Watch the event:

Erica Hesketh

Erica Hesketh is a poet, editor and events producer, originally from Japan and Denmark, now based in London. Her poems have been published in The North, Magma, Under the Radar and elsewhere. She was longlisted in the 2023 National Poetry Competition. She has twenty years’ experience editing fiction, non-fiction and poetry, working for publishers as well as directly with authors. She has programmed events for Southbank Centre, Port Eliot Festival and others. From 2016 to 2024 she was Director of the Poetry Translation Centre. She is the editor of Living in Language: International reflections for the practising poet, and a member of the Southbank Centre New Poets Collective 2023–24. Her debut collection In the Lily Room is out with Nine Arches Press.

Daniel Joseph

Daniel Joseph is a translator, editor, and anthologist of Japanese fiction. He holds an MA in medieval Japanese literature from Harvard University, and has published translations of works by an eclectic assortment of Japanese writers and musicians including Kou Machida (Inpatient Press), Izumi Suzuki (Verso Books), and Kazuki Tomokawa (Blank Forms Editions). Shorter translations and essays have appeared in Granta, Epiphany, and ArtReview, among others. He is senior editor at Kodansha USA in New York, and is compiling and editing the forthcoming Penguin Book of Japanese Science Fiction for Penguin Classics in the UK.

Jesse Kirkwood

Jesse Kirkwood is a literary translator from the UK working from Japanese and French into English. The recipient of the 2020 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize for his rendering of Yūshō Takiguchi’s short story ‘Nocturne’, his translations include Tokyo Express (Penguin, 2022) by Seichō Matsumoto, A Perfect Day to Be Alone (MacLehose, 2024) by Nanae Aoyama, and Sympathy Tower Tokyo (Viking, 2025) by Rie Qudan. Jesse grew up in a remote corner of England’s Lake District, studied in Oxford and London, and now lives in Japan.

Yuki Tejima

Born in Tokyo and raised in Los Angeles, Yuki Tejima’s recent translations include Mizuki Tsujimura’s Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon and How to Hold Someone in your Heart, Kumi Kimura’s Someone to Watch Over You, Emi Yagi’s When the Museum is Closed, and the sequel to Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s best-selling memoir, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window.

With Erica Hesketh, Daniel Joseph, Jesse Kirkwood & Yuki Tejima  

ERICA: Hello, and a warm welcome to this Meet the World event organised by the National Centre for Writing. My name is Erica Hesketh and I am a poet and editor with Japanese and Danish heritage but now living in the UK. I’m really excited to be welcoming you to celebrate the launch of Kanata, a new series of chapbooks from Norwich’s own Strangers Press. As I’m sure you know, Strangers Press is a publishing project at the University of East Anglia that focuses on publishing literary translations and international writing in innovative and creative ways. They publish very gorgeous selections from around the world and their new series is no exception. It’s a set of five fantastic books from Japan and it’s called Kanata, which translates as ‘far out’ or ‘beyond’ but it also hints at a sort of nebulous liminality which Strangers Press describes on their website, where you can purchase all five books. This chapbook series was generously supported by the Yanai Initiative, so huge thanks to them, as well as to the UEA, the Norwich University of the Arts, the National Centre for Writing and GRR Design. Tonight we are joined by three of the translators on this wonderful series: Jesse Kirkwood, translator of Takiguchi Yusho’s Kamachi & Pictures of Her, Yuki Tejima, translator of Wataya Risa’s Then Why Ask Me to Come? and Daniel Joseph, translator of Machida Kou’s The God of the Word. We’re going to hear excerpts from the three books and have a chat about all three, as well as the translation process, and the event will last around an hour. I’m going to briefly introduce the speakers and their books as they come to read. But first, I’d just like to say a big hello to everybody.  

DANIEL: Hello. 

JESSE: Hi. 

YUKI: Hello, Erica. 

ERICA: So, I think we’re all calling each other from different places in the world. I wonder if you might just say where you are and what it’s like outside your window right now. Jesse. 

JESSE: I’m in London, although I’m normally in Japan, but I’ve escaped the Japanese death summer to be in the capital here for a while. But we’ve just had a thunderstorm here, so the weather’s pretty exciting here as well.  

ERICA: And Yuki, where are you? 

YUKI: I too have escaped the Tokyo heat. I am currently in Los Angeles. This is where I grew up, so my family still lives here, but I’m here just for the month of August, just for the summer. 

ERICA: Yes, the Tokyo summer is particularly aggressive. My mother messages me most days saying it’s 35, 36, 39. It’s very difficult. Dan, where are you?  

DANIEL: I’m in Queens, in New York City, where it’s bright and quite warm today. Not as horrible as it has been and not as horrible as Tokyo, but I’m glad to be inside. 

ERICA: Well, it’s really lovely to meet all of you after having read your fantastic translations. I wanted to first ask a question to all three of you, which is how you came to be involved with this project. Were the authors that you translated authors you’d worked with before or how did Strangers Press come to collaborate with you on this? Jesse, maybe you first. 

JESSE: The project’s been quite a long time in the works and, especially in my case, this is a story and an author that I’ve had quite a long connection with. Takiguchi Yusho is a writer who’s quite special to me because he was the author I translated for a literary translation prize. Winning that prize is what kickstarted my career as a literary translator. So yeah, he’s always held a special place for me. And then this story – at least one of the two stories I translated for the chapbooks, Kamachi – has been through the hands of various different mentor figures as well as my own, as we’ve tried to hash out various translations of various bits of it. I started working on it back in 2021, which feels very strange to say, when I was doing a mentorship with the National Centre for Writing, the Emerging Translators mentorship, with Polly Barton, and then it went through a phase with David Boyd and Asa Yoneda at the helm and we worked out a kind of David, Asa and Jesse version, and then more recently I’ve had the pleasure of doing a similar process with Strangers Press directly. So, both these stories have been through a roller coaster ride to get here, but it’s really nice to finally be able to share them. 

ERICA: Multiple iterations. When we come to hear the text, I think that’ll be really interesting to bear in mind as well. Yuki, what about you and your relationship with the text? 

YUKI: This was my very first published translation. It ended up not coming out first, but it’s the first project I ever worked on. I too was in a mentorship at the National Centre for Writing, with Juliet Winters Carpenter. But Wataya Risa is an author that I would never have dreamed of translating because she is such a big name in Japan. She is a popular and literally acclaimed writer and I don’t think that I would have had the nerve to volunteer myself and say, ‘Oh, I would love to do a Wataya Risa!’ So, I was just so exhilarated when I was asked by Asa Yoneda to translate this story and it was so funny on my first read, and I asked her, ‘Oh, please let me translate it. Are you sure that you can trust me with this?’ and thankfully she and David, who I worked with for a long time on this piece, were wonderful and they really helped me through it. So, I just feel lucky, just feel blessed that I was able to work on anything by Wataya Risa and after having such a great experience translating her work, I do hope that, moving forward, I’ll have the chance to translate more from her. I’ve never met her but I hope that one day this will lead to a meeting with her at some point. For a first-time translator, it was intimidating but because of its voice and humour and I completely got lost in it. I was able to play around with it in the way that she does in the Japanese. So, it was a complete honour and a blast for me to translate this piece. 

ERICA: Yes, I hope it does lead to a meeting. It should. The first of many collaborations. Dan, tell me about your history with Machida Kou and with Strangers Press. 

DANIEL: Well, Machida Kou, as you may know, was the singer of the seminal punk band called INU, and I was a fan of his music, actually, before I even discovered that he was a writer. And when I did discover that, I picked up the first book I could find of his, which was Kiregire, the novella that he won the 2000 Akutagawa Prize with, and I decided I was going to start translating it. So, I just sort of started, for whatever reason, and some years later happened to be at a translation event in Tokyo where he was the keynote speaker and through his publisher, his minders and my minders brought us together and we had this kind of samurai showdown, almost like a yojimbo or something in the middle of the street. It lasted for about two minutes, he’s a notoriously standoffish person, and it was a very sort of aggressive encounter. But he apparently liked me enough to give me permission to translate it. So, I published that and I’ve done a couple of other short stories, including one that I co-translated with the aforementioned Polly Barton, and David Boyd and Asa Yoneda are collaborators of mine in other projects and they invited me to join the series, to do something by Machida. I wanted to do this story because I thought it was quite funny. My training is in classical Japanese, so that’s my background. He writes mostly contemporary stuff, so getting a chance to apply his sensibilities to classical themes was irresistible. So that’s how I ended up here. 

ERICA: Thank you. That’s a mental image, the meeting in the street. Amazing. With all three of you, how involved were the authors with the translation? In terms of their level of English or how interested they were to be creatively involved, did they just let you get on with it or did they want to have input? Jesse? 

JESSE: Takiguchi Yusho has always been very generous with his time, incomprehensibly generous to me. I don’t know why he gives me so much time to be honest, but he lets me pester him about all sorts of things and let me gatecrash a course he was giving at a university, which was really insightful, to see how he was teaching literature as well as writing it. We’d been in touch a bit already and then when it came to translating these stories, he kindly agreed to meet me in a café and let me pick his brains. But as you’ll know from reading these stories, they’re so slippery and ambiguous in places that there’s a point where the author himself is going to just say, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know when exactly this is taking place’ because that’s the point of the story. So, obviously, I think with any translation there’s that point where the author has to let go of their creation and trust you with it, hopefully, and fortunately he did that. So yeah, hopefully the results did it justice. 

ERICA: Wonderful. And Yuki, you said you hadn’t met Risa but did you correspond about the text?  

YUKI: Like I said, I’ve never met or spoken with her, but I have heard through her Japanese editor that she was very excited about this project and she was really looking forward to it coming out. There was a discussion about the title and the Japanese publisher, who I’m in regular communication with wanted to know how I translated it and I gave them the title and they were like, ‘Oh, wow, okay. Does that mean what it means in Japanese?’ and I reassured them that nuance-wise it really does. If I translated it directly, this is what it would sound like in English and that wouldn’t really make sense to English people. And so, we had a conversation, it felt like a three-party conversation. Through her publisher I was able to hear her thoughts on the process and the project and that was great. It was great to hear that she was involved and interested and was eager to see the published version. 

ERICA: Great. Thank you. And Dan, how involved was Machida Kou? As far as I can tell, Machida couldn’t care less about being published in English, so we have essentially no contact, though I will say that, a couple of years ago, a New York record label reissued the INU album – they only made one LP. Actually, it had never been released in the US before, so it was the first US release and I translated the lyrics into English for that. I got a hold of his personal email and he actually responded to me within twenty-four hours and answered all my questions very directly, which I have to say I was shocked by. So that was the one time that he gave me any input. I’ve probably done about a half a dozen projects of his at this point and that was the only time he had any real input. Incidentally, he also has my favourite email address of all time, which is… 

ERICA: Don’t give us the email address! 

DANIEL: We’ll take that out in the edit. He had no input, is the short answer. 

ERICA: You are reinforcing my mental image of the man, wonderful. Okay, let’s hear some text. So, Jesse, if we could hear from you first. I’m going to just introduce a little bit for the audience. Jesse is going to read from Takiguchi Yusho’s Kamachi & Pictures of Her, two thematically linked short stories. Takiguchi Yusho is a multi-award-winning author from Tokyo and as Jesse was mentioning and as you’ll hear, his work deals with time and memory, including collective memory. Jesse Kirkwood is a literary translator from the UK, working from Japanese and French into English. He won the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize in 2020 and he now lives in Japan, although he is in the UK right now. Over to you Jesse. 

JESSE: Thanks so much. This is a short passage from fairly early on in Kamachi, where the narrator is basically testing out his theories about this eccentric old woman who he’s observing and who he has realised is an incredible storyteller. And he’s also telling a story about storytelling itself. So, I’ll just go straight in.  

Once, discussing Mrs Izawa, my wife and I concluded that her stories were best appreciated more as poems, or a sort of music – that by stripping away any semblance of narrative, she might instead be trying to draw attention to the more visceral interactions between her words. But it wouldn’t quite be true to say her stories were entirely bereft of structure. It was more like their seemingly unrelated parts connected by some kind of accident, except it was more than mere accident – because didn’t her way of telling stories make a particular turn of events seem inevitable, even miraculous? In other words, she fascinated us, even if she could be a bit of a pain, and we took a certain kind of pride in the idea that the two of us might be the only ones around who really understood her, while everybody else dismissed her as little more than an oddball. Though we’ve never actually gone and stood in front of her little stage, we like to sit here at the window like this, peeking over and listening in.  

I direct my gaze towards the cluster of shrubs by her veranda, amongst which is a camellia – yes, just like in her stage name – and think back to a story I heard her tell recently. One day, a few decades ago, she saw two men having a punch-up at the station. One of them was bleeding from his nose, the front of his white shirt spattered red. Another day, not long before that, she’d woken up at six o’clock as usual, washed her face, gone to the toilet, made packed lunches for her husband and son, as well as breakfast for all three of them, and had seen them off for the day, and then it was time for the laundry, and it was around the end of March, her son would soon be on his spring holidays, and the weather was good, so she stripped the beds, washed the sheets, and hung them on the washing line – the one over there, in her garden. As the sheets began to dry, the weave of the crumpled fabric had gradually opened, revealing the red flowers of the camellia beyond, so that when she saw the bloodstains on the man’s shirt, she was reminded of how those flowers had looked through the sheets that day. She’d always tended to the camellia carefully, but now, with the house feeling increasingly cramped as their son got older, they were building an extension, and so they had decided to give the tree away, despite its having been there ever since they’d married and moved in together and seeming to her a living manifestation of all the time the family had spent together.  

The gardener arrived and began unceremoniously gouging the tree out of the earth. Unable to bear the roughness with which he worked, she tried to grab him, to make him stop. When her husband rushed out to calm her down and lead her away, she ran into the house, laid her head down on the low table in the living room, and started sobbing loudly. ‘Digging away with those cold tools of his! Those cruel, uncaring hands!’ When she looked up, the sleeve of her smock was stained a bright red. Bringing her hand to her mouth, she realised that she wasn’t just crying – at some point, her nose had begun to bleed. ‘My camellia’s tears, red as blood, dripping from my nose.’ The fight at the station had been broken up by staff and a few commuters. With only a sidelong glance at the commotion, she boarded her train. She was heading to a town across the river, almost in the next prefecture, to find the house to which her camellia had been taken. She’d had the extension work called off at the last minute, stubbornly insisting that her husband and the carpenter alter the plans so that the shrubbery could be left in place. But her camellia had already been dug up and taken away, so she had tracked it down, and now she meant to get it back. She got off the train and marched purposefully along the riverbank. Whatever the new owners might say, she was going to get her tree back, by force if necessary – it belonged in her garden and nowhere else. It was a bright early spring day and, though the cold wind racing across the river lashed at her side, she didn’t falter – if anything, the wind seemed to galvanise her step. The long, wide river lent its surging strength not only to the wind, but to her as well.  

But just by committing Mrs Izawa’s story to writing from memory like this, I feel like I’ve given it a tidiness it’s not supposed to have. When she told it, she recounted at great length how that morning (although which morning she meant was already unclear) she woke up at such and such a time, washed her face, went to the toilet, and made breakfast, except rather than just breezing through the bare facts of this morning routine, she’d evoked the stiff feel of the tap as she turned it, the sensation of discomfort she experienced before recognising it as the need to urinate, her posture as she relieved herself, the warmth of her urine after a night under her duvet, the smells, textures and flavours of her ingredients as they mingled in the kitchen, and in writing the story out, unable to weave all these details into a single sequence of events, I had no choice but to omit them, even though I hadn’t entirely forgotten them. So now I wonder if maybe it’s enough to just describe what happened without tying it all together, which makes me feel like Mrs Izawa’s storytelling, in which all these fragmentary sensations and incidents are brought into the foreground, really does deserve to be considered a kind of art. What’s less clear is who she’s telling her stories to, now that she has no one left to listen – apart from me sitting here and listening in from the window of the building opposite, of course. Maybe they’re not intended for anyone else’s ears in the first place. Except for the coldest of winter days, her door is always left wide open, but the only creatures I’ve seen going in and out, aside from her, are the cats. 

ERICA: Thank you so much. It’s so delicate and so rich and an even more wonderful experience hearing you read it out loud as well because you have the sense of the layered speakers. So, thank you for that wonderful reading. This story, Kamachi & Pictures of Her, which are two distinct stories but once you read them together you can’t help but see the connections, they both seem to have a lot to do with the nature of memory and the constructed nature of memory in the context of telling, whether to yourself or to somebody else, and when I was reading the stories and hearing you read them just now again, it brings to mind lots of things around narrative versus the vivid detail or the unreliability of memory or subjectivity of it, and you mentioned that this was a theme in Takiguchi’s writing. Having spent time with his fiction, could you speak a little bit more about this theme and how you’ve approached it? 

JESSE: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a pleasure to actually be able to read this out loud because, as you say, it does definitely add something to it, especially in a story which is literally about an oral storyteller and the narrator’s attempts to mimic her. I used the word ‘slippery’ to describe his prose earlier and I think slipperiness is a really good way into looking at how he thinks about time and place and memory and how those things all bounce off each other and how storytelling in itself is one of the few ways we can try and get back to things that happened in the past. Although often, in the telling, we find that things change and slip around and that’s kind of what he’s also doing in his prose. So, it can sound very cerebral, I guess, but it’s really not. It’s very playful, that’s why I like the word ‘slippery’ because it’s kind of fun and it suggests occasionally maybe taking a pratfall. And the journey back into the past isn’t some kind of smooth intellectual journey, it’s a jagged one which throws up all sorts of things that you’re not expecting. So his book, which he won the Akutagawa Prize for, is slippery in the sense that it’s switching narrative point of view. I always think of it as a kind of roaming camera, that sense of multiple polyphonic narrators coming in and out of the frame. 

ERICA: Yeah. In the second story, Pictures of Her, we have another first-person narrator – actually, all of these books have first-person narrators – but with this first-person narrator, the way in which we view the narrator changes over time as well, in terms of how we contextualise the story that he is telling us and that gets affected as the story goes along, even in such a short space of time. One of the things I really loved about reading all three of these books is how totally different they were from each other – tonally, subject matter, voice, everything, which is partly what makes it such a great selection. I’d like to invite Yuki to give us a reading next. We’re going to hear an excerpt from Wataya Risa’s Then Why Ask Me To Come? That’s Yuki’s translation of the title and it’s a brilliantly witty COVID lockdown barbecue story that takes a rather awkward turn for its dodgy narrator. Wataya Risa is a multi-award-winning author from Tokyo. She was the youngest-ever winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. She’s funny, feminist, unexpected and you’re in for a real treat in this very excellent translation by Yuki. Yuki Tejima was born in Tokyo, raised in Los Angeles, and the authors she’s translated include Mizuki Tsujimura, Kumi Kimura and Emi Yagi. So, I’m going to hand over to Yuki to give us a little excerpt.  

YUKI: Thank you for that, Erica. This is the beginning of the story called Then Why Ask Me To Come? A little bit about the title: In Japanese it’s 嫌いなら呼ぶなよ which is kind of a harsh way of saying, ‘don’t call me if you didn’t want me to come over, don’t invite me if you didn’t want me to come’ which is very long in English and also not very punchy. But because this was my first translation, I didn’t know how adventurous we were allowed to be. So, David Boyd was very helpful. He was like, ‘What are your suggestions?’ and I had literally, ‘don’t call me if you don’t want me to come.’ They were very bad titles. And David said, ‘Well, how about something like “then why’d you ask me to come?”’ and I was like, that’s exactly what I would say if someone asked me what this Japanese phrase meant in English. I would say, ‘then why’d you ask me to come?’ and when he suggested that, I was like, ‘Am I allowed to do that? Is that okay?’ because that’s how it translates but it’s not a direct translation. So that was my first lesson, actually, and I was thrilled with the title. I was like, ‘Yes that’s great!’ and then it was ‘Why’d you ask me to come?’ which is very American or ‘Then why ask me to come?’ which is more British and we went back and forth with the title. But I’m very happy. This is how 嫌いなら呼ぶなよ, the Japanese title, would sound in English, ‘Then why’d you ask me to come?’ and that became ‘Then Why Ask Me To Come?’ and this is the start of the story. It is a husband wife, they have been invited to go to a barbecue at a friend’s house, but it’s not during lockdown but close to the lockdown being called off. And so everyone’s kind of iffy on ‘Are we supposed to wear masks? Are we allowed to gather?’ and then this barbecue takes a turn. The narrator is the husband.  

The sun was blindingly bright. My prediction had been spot-on, as usual, and the rays were stronger now than when we’d left the house. Smart decision to put sunscreen on the back of my neck – an often-overlooked spot.  

Kaede, on the other hand, had said the forecast had promised clouds all day and she would bring her UV-block umbrella just in case, but otherwise she was all set. By the time the subway arrived and we’d climbed the stairs up to the exit, however, the clouds had dissipated and it was sunny skies all the way. Kaede turned to me weakly, ‘Oh wow, so bright. Can I borrow your sunscreen?’  

Thus vindicated, I obliged and squeezed a dollop of white onto my palm, then slathered it on her neck, arms, even her slivers of exposed ankle, which made her giggle. I wanted to pull out my own black 100% UV-blocking umbrella, which I had also brought along in my bag, but considered how overtly feminine that would look. Lucky Kaede, who could whip out her sunshade at any time, come rain or shine, and not attract stares. 

By now, the mask I’d been wearing for what felt like hours had grown so humid on the inside that I thought I might pass out, but at least it afforded the lower half of my face an additional protection from the sun. That’s what I told myself anyway – a small recompense for my suffering.  

When we arrived at the small gate in front of the Moriuchi house, the three Moriuchi kids and the two Kawahara kids were chasing each other around the lawn with huge water guns. Soaked T-shirts, radiant smiles. The guns looked like bazookas in their small arms, and they were completely drenched. On spotting us, they waved and called out in unison, ‘Hello!’  

We’d met them a few times before – such good, well-behaved children.  

‘They’re having so much fun!’ Kaede exclaimed.  

When the Moriuchis first planned this house, so Kaede had said on the way over, they were thinking of using this space as a garage. Then they realised that there were no parks in the neighbourhood for the kids to play, so they planted some grass and turned it into a lawn instead. Wasn’t that the best idea?  

At first I thought I was supposed to laugh at the Moriuchis’ ridiculous mistake, but as I had listened, I realised Kaede genuinely believed it had been a fantastic idea. So, I had smiled and said, ‘They’re lucky to have such loving parents.’ She had smiled back. 

 Folding up her white-and-beige striped umbrella, Kaede now rang the bell and called out from the gate, ‘Hello, it’s the Shimotsukis!’  

‘Just a second,’ I heard Ham-Ham call back in her singsong voice.  

My body tensed. I had really not wanted to come here today. The Moriuchis’ housewarming had been postponed once, then twice, due to the State of Emergency, which was finally lifted last week. Secretly, I’d wished it might go on forever if that meant never having to come to this party. From a quick look at the house, I could tell it was an obvious upgrade from their previous apartment. That was all I really needed to see; I was ready to get the hell out.  

Kaede opened the gate and headed toward the house with me a few steps behind. In front of the door lay a moss-green doormat with the word WELCOME shouting in capital letters that also seemed to threaten silently: Don’t you dare enter in those filthy shoes. This was already too much for me. I scraped my shoe against the E and told myself I was overthinking things.  

‘Come on in!’  

My mortal enemy, Ham-Ham, smiled through a crack in the door. Wait, I knew this scene from somewhere…  

That’s it – The Shining. Heeeeere’s Ham-Ham!  

‘Oh my god, Ham-Ham! I’ve missed you. I’m so excited to finally see your new house! It’s gorgeous. I love it!’  

‘Thanks for coming in this crazy heat. I missed you too! Talking on the phone just isn’t the same.’ 

 Kaede and Ham-ham threw out their arms and clasped their fingers together. Moeka Moriuchi, formerly Hamura – hence the nickname – was Kaede’s closest friend. They’d met on the girls volleyball team back in high school and were still thick as thieves, even after marriage and kids. She was the first friend to whom Kaede had introduced me, shortly after we’d started dating. Kaede and I had met at a mutual friend’s party, and I’d invited her to go scuba diving with me.  

To me, Ham-Ham was more terrifying than Great King Enma, the king of hell himself. If I ever had the nerve to slip up in any way, Ham-Ham would get a call from my wife and by the following morning would know every suffocating detail like it’d headlined Yahoo News. For example, once, I’d pushed aside a few mushrooms – they’re not my favourite – in a dish Kaede had cooked, only to then receive a bizarre lecture the following visit, not from my wife but from Ham-Ham, about how picky eaters missed out on much-needed nutrients in what should be a balanced diet.  

‘Oh, hello, Shimotsuki-san. Thanks for coming. I know how busy you are.’ 

ERICA: Thank you so much. That was brilliant. So funny. This story is such a great example of COVID satire, and all of the social norms and judgments that are part of every society anyway are brought to the fore and amplified because everyone’s all so on edge about what to do about wearing masks and distancing and all the rest of it, all of the weird, seemingly arbitrary restrictions that were on us during that strange time. But I was interested in how COVID was experienced in Japan versus in the UK or in the US. I think it was a different experience for people, even though some of the things were the same, and I was wondering how that factored into how you translated how to make that experience relatable or not. 

YUKI: Thank you for that question. In March 2020, when the lockdown started to happen, I was actually in LA and I was locked down in LA for six months with my parents, but I was on social media and hearing news from friends and family about how things were in Japan and mostly things were the same. Everyone was wearing masks, everyone was disinfecting everything and not gathering and social distancing and all of that. But what I thought was interesting was that later on in the story the narrator talks about the mask police, which is basically people who go around checking to make sure that people are wearing masks in Japan, and they make the person who’s not wearing a mask feel bad enough, either directly by saying something to them or just kind of looming, just kind of giving them the eye and making them feel bad enough that they will either just scurry home and put on a mask or never leave the house until they no longer have to wear masks. And that’s the pressure, the social pressure that the Japanese have to live with, with or without a pandemic. What I thought was interesting was that this story actually makes more sense now to the rest of the world. I’m sure that the rest of the world can now relate to the tiniest nuances and the way that people can make you feel insecure. And this narrator, who ends up showing how insecure he is, even though he is handsome, he has women falling all over him, even after he’s married, he knows that he’s good-looking and he’s charming, but he’s so insecure inside and that is probably a result of all the social pressures. And what was interesting as I was translating this is that this is the kind of scrutiny that Japanese people have to go through on a regular, everyday basis and people around the world can now understand what it is that the Japanese put each other through. And it’s stifling, it’s suffocating to Japanese people. That’s why Wataya wrote this story and wrote this book of collections of people with very questionable morals, and then there are the people who are judging them as well. As we read the story, we’re siding with this side and then we side with the other side, and we’re going back and forth to the point where we no longer know – ‘Okay, wait, so who’s right and who’s wrong and what’s moral and what’s immoral?’ I think Wataya wrote this because it was so suffocating in Japan. Japanese society checking on each other, making sure that everyone else, not just themselves, because of course they were following all the rules, but they were making sure that everyone else was following all the rules too. But this is not a COVID novel in that it applies in Japan at any time, probably throughout history. This is what Japan is like, what Japanese society is like.  

ERICA: Yeah, there’s that sort of ‘don’t cause other people meiwaku’ sort of thing, isn’t there, which doesn’t really exist in more individualistic cultures in the West. Like, you know that you have a duty not to be a burden on other people by potentially spreading your germs or whatever, but that’s policed much more harshly and judged much more harshly. But without giving away any spoilers, the narrator/main character has also done wrong in an individual way in his own relationships and dealings. I found his voice so fascinating because even in that extract we could hear little insecurities about appearing feminine or watching to see the material progress of the host of the party, things like that. So, he’s noticing little social markers, while also claiming to be quite self-confident in his own masculinity or whatever. It was a very amazing portrait of a fragile, male ego thing. But in a way, that sustains over a short story because of the brevity of it and the way his character gets ramped up to the max by the end of the few pages that we are with him. Can you tell me a little bit about creating that voice? 

YUKI: Sure. This voice was so much fun to create. My best friend in LA read this and she was like, ‘I didn’t know whether to love him or hate him or whether to love the other people at the party or hate them,’ and this was so much fun to create. I remember Wataya saying in interviews that she wrote this story and wrote this man because on Japanese television and in the media in general, celebrities and famous people are often made to apologise in public to the public about being caught having an affair or whatever. Wataya was watching these interviews and these people are apologising but their eyes are just completely dead and they have these blank looks and Wataya was thinking, ‘Do these people even know what they’re saying? They don’t look like they’re very sorry at all.’ And so she’s writing about a man who is apologising for doing things that cause everyone at the party to accuse him of doing whatever he has done and he’s apologising but he has this kind of blank look. He’s not really absorbing any of it. But what’s interesting is that it’s kind of a monologue from his point of view, and you can tell that even though he looks completely blank and empty from the outside, on the inside he’s so desperate and anxious and if someone says something, it’s like pop-pop-pop-pop, he’s saying something, even if he doesn’t say it out loud, it’s happening inside of him or he comes up with all these excuses and all of a sudden he’s ranting at everyone else but then only on the inside. I most enjoyed translating the rhythm and the pace of all the things that occur inside him. His words are ‘I’m very sorry,’ ‘My heart is breaking,’ ‘I’m sorry to have hurt you,’ all these things, but inside he’s like, ‘Why should I be sorry? It’s not my fault that all these women are coming to me’ and so I think I enjoyed the translation of the rhythm and the pace and I think it’s in the pacing and the rhythm and in his having to come back on everything but not being able to say it out loud that shows his sense of urgency and his desperation. I really paid attention to the pacing and the rhythm of his speech, his internal speech.  

ERICA: Yes, that’s fantastic. There is a big difference between the external words and the interior monologue of the narrator. Thank you so much for that. Right, we’re going to hear from Daniel now, an excerpt from Machida Kou’s The God of the Word. Machida Kou is from the previous generation to the other two writers we’ve heard from tonight and he was born in Osaka. As well as being an award-winning writer, as Daniel was saying, he’s quite a famous punk-rock singer and actor. Daniel is a translator and anthologist of Japanese fiction, as well as senior editor at Kodansha USA in New York. He’s currently compiling and editing the Penguin Book of Japanese Science Fiction for Penguin Classics, which sounds really exciting. Over to you, Dan, for your excerpt.  

DANIEL: Thanks, Erica. I’m just going to read the first part of the story, which sets up the tone and the world without getting you into the part where it goes off the rails completely. It was interesting hearing you guys just now talking about the narrative of Yuki’s story because it’s a very Machida-esque character. These kind of unpleasant men tend to figure centrally in his work. What’s interesting about this one is that it’s an unpleasant man from the fifth century CE, rather than our time.  

Ruling all under heaven from his seat at the Hatsuse no Asakara no Miya, Ōhatsuse no Wakatakeru no Mikoto, fifth scion of the nineteenth emperor Ingyō, was a magnificent and all-powerful sovereign and the tale of how he came to rule this land is a lurid and bloody one indeed.  

Long story short, it all began in 454, when Emperor Ingo departed this mortal coil. All manner of things happened as a result, but ultimately it led to his third son, Anaho no Mikoto, who dwelt at the Isonokami no Anaho no Miya, acceding to the throne as emperor Ankō. Immediately upon doing so, the new emperor dispatched a messenger called Ne no Omi to his uncle, Ōkusaka.  

Ne no Omi said unto Ōkusaka, ‘So, the emperor asked me to drop by and see how you might feel about your sister marrying his little brother Ōhatsuse. Well, Whaddya think?’  

Ōkusaka was overjoyed. And why wouldn’t he be? Ōhatsuse was the emperor’s full-blooded brother and if Okakaga’s sister married him, it would practically guarantee his prospects. What’s not to like? So Ōkusaka said, ‘Hell yeah.’ But not only did he thus express his enthusiastic consent, he went one step further and trotted out this insanely fancy and impressive headdress crown kind of thing, then said, ‘Here, give this to the emperor for me.’  

He figured he could strengthen his newfound alliance through the giving of this luxurious gift.  

Ne no Omi said, ‘Cool, I’ll pass it along,’ and then departed.  

The thing is, this Ne no Omi character was a total dirtbag and, after one look at this gorgeous crown, he was seized by a covetous urge. ‘I gotta say, this is one helluva crown,’ said he unto he. ‘The more I look at it, the more I think I’d rather keep it. I’d better just hang on to this for myself.’ And lo, the scumbag did take it home with him.  

But, realising that at some point Ōkusaka and Anaho no Mikoto would compare notes and figure out that he’d stolen Ōkusaka’s gift, he reported back to Anaho no Mikoto with this outrageous confabulation. Ōkusaka said, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? I’d never let my sister marry that worthless Anako’s brother, not in a million years.’ And he went on: ‘That wasn’t all, though. He called me a moron and went and pulled his sword on me.’ He tacked this last bit on to emphasise that it had been a serious force majeure kind of a situation, the sly devil. 

Anyway, Anaho no Mikoto was so angry he couldn’t see straight. He went to Ōkusaka’s palace and screamed, ‘You fucked with the wrong guy, you sonuva bitch!’ Then he killed him.  

It all turned out to be something of disaster for Ōkusaka. But the real tragedy was that he had a wife and kid, Nagata no Ōiratsume and Mayowa no Miko, respectively. Now, Ōiratsume must have been something of a babe because Anaho no Mikoto brought her straight back to the palace and made her his empress.  

One day, purely by chance, Mayowa no Miko learned that it was Anaho no Mikoto who killed his father. He was only seven years old, but being a boy of uncommon pluck, he crept into the emperor’s bedchamber and, taking up the sword that lay nearby, cut off the emperor’s head. Realising it would be bad news if he got nabbed, he fled to the home of a man called Tsubura no Ōkimi, who lived over in Ikoma, in Nara. Quite something for a seven-year-old. Chalk it up to his imperial blood, I guess.  

Ōhatsuse was still just a child himself when he heard that his brother Anaho had been killed, but boy did it make him mad. In his rage, he rushed to his older brother, Kurohiko, and informed him that Mayowa no Miko had killed the emperor. Naturally, Ōhatsuse figured Kurohiko would say something to the effect of, ‘What?! No fuckin’ way! Gather the troops, we’ve gotta surround Tsubura no Ōkimi’s place and kill him and Mayowa both!’  

In the event, however, all Kurohiko said was, ‘Huh? Really?’ all calm, like it had nothing to do with him. He just kind of stared off in his space and didn’t seem much interested in getting involved in the whole drama.  

Boy did this make Ōhatsuse even more mad. ‘Okay. First off, he was the fucking emperor,’ he shouted. ‘Second, he was family. What are you doing, acting all calm when your own brother gets murdered?’ He grabbed Kurohiko by the collar and dragged him outside. Despite being the older of the two, Kurohiko whined pathetically – ‘Hey, come on, let go’ – like a big punk rocker getting shaken down by some little scamp. Ōhatsuse wasn’t about to let him off the hook, though, and he screamed, ‘Shut it!’ then lopped Kurohiko’s head clean off.  

Ōhatsuse then went straight to his older brother, Shirohiko, and informed him, too, that Mayowa no Miko had killed the emperor. Apparently, though, every single one of these brothers of his was a good-for- nothing layabout because, just like Kurohiko, Shirohiko said something like, ‘Huh, for real?’ and didn’t seem like he wanted to do a damn thing about it.  

Getting another such apathetic response incensed Ōhatsuse no Mikoto still more. ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ he shouted, and, grabbing his brother by the collar, dragged him outside. Shirohiko really got a raw deal. I mean, it wasn’t his fault he’d reacted the way as Kurohiko, he had no idea! If he’d known, maybe he would have tried to humour Ōhatsuse by saying something like, ‘Oh man, that really blows.’ But he didn’t.  

And it was extra bad luck for Shirohiko to be second because Ōhatsuse really lost it this time. He was even angrier than before and the little psycho dragged Shirohiko all the way to Takaichi, where he dug a hole and stood Shirohiko in it, then started burying him alive. All the while Shirohiko was weeping saying, ‘Hey, come on, stop burying me,’ but Ōhatsuse just replied, ‘Nice try,’ and kept on going. Then, when the dirt was up to Shirohiko’s waist, the pressure must have gotten to be too much because his eyes popped right out of his head and he died.  

We’re talking literally here, like in the cartoons, when their eyes boioioing right out of their sockets. For any readers who would like to emulate this for themselves, I recommend asking whoever’s around to hold two clementines up to their face. It was exactly like that. Only a little less orange. 

And it goes on from there. 

ERICA: Thank you so much. Oh my god. I was just laughing and laughing on the train reading this. It was so good. So, how did you nail that high/low register for this? Did it come out quickly on the page? Did you have to work at it? Did you try a few options?  

DANIEL: It took a long time. There was sort of my take – much like the others described in their process – there was my take and then David and Asa and I worked through a version and then Nathan at Strangers and I kept polishing it and trying to pitch it, UK versus US and then high versus low and sort of recognisable versus sort of alien. It was a balancing act that took quite a few passes to get to and involved a lot of building up and then stripping away, putting in too much and then realising, ‘Oh, it’s going to be funnier if there’s just a three-word sentence rather than a more elaborated joke.’ So, yeah, it was quite a process to get there in the end.  

ERICA: Sentence by sentence, you can look at the sort of language you’re used to seeing in mythology or ancient texts, the grammar of that and the tone and then completely mixed in with the dialogue. It’s just absolutely brilliant on a word-by-word level. I’ve got to congratulate you. I also wanted to mention the introduction you gave for the text. In the book, there’s one sentence that says that the author consulted a modern Japanese translation of the Kojiki for this story. Maybe you can tell us a bit about that. It’s a piece of Japanese myth that maybe not even all Japanese readers would know, so it needs a little bit of introduction from that point of view. But then, for the English language reader, Daniel adds this note: ‘the Kojiki, the record of ancient matters, is considered the oldest extant Japanese text. It’s a myth-history documenting (read: legitimising) the divine lineage of the emperors of the Yamato court, including our own Wakatakeru no Mikoto, AKA the emperor in the story. The first fourteen emperors are generally thought to be made up but Wakatakeru was supposedly a real guy. Which means all of this really happened. Well, some of it anyway.’ I really love the inclusion of that because it helps the reader a little bit to situate the story, but also gives you a feeling of the tone. I was wondering whose idea that was? I’m always interested in how translators reach out to the reader to say, ‘Here’s something that might help you or here’s something you need to work out for yourself’ and how you come to that decision. 

DANIEL: The one line that you mentioned that says the author consulted this modern translation of Kojiki is in the original, so I translated that, sort of faithfully, to keep that in there. And as you say, Kojiki is the kind of thing that all Japanese people would know about and maybe would have to read a little bit of in high school, but the actual content of it is fairly opaque to most. Initially, I wanted to do the note just to give readers a sense of what was going on here. Because Japanese people don’t necessarily have any connection to these characters or this story, I was happy to keep it just as confusing and opaque for English language readers. This long string of names and places and unrecognisable stuff, that’s just as overwhelming for most modern Japanese readers. So I was happy to retain that. But just the knowledge of what Kojiki is felt like important to put in there. It’s this kind of myth-history. It was an 8th century project that was essentially a sort of proto-nationalism. They wanted to legitimise their burgeoning nation state by saying, ‘Oh hey, our rulers go all the way back to the gods. This is how we came to be in charge here’ and that understanding, I thought, was important. And what Machida is doing here, he did it with another story as well. There’s a 15th century Marshall epic called Gikeiki, the story of Yoshitsune, that he also did a similar sort of piss-take on and in both cases he mixes the humour in and I think here it’s really taking that nationalist project and turning it on its head and sort of saying this is just as ridiculous then as it would seem now and people are just as terrible. That you can dress it up in fancy words and call it ancient and important and sacred or whatever, but people are just as shitty throughout all of history as they seem to be now. 

ERICA: And there’s an all-powerful god, the god of the title who appears and starts wreaking havoc/doing deals with the emperor as we go along and it gets more and more surreal. The god is a god who can bring things into being by just saying the word. So, it’s not even a question of telling what the future is but making it so by speaking and that starts out fairly benign and straightforward but it quickly becomes completely batshit. 

DANIEL: The only word for it! 

ERICA: I just love how it takes a completely mad turn and by the end we’re receiving gifts from what I guess readers will recognise in things from the 21st century basically just being thrown in there. So, there’s a sort of sending up of the myth and the idea of these heroic figures, making fun of that whole way of mythologising and telling story. But I felt like there was also something about contemporary society in there. Or am I reading too much? 

DANIEL: Yeah, he’s equal opportunity, his contempt. The modern people that – spoiler alert – end up showing up. He’s just as disgusted by them, I think, as he is by the emperor. In so far as this guy, Wakatakeru no Mikoto, or Emperor Yūryaku, was a real guy, in Kojiki he’s described as cruel and tyrannical. He’s known as this kind of awful person. So, Machida didn’t make that part up. And even in Kojiki there is the story that he meets this god called Nishinoami and they go hunting together. But that’s sort of where it ends. I think that he used that as the jumping-off point to be like, ‘Well, this god has this kind of weird name.’ It’s not explained what his powers are in Kojiki. So he said, ‘Oh, what would the powers be if you had this weird name?’ and then he just uses that to unleash chaos on Japanese history. But I do think that it is this kind of anti-authoritarian, anti-nationalist bit, and then I think it’s also just equally mocking modern consumer culture and profligate wasteful, shallow attitudes. So yeah, it’s all kind of in there and who knows if he even had that in mind. Maybe he was just trying to be funny. 

ERICA: Exactly. It’s very punk. Like with a lot of comic fiction, when you start talking about it, you can end up making it sound more intellectual and heavy than it is. Basically, it’s absolutely hilarious and I really recommend it to everybody, as I would all three of these books. We’re coming very near to the end of our time – an hour goes by very fast when you’re talking about really great books like these. Because there might be budding translators here in the audience, and I expect there are, including those working from Japanese, I wondered if you had a very quick piece of advice for anyone starting out in in your field to give them encouragement. Dan, we’ll start with you. 

DANIEL: Sure. I’ll approach it from a side that has nothing to do with translating itself, which is to say that, like anything else, it’s a business and it’s a world and it’s a group of people, and meeting people, I think, is the most important thing you can do. Go to translation events, go to readings, introduce yourself to people. If you want to get involved in the world of translation seriously, then you do need to become part of that world, and I think just putting yourself out there and meeting people and attending as many events as you can and so forth is really the way to do it. There are contests and mentorship programmes – I think Yuki and Jess, you both can speak to that as an experience – so there are these avenues in, but I do think just insinuating yourself into the world of translation as much as you can is a really good idea. 

ERICA: That’s a great tip. Thank you. Yuki, What about you? 

YUKI: I absolutely agree. If you don’t feel like you have enough to talk about with these people you’re meeting, just ask questions, because people tend to be very generous advising you and I wouldn’t be where I am in my short career if it weren’t for Jesse and Dan and all the translators I’ve met who’ve done this and who know more about this world than I do. So, absolutely, even if you’re shy, even if you don’t like networking, even if you don’t like events, just go and lurk and see what other people are talking about. I’ve become very much a question-asker. I just ask all these questions because I don’t know and I want to know and I’m very curious and I really care about knowing. So, meet people and ask questions and also read in both languages, the source and the target language, because, for example with Dan’s Kojiki, you need to know so much in order to translate this passage by Machida Kou, you need to know about Kojiki. Not that you have to read Kojiki, the Japanese ancient text, the Japanese will not have either. But I’ve been reading Japanese novels and English novels all my life and you never know when something that you’ve read will come back and become something you work on or something that gives you ideas for something that you’re working on. So, read, read, read, and read now because it becomes harder to do once you become a full-time literary translator. You will not have time to read. So try to take the time now and just read as much as possible. 

ERICA: Fantastic advice. Thank you. And Jesse? 

JESSE: I feel like Dan and Yuki have done a great job on both sides of the equation. Lurking, insinuating – both great words. I definitely did a lot of both of those before I had the courage to approach people. I guess it sounds kind of logical, but just being interested in literary translation, like really insanely interested in it, and asking questions even just of yourself, and then, when it comes to the actual process of translation, doing side-by-side comparisons, English and Japanese or whatever your languages are, just so you can kind of see inside the head of translators you admire and follow them down their thought processes. And then just reading madly. 

ERICA: Thank you very much. I hope that’s useful for anyone listening. It’s really great advice because the translation community is really a very generous and well-knitted-together community, from my perspective as an editor as well. And reading a lot and reading deeply and widely is helpful for any writer – translators are writers too, of course. So, thank you so much, all three of you, for this wonderful conversation, for sharing the readings, for being so good at reading your work as well. We’ve come to the end of our time and I need to say some thank yous again. Thank you to Strangers Press, obviously, for publishing these wonderful books, the Yanai Initiative, the University of East Anglia, the Norwich University of the Arts, National Centre for Writing, and to all of you for coming along. I hope you enjoyed the event and I hope you buy all five books. I’m sure there’s a link to do so somewhere on the screen. This event is a YouTube premiere, so it’s been broadcast but it will also be available on the NCW’s YouTube channel. So, thank you very much and have a great rest of the day.

KANATA is published by Strangers Press in partnership with the University of East Anglia, the Norwich University of the Arts, the National Centre for Writing and GRRR Design, generously funded by the Yanai Initiative.