Translating Hiromi Kawakami
Allison Markin Powell (U.S.A.)

When I recommend Hiromi Kawakami’s books, people often ask what they are about. This is actually a very difficult question to answer. Of course, ostensibly there is always a plot structure—a companionship that turns into friendship that develops into a May-December romance (Strange Weather in Tokyo) or the happenings in and around a thrift shop in western Tokyo (The Nakano Thrift Shop) or stories told by various women who each had some kind of relationship with the same man (The Ten Loves of Nishino)—but to tell the truth, the most prominent feature of Kawakami’s books is always the atmosphere that she conjures, the mood that she evokes, the neighborhood that she populates. One of the ways she does this is by setting up a hierarchy of distance between the reader and narrator, and then subsequently among the players in the story—and oh, the players, they are always so vivid! Even the most minor character is described with a telling detail to bring them sharply into focus. Kawakami then adds depth to this hierarchy of distance with time—it’s common for her narrators to be telling their stories from memory, so there is often a tinge of melancholy or nostalgia. And though the narrators may have the benefit of hindsight, rarely do they offer pronouncements or conclusions about the events they are describing.

I have had the honor and pleasure to translate four books by Kawakami over the past decade. I’ve also had the chance to translate an essay she wrote for The New York Times and a short story from her debut collection. So within Kawakami’s hierarchy of distance, I dare to say that I feel “close” to her writing.

Perhaps not surprising, since translators are perhaps the closest readers—we strive to understand as much as possible about a text in order to render it anew in another language. But even when I can explain what a piece of Kawakami’s fiction is about, I don’t always know what it means. Nor do I feel the need for any such certainty. Indeed, Kawakami herself seems quite content to allow her readers to make their own interpretations. As her translator, I feel a similar responsibility to leave things open.

Compared to English, Japanese allows for a much greater degree of ambiguity, so when bringing Kawakami’s text into English, it can be a challenge to maintain the elusiveness of her prose. Often what feels like the best solution is to hew as close as possible to the original, on a language level— to preserve the spareness, being careful not to add any unjustified clarifications. To fail to respect the intangibility of Kawakami’s writing is to risk coloring or defining her in an unintended way; it can lock her style into a more fixed position, precluding latent possibilities and limiting the actual breadth of her talents as a writer.

The most recent piece of Kawakami’s work that I translated is actually one of her earliest stories. “I Won’t Let You Go” is about a mermaid. The narrator’s upstairs neighbor returns from a vacation, bringing with him a small mermaid that he came by. The neighbor then asks the narrator to keep the mermaid for him and she obliges, despite her misgivings, but soon falls under the mermaid’s spell as well.

Whenever I write a literary translation, I am trying to recreate for the English-language reader the experience of reading the original text in Japanese. In this case, that involves casting a spell over the reader, as the mermaid does to the characters in the story. I have spoken elsewhere about hearing the “voice” of the text. In Kawakami’s works, there are often various layers of voices—the narrative voice as well as the actual voices of the characters. Kawakami employs an idiosyncratic use of quotation marks when her characters are in conversation with each other—sometimes they appear and sometimes, even in the midst of dialogue, they do not. To my eye (and ear), this serves the hierarchy of distance that I mentioned earlier—it cultivates a sense of interiority between and among the characters, adding further texture to their relationships and to the connection with the reader.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but I always strive to maintain the preferences that I see have been made by the author. If literary translation is a series of word choices, it is a delicate balance of preserving as many potential interpretations that are present in Japanese while being aware of whatever may be excluded by the decisions I make.

I mentioned earlier that I feel “close” to Kawakami’s writing. When I began working on my third book translation of hers, I experienced a feeling of cozy familiarity, and I recall describing it to someone as akin to sliding on a pair of slippers—it was that comfortable. Not to say that I find her work easy to translate, just that I have a sense of her style and rhythm and, to reiterate, what she leaves unsaid.

The poet and translator William I. Elliott alludes to this same feeling in a poem about translating Shuntaro Tanikawa’s work—which he has done over the course of sixty years, so his slippers are extremely well worn. It’s an apt reference because I met Bill in the course of translating Strange Weather in Tokyo. In that novel, Kawakami cites two poems by Seihaku Irako. The first, “Wandering,” had been published in an anthology in a translation by Bill and Katsumasa Nishihara. As a result of requesting permission to use their translation, the three of us became friends, exchanging books in the mail and gathering together whenever I visit Tokyo.

From Shun’s Slippers by William I. Elliott

Kawakami’s writing dwells inside of me too, and I’m grateful for the camaraderie.

(Translator, Editor)