka you know like like hell you know uh I couldn't I I I thought one of my friends was playing a

trick on me um and he said no this is Hami I oh then my heart began to pound and uh I said where are you and he said I'm in Syracuse New York and I saidwell would you like to come here and he said yes and it was that simple and straightforward so I hadn't met him before of course I've been reading his work and I'd written about his work and I remember one time in particular in Washington DC at the association of Asian studies conference where Jay had organized a panel uh on murakami I

I I'm sure you remember that day uh it was you know usually uh a panels on lit Japanese literat are sleepy Affairs this one was packed I mean people were standing around the back of the room and it was a large room it was absolutely packed because people knew about this writer but he'd never been discussed in an academic uh situation before and there was a tremendous curiosity and and and great response uh to the various uh papers that uh that were given so um I had actually translated uh short works by uh murakami at

the at the beginning a couple of short stories I published one in the Canadian literary magazine and another one in a in a magazine called Soho Square which came out of uh Great Britain and uh so uh it was for me a a a wonderful opportunity to translate uh his fiction uh first of all some stories and uh then the strange Library uh which as Roland mentioned came out in December and now uh the two first novels that that murakami wrote um in 1979 to 1980 hear the wind sing and pinball 1973 and they're they're

coming out in a single volume because they're quite short so so put together they they're about 300 Pages uh uh long and it's been a lot of fun to work on them uh Mami Haruki and I uh arrived at was University in the same year uh he arrived in April of 1969 as the first year student who'd been uh a roning for one year and I arrived in that fall uh as an exchange student from Overland College in Ohio uh for to spend my junior year abroad uh in Japan so we were both on the

same campus though of course we never met each other I was hanging out with a basketball team and that wasn't really where he was at um but uh but it was a very Lively year with with lots of student demonstrations the campus was closed at the end of my year there and uh a lot of that stuff comes through in his writing and because he and I are so close in age and and both had that early uh experience I felt very close to him as I was doing the translation and the LA the the

language as it were I don't I don't know if what we really do is magical uh it's a nice nice spot anyway um but but uh uh you know I I felt very close to the language um it was our generation you know he was in Japan I was except for that year in uh in Ohio and I'm from New York so uh there's that too and so it was it it was uh fun and I think reading morakami is fun translating him is certainly fun and uh it's fun to be here today and and

meet all of you thank you so we also have with us tonight Jay Rubin uh who has translated works by Haruki marami since 1989 before that a little well ' 89 was when I first read him but I I think the first uh publication came out in ' 91 91 so if you've read the windup bird Chronicle uh if you've read notes not Notes From The Underground Notes From The Underground not from the underground transl oh you wrote that this is also Mr dovi uh no if you've read haruki's Works Through The Years in English

Jay Rubin has done the bulk of them a large majority of them and we're lucky to have Jay here tonight because he's not only a translator he's also a newly minted novelist who can't quite believe that but and his book will be available tonight after the show so I'm just going to ask Jay I mean your experiences as a translator shifting into the role of a novelist how would you explain that shift to the audience well first before I get into that I'd like to talk about the title of this event well the magical part

I can't argue with I mean there is there is something and even the word art I remember once on this stage talking about my uneasiness but finally willingness to accept the the the term art with regard to translation um because there's a a large part of it that you can't really explain it's it it happens uh as you wrestle with one language trying to get it into the other language and you're not just taking grammatical forms from one language and and mechanically transferring them into the other something unusual going on there's something there something that's

creative I mean isn't it it is not creative it's not creative no it is not creative people try to use that term about translation I don't I don't believe you can use that I can talk a little more about that but the main thing here that that that takes me aback uh in the title of this this uh event is from Haruki murakami that makes me feel very old because every you know I mean when whenever people would talk about the kind of the sweep of Japanese literature it was always from so and so from

Nat or if if a little later from Mishima Yukio even but from somebody else certainly and murakami was the culmination now he it's from I could just stop talking because I'm just the you know I I'm the guy who's been or one of the guys who's been doing this stuff for God since as you say 19 it was 1991 I think the first story um first story that I uh translat of Hardis came out in in the New Yorker and a very dear friend of mine who's here in the audience tonight named Paul levenson well

a there another very dear friend of mine was the editor she's now she's here this is Linda Asher and Paul levenson is also in the audience and he was so thrilled at at the was that TV people no no I didn't do TV people that was that was Alfred burall which story was the first one first one was of the the elephant vanishes okay which which is an amazing a wonderful story I still think it's a wonderful story it's the title of a of the of a collection there are two I've I've often said even

in public that I think Mami is a better short story writer than a novelist and there are just amazing three amazing books of short stories of his available in English one of them is called the elephant vanishes which people thought was so good that they then reinvented it in Japanese there it never came out in that form in Japanese the thing was put together using translations that I had done and that Alfred bbom had done uh it was they were put the collection was put together by Gary fisc John who was a a kop uh

editor he did a wonderful job of combining um stories from various various periods of murakami and he it was such a good book that then maybe what five or 10 years later the the Japanese publisher Shin chosa decided that that there should be such a book in Japanese and so now there is a book called The Elephant vanishes in Japanese but it didn't exist that way first it was first something so as you can probably guess Jay has been not only a translator but a literary scholar of Japanese literature for a number of years he

taught at Harvard he taught at University of Washington in Seattle now as I said earlier he's a novelist you have a book that you have written uh which has taken you a bit of time to finish and it's done I started it in 1985 it took a while can you talk a little bit about going from translation to writing fiction well it's funny it it you know I started in 1985 I didn't read murakami until 1989 right so I actually I with my wife's help put together this novel about uh the situation in Seattle for

for for Japanese Americans primarily Japanese Americans but also also Japanese born people who were living in on the west coast at the time of Pearl Harbor and then ended up getting locked up um I didn't know a thing about that until I was a graduate student it was my graduat it was my professor in graduate school who first mentioned to me that 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry had been locked up in concentration camps out in the desert do does everybody know that that happened I think nowadays a lot more people know that it happened I've

talked to high school students who have have in fact learned about it in school they've read about it that never was the case before I think up until certainly not maybe 10 years ago it was still not very welln and it was not all that well known on the East Coast y I didn't know a thing about it I went to Chic I went to school in Chicago my my history well my professor who was a specialist primarily in history and Japanese literature mentioned this thing to me I couldn't quite believe it I started reading

about it there's a wonderful book called n daughter has anybody read n daughter this everybody should read n daughter it's it's a it's a Memoir written by a woman who grew up in in Seattle uh about well an awful lot of it is about Japanese American life before Pearl Harbor Pearl after Pearl Harbor that section is only about the last third of the book but it's an incredible document of what what went on and U that among other factual books was one of my sources and I mainly wrote this novel because was angry because there

was absolutely no constitutional justification for locking up a a particular racial group and sending them out in the desert and make and keeping them there during the war in fact it was known it was known even before people were sent away that there was absolutely no evidence of any kind of Espionage any kind of sabotage and there were lies told all this came out finally in the 1980s when the redress movement finally rung an apology out of the US government well anyway here I am getting getting worked up get up and we're going to have

some time to talk about this uh with the Q&A and with the reception but let me just say that I wanted to I got angry and wanted to write a book about this about this this uh terrible phenomenon that occurred in our country and and nobody wanted to hear about it we got the book finished in about 1987 tried to send it around to agents tried to send it around to to Publishers there was no interest and surpris I after that I got busy translating morakami that's what I started getting so it comes full circle

so um well we'll talk we'll talk about we also have wants me to shut up no no no I want to talk about this some more uh and we will we will but we have as I mentioned uh Toronto and Seattle we also have a wonderful crew from Tokyo here tonight including uh the founding editor of Monkey Business uh along with Ted GSE and Muki shibata who is uh the easily the most revered translator in Japan of English language novels mostly American novelists into Japanese so this is going the other direction uh across the Pacific

uh mot is also a dear friend of mine and a scholar and a wonderful writer in his own uh right and uh it's wonderful to have him here tonight Muki shabata hi um I feel mildly tortured with this microphone um I realize how much unnecessary movement I make but anyway um since the topic is translation harim I I maybe should talk about Haruki as translator but before that I'd like to go back uh to the 19th century um it is a well-known fact among Haruki maram fans that uh Haruki wrote uh uh the very first

passage of of his very first novel here the wi sing uh in English and it it wasn't that he had the ambition to publish in English uh he did it uh because he wanted to break away from the uh uh prevalant uh uh conventional uh Japanese literary style so writing by English helped uh free himself of the uh the uh uh the uh uh burden of the traditional uh Japanese style and he wasn't uh the first one to did it do it uh almost exactly a century ago uh there was a wonderful uh novelist one

of the very first uh modern Japanese novelist shim and in the 1880s uh he was writing one of his major novels Uki gumo uh the uh floating cloud and he had uh uh uh probably in 1886 or something like that uh he uh had finished the first part of that novel and this part was deeply uh steeped in the uh uh Edo previous Edo uh uh literary style and he wanted to get away from it so when he started writing part two uh he uh wrote uh very F first passage in Russian so just exactly

like Haruki did and so you know uh this I think this shows uh foreign language uh uh uh I mean the the value of foreign language to uh uh free him free yourself from the uh tradition when it's you know felt as uh as burden you know rather than as a as a a uh uh Legacy and uh also uh shim was was very influential as translator uh probably in in in terms of Pros his translation of the Russian writer to GF was even more influential uh than his own Pros as as a novelist and

uh uh probably it's too early to talk about the influence of Haruki on younger writers uh either as translator or as novelist but uh there is no doubt whatsoever that he made a a big big impact on younger writers and readers both as writers and translators so there is so much similarity uh between the two and uh uh when you think about similarity when you uh you also uh want to think about uh uh difference to and probably the biggest difference is that whereases was so uh uh uh reverential he had so much respect uh

toward the the original Uh Russian writers and I'm not saying that that the harur doesn't have any respect or the writers he translates but uh in his case I think it's not so much uh reverence as uh empathy he feels toward uh the writers uh he translates and this difference this uh shift we could say from a reverence to empathy uh shows in brief the uh you know the the literary history of Japan of these 100 years that's it I thank you I I should mention that uh Moto translates into Japanese uh such American stalwarts

as Paul AER uh Thomas Pinchin Rebecca Brown uh oh I should mention that I'm Jay's translator too one of the transl Jas [Applause] El so some of you might some of you might be aware of pinch's uh uh novel Mason and Dixon which is Quite a feat in English uh in which he employs kind of a slapsticky uh 18th century Pros to tell uh the story of the two explorers Moto translated that into Japanese I have no idea how he did it but uh um he's a he's extraordinary artist himself we also have two wonderful

artists here tonight also from Tokyo um uh both award-winning uh artists in their fields aoko Mata uh who uh is a novelist and short story writer and we also have Satoshi kitamura who is a graphic artist illustrator Storyteller himself so I'm going to turn over the uh the microphones that we're all wearing on our heads to OKO Mata OKO Mata [Applause] so um I want to talk about how I how I encountered Haruki morakami uh myself um in high school I was studying in the US studying abroad in the US and of course were reading

uh in school everything um in English and I was craving uh books written in Japanese but of course those were hard to come by but I happened to find um the the two no two volumes of Norwegian Wood in my aunt's house so that that was my my encounter with with [Music] her for so um in a literature class uh in the year above me uh they happened to be reading wild wild sheep chase in English and so some of the students came to talk to me because I was Japanese and they would ask me

you know do do all Writers Do all Japanese writers write such strange uh stories strange narratives um uh and you know why do they write such things and it actually made me really proud that they had that impression um of amami novels not that Japanese people wrote about beautiful things but they were writing such extraordinary you know strange um stories so uh at that time uh in my English class we were reading Raymond's Raymond Carver's Cathedral and um after two years I went back back to Japan and I discovered that Mami was uh translating uh

Carver's story okay so um so the I I read uh Raymond Carver when I came back to Japan in Japanese and and then through murakami's translation also discovered uh the translator Muki shata and so not only did murakami um kind of expose me to Japanese literature and writers but also open the door to American literature as well so I became uh because I was uh really fascinated with foreign literatures I ended up being an English major in college and after after graduating I went to translation school for several years to and was an aspiring translator

but at the same time it's it's very difficult to become a literary translator and I almost gave up many many times but in my at the end of my 20s I finally was um I became a writer uh and then at the same time I I also became a translator so uh now I'm a translator of the American writer Karen Russell and um I don't know how makami thinks about this but for me uh writing and translating are are very much similar Acts and um I say that writing and translating is the same is a

similar act for me because um um in both cases I think that there are voices that are kind of floating around um my head in a very vague and nebulous State and uh it's it's really the process of ordering U putting an order to those voices and so if it's U my own novel it's my own voice that I'm hearing that I'm uh putting into language in an orderly form and when it's translating it's someone else's voice that I'm writing down ordering [Music] so when writers uh translate when I'm trans translating I'm often seen as

being U lazy of you know not doing my job of of writing my own novels but I don't I actually don't think so at all um translating has really made me uh love literature and I've always loved reading but becoming a writer first of all uh made me like literature even more and then translating the intimate Act of translating really made me uh fall in love with literature all over again so for me translating is a really important part of of writing great I should add here that um H toldi yoshio who's doing the the

the interpreting tonight the Yen's job tonight of interpreting is also a highly regarded scholar a writer and translator in her own right and her work appears in the new issue of Monkey Business issue five also in Issue four and three so she's uh she's been with us for a long time she's an she's an excellent artist in her own right she's just helping us out here tonight with the translations for aoko I neglected to mention that everyone up here with my with the exception of me is a gifted translator including uh uh Satoshi who kitamura

who also lived in London for a few decades I think and is an award-winning uh children's book author illustrator graphic Storyteller his work is also in the new issue of uh Monkey Business which is available tonight he actually worked from a poem by Charles simik whom some of you may be familiar with Charles Simi the American poet who is featured in Monkey Business in part because shibata sense Muki shibata translates simix Works into Japanese so Satoshi kitamura is with us tonight Satoshi thank you um I'm talking about well I'm this is because I'm the only

artist there all lighs so and this is about lecture about translation so we made it like a illustration as translation I don't know if it's true or not but um when I rest the books I I have to read the text many many times and um so so um that's how I work all every time but um this project M translate selected and translated the poems from America or England and um I Illustrated this one for example is Emily dickenson's poem and there's the famous photographs portraits of em Dickson and I traced the outline and

colored it so that the poem would fit in her body and so this is the one and the another one like this this is like a very strange uh poem about monkey it and uh so this I just did a monkey yeah uh and this is a l Kell poem this is about crocodile okay it's a very funny poem and um so this sort of thing I just again this is a charic poem so it's about this these poems have a kind of story in it so I can draw like this you know I can

just pick up things from the text and draw it and um oh uh oh this one again this is a kind of well I can't really say the image of the poem but something I felt reading the poem it's bit spooky uh and this one I just didn't know how to do it in a way so what I did is just I made a background so that the poem stands out so it's more like atmospheric kind of thing again this H sorry this is this is um uh Helma Melvis is this a poem uh passage

from the yeah okay okay and it's about the water and what I did is just I put the blue paint on top and folded the paper in half and open it so it's like a reflection in no way oh and um so it's kind of intuitive sort of thing in a way and this is again it's a sort of describing the text and it's about the net curon or was it net cut or sort of the net thing on the door so I use a material uh and painted over it so it's it's again H

sorry H maybe this is a one this is again it's a sort of a story uh not Hon's notebook is it from The Notebook it's from his diary Diary uh okay and is again it's more like a dialect showing what's the text say and uh this type of obstructing is there I just can't couldn't figure out how to do it so and this is the sort of thing I kind of I've been to well this is by wellish Poet De Thomas and I kind of had a feeling about wealth it's sort of dark and Lany

so I made it dark and Lany and again this is about a dog uh uh this is about uh sorry so yeah it's a syic station so I did like previous platform and this one is a um Edo's poem called to Helen and uh somehow I thought this is very archaic type of style uhhuh and uh I kind of sort of made a little joke which Helen do you mean you know so I did a lots of beautiful ladies anyway uh this is the title poem of this anth EMP I it's totally crazy poem and

so I just did a crazy picture and so on and anyway I I want to show you something else this is the book uh written by uh writer B I had never met when I did a book um this is called the yes the yes is a character and uh yes just woke up from hibernation or whatever and went to trip and these black things on the front is a characters called nodes they are like a type of insects or whatever really and uh whatever the yes wanted to do they the NES tried to stop

him but he wasn't bothered by it so he he kind of went on and on and uh so when he wanted to cross the the you know uh sort of bridge the no tries to St him but he didn't care and he just went on and on and uh eventually no gave up this is a lots of word play in the text like the place they are in is called where and uh anyway when I read the text I thought this is really good because it's it's abstract in a sense but also I had to

make it more sort of concrete I mean visual more simple for children because this is uh supposed to be read by about 6 years old 5 6 years old and finally these notes gave up and that so yes just went and I made him without eyes or notes I just wanted make him simple uh so that Lita can just add their own eyes or notes if they like and I thought it made I want to make it a little bit unique so I I it's got only three legs uh but anyway this is the kind

of thing I do but um basically it's really a fun to to uh interpret text into visuals uh especially when the text is really good um when it's really unique I like my own uh stories myself as well but but it's not less like a translation but when I have to illustrate a book by WR by someone else it's it's yes it is very much like a translation from language to visual and um it's it's a um it's one of the most enjoyable thing I can imag I've done lots of illustration for poetry books and

so on but especially when I come across a very good text for children's books it's it's such a challenge to make it into visuals um so anyway uh so I can sort of connected VI translation and illustration uh so anyway okay [Music] thank can I add something yes um I would have been very uncomfortable uh publishing just the original poem and my translation because uh I would I thought my translation didn't give enough access to the spirit of the original but uh uh sat's illustration is like or or maybe literally the the second translation so

we kind you know provide two translations to the original and that that way we thought you know we are providing enough uh uh you know root uh access to the original and and I'm I'm very happy with that book too thank you thank you um all of these uh writers uh translators artists and Scholars are featured in issue five of Monkey Business which will be available uh uh after this event tonight in the at the reception um and of course the newly minted novelist Jay Rubin uh his novel will be available tonight as well and

I'm sure everyone would be happy to sign copies for you if you're interested Ed in taking something home tonight but before that we have an opportunity to engage you directly um uh obviously these are all very different people with with f all no not you you're the same sorry sorry we're the Jay and I are the same with extraordinary talents and and uh transcultural um in in intelligences really knowing how to go back and forth between two cultures and Two Worlds which is ever more important in the 21st century so I'd like to open up

the floor to you and let you ask questions I think is there there may be a mic there's a microphone so everyone can hear you ask the question uh please take it away and uh and ask what you'd like there's a gentleman here yes uh first of all thank you is fascinating to hear all your different perspectives um I'm only an English speaker and and some Italian um windup bird Chronicle was the first morami book I read and it it struck me so much it's one of those books you remember where you were you know

when you first read it but I've only encountered him in Translation and I guess one of the questions I had is I was also struck by the title that said from morami onwards and whether from an academic perspective or writer perspective or artist perspective what do you think explains the mor effect you know his his his his Persona his um resonance is it almost overshadows in a way seems to me all of Japanese literature in America not not withstanding you know the great history of miman the older as you were pointing to Jay but it's

his his his star has risen to such Heights um that I just wonder if there's anything as either a translator or coming from Japan that in your mind explains because I've heard there are many explanations you use of jazz music use of American idiom titles like Norwegian would but it would be great to hear your perspective on that Jay you want you want to start Jay I'm not sure I quite heard the whole thing I'm I'm hard of hearing and I I miss a lot so uh it sounds essentially how would you explain the muracami

Mystique I mean he's he's a best seller in several countries right not just America I mean in in Korea and Europe I think his fascination with the brain just just goes beyond any kind of national borders he's how would you define that fation with he's he's so uh fascinated by the the workings of the gray matter he just plunge you know he'll he'll do it with fairly obvious symbolism I there are about 100 pag pages in The Wind upb bird Chronicle where the the protagonist is sitting in a well and there aren't too many novels

in which you know like a fifth of the novel nothing happens but the protagonist is sitting down in a well thinking or imagining uh I think that he just draws people in I I have gotten so much feedback from people who um who say that he has written he he writes for me and certainly I felt that way I felt when I first read him that this was a writer who was writing exclusively for me and then I was disappointed to find that there were all these thousands of people out there millions who who felt

the same way but it's he's quite capable of doing that and doing it in in a variety of cultures because I I think the kind of U of mental experiences that he that he writes about are not limited by religion or by by nationality or by any any kind of external uh quality of that sort so I think that's what makes him catch on so widely Ted what's your take I mean you're translating heroi now you why do you think he's so big so many places well I remember there was a uh a kind of

Symposium in in Japan about maybe seven or eight years ago in which translators from around the world of murakami came together and I was a part of that and I think there were about 30 of us uh translators from China from from uh Taiwan and Hong Kong and Malaysia uh translators from Russia he's very big in Russia uh translators from Europe uh and of course Korea uh I think has been from the beginning one of his largest audiences Norwegian Wood was such an enormous hit in Korea and it's interesting I think that Norwegian Wood probably

had a greater impact among his Asian Asian audiences and less here whereas here it's been more a wind up bird Chronicle and before that hardw Wonderland in the end of the world so um uh and I was looking at all these translators you know and of course we like to congratulate ourselves uh on on our skills and so forth but I was thinking I was thinking hey wait a minute you know like he's selling in all these places and we can't all be wonderful translators there has to be there has to be a turkey or

two out there you know uh in in the group but something about murakami's storytelling ability I think it's partly that that he's such a masterful Storyteller and I agree with Jay that his short stories May uh in fact even be a level higher than his novels but his novels carry you along and you just it's such a pleasant trip and uh yeah they really first time I read a murakami novel it really made me I think uh love literature uh and the fact that I could read it in Japanese and just enjoy it so much

was for me a a kind of a breakthrough and I all always will credit him for that when I first met Haruki he told me that he wanted to get away from Japan that's all he wanted to do when he was a young man as big as he is everywhere in the world he's Mega Big in Japan right I mean his his novels when they're published sell millions immediately the first night Moto why know you know it's hard enough for me to explain why I like his books so much so I can't explain why other

people like him what do you think why why why do you think Haruki marami is such a a a huge phenomenon in Japan as a Japanese writer what do you think [Music] so so as as Moto said um it's really hard to explain why you know some he he's such a fascinating figure for other people but to speak of myself um in college or by college uh most of his novel major novels had already been out and so I really went through a phase of reading murakami um from around High School to to college this

so it wasn't even a question of whether I liked him or not I mean that was never even an issue I just had to read his novels so I I can't really explain it but the fact that I couldn't stop myself that must have been a phenomenon that also happened to other people so that's the only way that I can explain the the fascination so let's ask Satoshi who is a much younger man than Haruki uh what do you what do you think about uh I don't know I I think probably people we are living

in the psychologically similar environment everywhere because I lived in England for 30 years and looking about 30 years ago there's a a huge gap between cultures people and like lots of people lots of English people found very awkward to talk to me even if I spoke English I because because I look different so but nowadays if you go to England or in New York of course but any anywhere like maybe Paris and you know l or somewhere in China and group of people talking in P or Cafe they all look different you know different skin

col and so but they don't they're not conscious about it I mean that's a huge difference it's a good you know change and I think I have a feeling that he's a first person probably the first person who wrote this psychological State the characters don't identify each other by their skin color and also he they don't have as if the character doesn't have a father or mother that's right you know mother doesn't say you know come home or you know whatever so so that's why people can identify themselves yeah that's right wrong I don't know

as as many of you know if you've read haruki's works there are almost never uh families in his stories sometimes but usually it's quite dark um another question uh wow we have lots uh who has a mic maybe over here this side of the room uh hello hello yeah I'd like to um go off something Jay said at the beginning where he was concerned about the from in the title I'm actually concerned with the rest of the title that comes after the word murakami because that really wasn't addressed that much in the talk um it's

not up right now but um I'm wondering if perhaps Ted or Jay or anyone else would be willing to discuss how in 20 years there could be a panel on a different author at the Japan Society young translators today you know I'm actually one myself thinking about contemporaries and uh you know working novelists and you know we have this reverence in America and elsewhere former eony but who's next Who's Next and not even just who's next but I mean who's younger than him that should be translated and should be popularized in America well you you

know Monkey Business uh this is issue five now that's and and we've been doing it one a year for for five years and uh there are Pieces by murakami in Monkey Business in this issue that we've brought for you today uh there's a very wonderful essay by him kind of like a speech to uh wouldbe writers uh giving them hints about how to start uh start their writing careers but that's just a tiny fraction of uh of the issue and he's appeared in three or four of our issues um the the rest is uh writers

various writers including Alco um and uh fuka hideo and kawakami mko and kawakami hiromi and so many writers so many I I can't list them all so many wonderful writers and the idea of monkey business has been from the beginning to introduce uh English-speaking audiences to the other writers and to the younger writers right so that's what we're doing uh ironically uh in the first issue we included along interview with murakami because we knew that that would help start the the uh the journal because people are of course interested it's about his whole career it's

a it's a major interview uh but there too I mean I think the really uh striking uh stories in that first issue were what propelled us forward from that point and as we've gone forward we have thanks to uh Moto's uh connections and with the writers who he translates been able to include totally original works by American Writers as well including Paul ler including Charles simit including you know uh steuart dybeck you know major writers so so it's becoming it's evolving into a literary magazine that that eclipses all of the barriers and boundaries including visual

graphic work and fiction and essays and poetry so that's kind of what we're doing and and so I'm glad you asked that question because we can say not this is what should happen in the future but this is what's taking place right now Jay do you want to yeah I'd like to second that to sort of add a little footnote and that is that uh for the last year or so I've been putting together for penguin a uh a new anthology of of modern Japanese fiction and my Prime source is the is the now five

issues of Monkey Business I've got several stories that I I picked up from that although not all of them and one of the one of the stories I found from another source that I definitely want I just in fact I just got the permission to use it two days ago uh a story that Alo had written about the or indirectly related to the Fukushima disaster um there's just I've just of course worked so so long on murakami almost exclusively that I it's been a really good learning process for me to find out who else is

out there one of the one of the authors that I stumbled across was Alo and I I she has this wonderful poetic story called margar right or planting I think it's called in the in the English translation um that I very much want to use in that in that Anthology so another couple of years you'll have a an anthology of of of modern Japanese fiction from penguin does set Moto address this question to about up and coming ask that that long Haruki interview that appeared in the first issue of our was done by uh hi

Furukawa who is a much younger writer and wonderful one of the best writers we have now so it goes to that interview shows that how Young Writers were inspired by Haruki and uh writers like uh hide fukawa or M kawakami or some writers you know uh we haven't represented yet in the Mony B writers like machido or nakahara masaya uh if I have to uh uh uh uh mention one big difference between Haruki and these Young Writers uh it would have to be voice you know voice their voices are so complicated uh uh uh uh

you know har haruki's uh Pros is is very uh say you know uh in terms of Rhythm it's very simple it's very consistent it you know uh it's sort of easier to write on but uh these uh Young Writers and significantly uh many of them are musicians too so uh uh uh if I use uh uh music uh uh uh how do you say if I compare it to compare their Pros to music their Pros is full of syncopation and full of you know radical changes in Rhythm and so it's it's much much well no

of course is hard to translate too but that their Pro uh is is very hard to translate and um admiringly enough uh uh hos is a wonderful translator of Mami whose voice is really hard to capture but she does one stories is going to be in the Anthology also her translation of and Al has a very distinct voice too uh in in many of her stories she uses uh voice uh almost like chant um and then it really captures you okay okay before we get too chummy up here we have a reception upstairs uh that

will go on immediately after this you can talk you can ask I wish we had more time for questions but you can ask all of these wonderful artists questions upstairs tonight uh right after this and there will be books for sale as well and everyone will be willing to sign so thank you so much for coming tonight [Music] what