(The essay first appeared at 3 Quarks Daily on Tuesday and I explored how this relates to the novel in my last substack called The Space In-Between)

1.

Every morning, the mathematician wakes up not knowing who he is.

Or rather, he knows exactly who he is. He knows his theorems, his love of prime numbers, the way a perfect equation can feel like something close to grace. What he cannot recall, however, is who slept in his house last night, who cooked his breakfast, whose child left muddy shoes by the door. His memory, damaged by a long-ago accident, resets every eighty minutes.

And yet it seems that no one who encounters him — not the housekeeper who tends to him, not her young son whom he names Root for the shape of his head, not even his sister-in-law who knew him before — would say he is not himself. He is achingly, luminously present in every moment. He simply cannot remember things happening before.

Yoko Ogawa’s novel The Housekeeper and the Professor has haunted me since I first read it, but it returned with new insistence when I recently opened Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness.

Before reading Pollan’s book, I struggled to think of Ogawa’s Professor as truly conscious, in the same way I am truly conscious, mainly I had always assumed that consciousness was inseparable from something called the continuous self. When I tried to imagine, for example: what I myself am beyond the sum total of my life experiences and my story of being “me,” I struggled. We have all heard families of Alzheimer’s sufferers describe how a light went out in the sufferer’s mind or how “mom was gone.”

If I put myself in the fictional professor’s shoes, for example, while I can imagine my love of reading and writing still being there even after a catastrophic loss of memory, I wonder what “me” would I be if I couldn’t recognize my son or my husband? How much can I lose and keep “feeling myself?”

Or more interesting, how much can I really lose and keep being myself?

Philosophers sometimes invoke the concept of a “philosophical zombie,” which is a being that imitates consciousness perfectly but has no inner subjective experience, no sense of what it is like to be itself. The Professor is the uncanny reverse: a being whose inner life is unmistakably rich, whose subjective experience of each eighty minutes is vivid and complete, but who cannot stitch those moments into a continuous story.

2.

For his new book, Michael Pollan spent five years interviewing neuroscientists, philosophers, Buddhist teachers and plant biologists, trying to understand what consciousness actually is — how three pounds of tissue between our ears (“the tofu,” as he calls it) generates the irreducible felt fact of being alive, of there being something it is like to be us.

He surveys the field’s most ambitious theories, including Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch’s Integrated Information Theory and Mark Solms’ argument that consciousness originates not in the cortex but in the ancient, feeling brainstem. He visits laboratories and meditation retreats, takes psychedelics in his garden and sits in silence in a cave in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. He returns, finally, not with an answer but with something more honest — a deepened sense of the mystery, and a suspicion that Western science may be hunting consciousness with the wrong instruments entirely.

Which is precisely where Ogawa’s Professor comes in.

The Professor is not a case study or a thought experiment. He is a literary character of extraordinary warmth and specificity. But he functions, whether Ogawa intended it or not, as a perfect counter-example to almost every dominant theory of consciousness that Pollan examines — and as a quiet argument for something that neither Koch’s mathematics nor Solms’s neuroscience quite reaches.

Central to much of both Western philosophy and modern neuroscience is the assumption of the continuous self — the idea that consciousness is not merely a series of present moments but a thread connecting them, a narrative the mind tells about itself across time.

We are conscious, on this account, precisely because we remember having been conscious: yesterday’s self reaches forward to claim today’s. This is something that has been denied to most animals (those that fail the mirror test, for example) and infants. It’s hard to fathom how surgeons as late as the early 1980s, operated on infants, particularly newborns, without analgesics or anesthetics, believing they were not fully conscious or capable of feeling pain.

Ditto for animals. It boggles the mind how anyone could not see dogs have a continuous sense of self.

The Professor in Ogawa’s book dismantles this assumption simply by existing. He has no continuous self in the conventional sense — no thread connecting this morning to last Tuesday, no accumulating autobiography. And yet his selfhood is unmistakable. His personality, his mathematical passion, his particular tenderness toward Root — all of it persists, morning after morning, without any narrative to sustain it.

Ogawa’s novel asks, with characteristic Japanese quietness, whether the continuous self we take to be the foundation of consciousness might be something closer to its furniture — useful, perhaps, but not load-bearing.

3.

I should confess that I have been thinking about Koch’s work for some time. Six years ago, writing in these very pages about octopuses and animal consciousness, I found Koch’s journey deeply moving — his rejection of his Catholic upbringing’s insistence that dogs have no souls, his commitment to extending moral consideration across species, his vision of consciousness as existing on a spectrum rather than as a binary human privilege. The Integrated Information Theory he developed with Giulio Tononi seemed to offer exactly what we needed: a scientific framework generous enough to include octopuses, trees, perhaps even fungi networks, in the vast web of sentient life. I was persuaded, or close to it anyway.

Reading A World Appears, I find myself less certain.

Not about Koch’s moral impulse, which remains admirable, but about the theoretical architecture.

IIT assigns consciousness a mathematical value — phi — as though awareness were a property a system possesses, as measurable as temperature or electrical charge. And it was precisely this framework that Koch and David Chalmers wagered on in 1998: Koch betting that the neural correlates of consciousness would be identified within twenty-five years, Chalmers that they would not. In 2023, Koch conceded. The experiments designed to adjudicate between IIT and its rival Global Neuronal Workspace Theory produced no decisive verdict. The mystery of the hard problem held.

What strikes me now, reading Ogawa’s novel alongside Pollan’s account of this failure, is that both Koch and his rival theorists may be asking consciousness to be the wrong kind of thing. They are looking for a substance, a property, something a brain has.

But the Professor — losing and regaining himself every eighty minutes, conscious beyond any reasonable doubt and yet possessing nothing resembling the continuous neural integration IIT requires — suggests that consciousness may be less like a property and more like a weather: something that arises between things, in the space of encounter, irreducible to any single system’s internal state.

Mark Solms was another thinker I’d encountered before. Reading The Hidden Spring some years ago, I was moved above all by its origin story: a childhood memory of watching his younger brother fall from a roof and survive, but changed, his personality subtly altered along with his cognition, prompting the young Solms to ask a question he would spend his career pursuing: if my brain were damaged, would I still be me?

I think that is my question as well, and something that haunted me as I re-read Ogawa’s book last week.

Solms’ answer, developed over decades of working with neurological patients and training as a Freudian psychoanalyst, is that consciousness originates not in the cortex — not in the sophisticated, language-processing, reasoning brain we tend to think of as the seat of our selfhood — but far deeper, in the ancient brainstem we share with all vertebrates. Feelings, on this account, come first. Thought is downstream. The hidden spring is not cognition but affect, connected to emotion and feeling—. It is also something explainable by Natural Selection since beings who trust their gut when danger is at hand will be more apt to survive, in the same way that having a sense of self would help a creature succeed.

Pollan seems to find Solms the more sympathetic of his two main interlocutors, and I understand why. There is something in Solms’s insistence on the primacy of feeling — on consciousness as fundamentally affective rather than computational — that feels closer to lived experience than Koch’s mathematical phi.

And yet again, reading Ogawa’s Professor, I find myself wondering whether even Solms’s generous, feeling-centered model captures what the novel quietly insists upon. The Professor’s brainstem is presumably intact. His feelings are exquisite: mathematical beauty moves him almost to tears, Root’s head in his hands is the most perfect thing in the world. And yet his self, in any conventional neurological sense, is radically discontinuous.

4.

This leads me to what I find most distinctive — and most challenging — about Ogawa’s novel as a contribution to the consciousness debate: its profound Japaneseness.

While Japanese thought is far from monolithic, the traditions that have most deeply shaped its aesthetic and ethical life — from ancient Shinto through Buddhism to the Kyoto School philosophers of the twentieth century — share a tendency to approach reality not as a collection of discrete substances possessing properties, but as a field of relations, a web of interdependencies, a dynamic of encounters and entanglements.

Even the term for human being bears this out on some level in Japanese:

人 (hito) — person, an individual

間 (ma or aida) — space, interval, betweenness, the space between things

人間 (ningen) — human being, literally “person-between” or “the space between people”

One of the oft-cited examples is from philosopher Kitaro Nishida, who remarked that while Westerners routinely make subject-based utterances, such as “I hear the bell,” that in natural Japanese a person would say, “the sound of the bell is heard.” Does this point to anything deeper than a linguistic difference? Nishida suggested it pointed to an understanding of pure experience as something that precedes the division of self and world: a moment before the “I” claims the hearing as its own..

Nishida is best known for his concept of basho. This is usually translated as “place” or “field.” He made use of this term to counter what he saw as Western philosophy’s insistence on the primacy of the individual subject, and by extension objects, which perhaps is what led to Western philosophers wanting to find a material object called “consciousness.”

For Nishida, consciousness is not a property that a self possesses; rather it is the field within which both self and world arise together; that moment of the bell being heard.

The Professor lives in basho. Every eighty minutes, his accumulated self dissolves back into that clearing of basho, and what remains — what persists through every reset — is not a narrative self but something more fundamental: a capacity for encounter, for feeling, for the particular quality of attention he brings to a prime number or a child’s head. His consciousness, Ogawa seems to suggest with great beauty, was never something he owned. It was always something that happened in the space between him and the world.

Pollan, in his book, is drawn toward something like this. His encounters with meditation and psychedelics repeatedly bring him to the edge of the individual self’s dissolution, and he finds these moments not terrifying but revelatory.

There is a related concept in Zen Buddhism that goes even further: 自他不二 — jita funi — literally “self and other, undivided.” Where Nishida’s basho describes the field in which self and world arise together, jita funi insists that the boundary between them is not merely porous but ultimately illusory. The self does not encounter the other across a distance — the encounter itself is what both self and other are made of. The Professor, who cannot accumulate a self between encounters, lives this not as a philosophy but as a fact of his daily existence. Every eighty minutes, the boundary dissolves. Every eighty minutes, what remains is pure relation.

Pollan is fascinated by what researchers call “lantern consciousness”: drawing on the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik’s work: the wide, diffuse, peripherally aware state found in young children, meditating monks, and people in psychedelic states. It stands in contrast to what Gopnik calls “spotlight consciousness”: the narrow, self-referential awareness of ordinary adult cognition, in which the prefrontal cortex has developed enough to focus the beam but in doing so has dimmed the periphery. Adulthood, on this account, is in some sense a narrowing: we gain executive function and lose wonder. The Professor, whose default mode network can no longer sustain its usual narrative function, lives permanently in the lantern state: not by spiritual practice or pharmacology, but by neurological circumstance. His eighty-minute window does not constrain him; it liberates him into a perpetual present, undimmed by yesterday’s accumulations.

The relational model of consciousness may also have unexpected relevance to current debates about artificial intelligence. If consciousness arises in a field of relation rather than within an individual system, the question of machine consciousness becomes harder to dismiss and harder to measure. It may be, as Nishida’s logic suggests, that the right question is not whether an AI possesses consciousness, but whether genuine encounter is possible — and what happens in the generative space between (in Japanese “Ma.”)

5.

Pollan, to his credit, senses all of this. A World Appears is not a book that arrives at triumphant answers — it is a book that learns, slowly and honestly, to sit with the mystery. And in that humility, it comes closer to Ogawa than its scientific apparatus might suggest. What both writers share, finally, is a conviction that consciousness is not a problem to be solved but a fact to be inhabited — something that exceeds every instrument brought to bear on it, including language itself.

Ogawa’s novel ends quietly, as it must. The Professor’s eighty minutes shrink to almost nothing. He moves to a care facility. And yet the housekeeper and Root keep coming — once a month, packing a lunch, sitting with him in the sun when the weather allows, playing catch. Root grows up to become a mathematics teacher, carrying the Professor’s love of numbers into the lives of children who will never know where that love came from. The Professor does not remember any of it. He cannot. And none of it, for that reason, is lost.

At the same time, bringing it back to evolutionary explanations for subjective awareness, it is not at all clear whether the Professor in the novel could ever survive on his own in his current state. He is cared for on a daily basis by others and ends his days in a facility.

But Ogawa’s story depicts something that neither Koch’s phi nor Solms’s hidden spring quite captures, being concerned about not where consciousness lives, but what it leaves behind. And more, what it calls forth in others, unbidden, across the space between. The seventeenth-century Japanese poet Mizuta Masahide, in a poem so admired that Bashō himself praised it, wrote:

蔵焼けて 障るものなき 月見哉
kura yakete sawaru mono naki tsukimi kana

The storehouse burns down —
nothing now obstructs
the view of the moon.

The Professor loses everything, eighty minutes at a time. And each morning, unobstructed, the moon is still there.

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NOTES

• Every so often in class crafts on writing, you will hear about the consciousness of the point-of-view character. Not just for first person protagonists but even for close-third, the novelist is evoking another “person’s” consciousness. That is, the novelist is describing what it is like to be that person, to walk around in that character’s skin…through interiority and descriptions of physical sensation, etc. For more on this, please see my Substack post here.

• I thought the Professor’s condition in Ogawa’s book was impossible, but learned that it is a real condition that maybe Oliver Sack’s described in his book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

• For those interested in “ma,”— the pregnant interval, the space between things — is the work of philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō’s concept of aidagara (間柄, betweenness).

• Readers interested in ma as a living concept across Japanese art, music, garden design, and daily life will find much to delight in Ma: The Japanese Secret to Contemplation and Calm, edited by Ken Rogers and John Einarsen and published by Tuttle Publishing (2025). The volume grew out of Kyoto Journal issue 98, also devoted to ma, which included my own essay “The Heart of the Matter: Translating the Heart Sutra,” subsequently republished at this publication. That the editors of Kyoto Journal felt an entire issue — and now an entire book — warranted by a single Japanese concept speaks to just how inexhaustible ma proves to be.

• Readers interested in the question of octopus consciousness and its relationship to the hard problem of mind will also find much to think about in Ray Nayler’s remarkable debut novel The Mountain in the Sea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), a near-future thriller set on a Vietnamese archipelago where a species of octopus appears to have developed its own language and culture. It is one of the most philosophically serious works of speculative fiction in recent memory — and proof that novelists sometimes reach where scientists cannot yet follow.

In fiction workshops, writers are often told that their job is to evoke consciousness. Not just to describe what a character does or says, but to render what it is like to be that person — to walk around in their skin, to feel the world from behind their eyes. This is what Henry James called the “central consciousness,” what contemporary craft teachers mean when they talk about deep point of view.

The novelist, in other words, is always in the business of simulating consciousness. Every close-third narrator, every first-person voice, is an act of imagining another subjectivity from the inside.

Which makes Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor a quietly radical act.

The novel is about a mathematician whose memory resets every eighty minutes following a car accident. He cannot form new long-term memories. Every morning he wakes to a world that is entirely familiar — he knows his theorems, his love of prime numbers, his deep feeling for the Hanshin Tigers. But his world is also entirely strange, because the housekeeper standing in his kitchen is, to him, someone he has never met before.

And here is the fascinating formal decision Ogawa makes: we never enter the Professor’s consciousness directly. The novel is narrated by the housekeeper. We see the Professor entirely from the outside — through her observations, her growing affection, her attempts to understand a man whose inner life she can only glimpse.

This is not an accident. It is, I think, the story’s deepest argument.

The temptation in fiction is to use memory loss as a plot engine—as a mystery to be solved and overcome like in the Bourne Identity. Or maybe to plunge us inside a fragmented consciousness directly as Vonnegut does in Slaughterhouse-Five. Ogawa refuses this.

By keeping us outside the Professor, she forces us to ask a different question: not what is it like to be him 間, but what is it like to be with him. What does his consciousness do to the space around him, to the people who encounter him, to the quality of attention and love that flows between them?

The answer, she suggests, is: quite a lot.

The Professor, despite — or because of — his condition, is extraordinarily present. He brings to every eighty-minute encounter a quality of attention that the housekeeper, and the reader, come to recognize as something rare and precious. He is not diminished by his condition. He is, in some fundamental sense, more purely himself than people who carry the full weight of their accumulated stories into every room they enter.

This connects to something deep in Japanese philosophical thought. The philosopher Kitarō Nishida observed that while Westerners say “I hear the bell,” natural Japanese renders it as “the sound of the bell is heard” — a moment before any “I” steps forward to claim the experience as its own. For Nishida, consciousness is not a property that a self possesses but a field within which both self and world arise together. He called this field basho — place, or clearing.

Ogawa’s formal choice enacts exactly this. By removing direct access to the Professor’s interiority, she refuses to let any “I” claim the experience. What we receive instead is the Professor as he appears in the field — in the housekeeper’s growing attachment, in her son’s devotion, in the quality of attention the Professor brings to a prime number or her child’s head. She fills the space not with psychology but with relation. The Professor’s consciousness, the novel quietly insists, was never something he possessed. It was always something that happened between him and the world.

I have been thinking about this a great deal while working on a longer essay about Ogawa’s novel alongside Michael Pollan’s remarkable new book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. Pollan spent five years talking to neuroscientists and philosophers about the hard problem of consciousness — the mystery of how subjective experience arises from matter. And he returned with a deepened sense of mystery and a suspicion that Western science may be hunting consciousness with the wrong instruments. Ogawa, I want to argue, is hunting it with the right ones. Will share the essay when it goes up at 3 Quarks Daily, next week! Hope everyone enjoyed the weekend!

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Picture from last week’s ikebana lesson—I made it through the first Sogetsu book and earned the first certificate—onward! In other news, I withdrew my acceptance from University of East Anglia (it practically killed me) and accepted at Columbia—but for various reasons I requested a deferment so will be starting my MFA in fiction in fall 2027.

Mieko Kawakami on Sisterhood, Survival, and Finding Hope in the Darkness

In Conversation With Her Translators, Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio

Interview in Literary Hub

I recently had the chance to talk with Mieko Kawakami and her two translators Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio by email about the author’s new novel Sisters in Yellow, which just came out in English a few weeks ago.

I first became interested in the book when I came across an interview she did with the New York Times in 2023, in which she mentioned that this new novel about four sisters was her version of the Makioka Sisters. Because Tanizaki is my favorite Japanese author, I was intrigued and kicked off the interview asking her about that reference.

This was the first interview I have ever done— and in retrospect I really wish I had quoted her directly since she perhaps decided she didn’t like the reference to Tanizaki any longer. It also could have been my stupid mistake of using the word ‘homage” which maybe was a stronger term than her “version.” At the time, I was thinking “in conversation with Tanizaki.” I should have just quoted her. At first, in a separate email, she denied saying that (I think she meant the word homage) but I mentioned both the New York Times, as well as a longer article in which she was quoted in Vogue Japan. Next time I will be more careful. But I think the good news is I thought her answer to that question was fantastic and showed how incredibly intelligent and interesting she is! It also, despite my own increasing discomfort, allowed her and her to share a lot about herself and her background with readers.

Her US publisher, by the way, compared the book the the TV show Breaking Bad. I haven’t seen that one yet, so can’t speak to the similarity…

In the Vogue article she said something about how in the US it is very hard to publish commercially in literary fiction without university level creative writing classes—I think she was probably referring to the MFA. I was glad to hear her say that she hopes Japan keeps to its current system of finding emerging writers by contests. Her own start was winning a prestigious one.

Another interesting thing we touched on was the way this new novel was first serialized in the newspaper. I wish American newspapers featured serialized novels like they do in Japan where readers can see a story evolve in a fast draft form first.

Speaking of MFA programs, I just found out that I was accepted at Columbia in fiction and will start in September. It was a hard decision since I was very excited to be heading to Europe (I was accepted at Trinity College Dublin and the University of East Anglia). In addition to being one of the great MFA programs in the US, Columbia also has a vibrant literary translation tract, and I am going to talk to a member of the faculty next week about the possibility of pursuing classes in that course a well. I am really excited!! The two translators of Sisters in Yellow met at the translation seminar held at the University of East Anglia…. It really was tough to decide between UEA and Columbia since they both have it all! Norwich England, where UEA is located is a charming place!

The interview with the Kawakami team is here (and I copied it below)

One of Japan’s most acclaimed contemporary writers, Mieko Kawakami was launched into literary stardom in 2007, when she won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s prestigious award for emerging writers. Her work, which has been translated into over forty languages, is known for its philosophical explorations of gender, class, and ethics in modern society.

Increasingly popular overseas as well as at home, her novel Heaven was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize, and this was followed the next year by All the Lovers in the Night becoming a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award. Like a lot of people, I was greatly looking forward to reading her new novel Sisters in Yellow, which is now out in English, translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio and published by Knopf.

*

Leanne Ogasawara: The novel opens when the protagonist Hana notices the name of a woman she knows—but thought she had all but forgotten—in a short news article that appears one day on her smartphone screen. That moment unlocks memories of a time twenty years earlier when she lived with Kimiko, along with two other women, in a place she calls the “yellow house.” These memories are something Hana has long sealed away in her mind of a time when the four of them lived and worked alongside one another, helping each other survive in a tough world of poverty and exploitation.

In several interviews, you mentioned that The Sisters in Yellow was a loose homage to Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s Makioka Sisters, one of the most beloved novels in modern Japanese literature. Tanizaki’s novel about four sisters in an aristocratic family in Osaka, is sometimes described as portraying the fading world of the old merchant-aristocracy, using the sisters’ divergent paths to marriage and work as an exploration of the tensions between tradition and modernity.

At a glance, your four sisters could not appear more different, and I wondered if you could speak just a bit about Tanizaki’s four sisters and your four “sisters?” I am also thinking of the delightful four sisters in Kuniko’s Mukoda’s novel Asura no Gotoku.

What drew you to the question of sisterhood?

(This question continues at the end)

Mieko Kawakami: I did mention offhandedly in an interview once that in the English-language context, if you say four Japanese sisters, Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters will probably still be the first thing on people’s minds, and I’d be happy if contemporary readers would see Hana and her friends as a new generation of sisters. Somewhere along the way, it seems people took that as homage… I do enjoy The Makioka Sisters though, and you can really sense Tanizaki’s motivations as an author; it’s come to function as an alternative to the backdrop of the time it was written in and the state of Japan’s literary world during the war.

We’re being used by algorithms, not only on the political level, but even in our most insignificant everyday choices.

In my case, I always want to write about feelings and scenes and human relationships that haven’t been written yet, and I want to shake up, to disrupt, ideas people take as given knowledge—I think that’s what it is to take an alternative stance. People often believe that we can understand things simply by categorizing them, and that bothers me. This might be something Tanizaki and I share in common, though our methods are different. In other words, I think the role of literature is to disturb those who go about their lives without a care, completely sure and never doubting anything, and at the same time to ease, even if only a little, the burdens of those who go through life in a state of anxiety and fear. That’s my job as a writer.

I started writing Sisters in Yellow right as #MeToo and fourth-wave feminism were hitting Japan, and people were beginning to understand how important it was for women to empower each other, how important sisterhood was. Of course, none of the problems these movements sought to tackle have been solved—it’s an uphill battle. At the same time, I think through fiction I wanted to underscore that within women’s solidarity, I believe there’s not only good—there’s an equally strong potential for negativity. I wanted to highlight solidarity’s underlying problems with the same intensity that I believed in its goodness.

The opposite is true as well. If there are things we take for granted as being evil, I want to show in detail the parts of that “evil” that might be good. And I don’t mean just on the conceptual level. We’ll never understand other people, other ideologies, what’s going on in the world, if we only consume what we want to consume, only share the social media we want to share with the people we want to share it with. We’re being used by algorithms, not only on the political level, but even in our most insignificant everyday choices. I think now more than ever, it’s important that when our feeds show us something that leaves an impression on us, that we also cultivate the ability to imagine things that are far beyond those images.

LO: In the novel, the protagonist Hana learns of a feng shui belief that says placing something yellow on the west side of one’s home will improve a person’s financial fortune. My Japanese hardcover copy has a publisher’s marketing strip on the cover which asks: “Why do people become so obsessed with money to the point of committing crimes to chase after it?” But in some sense the four “sisters” are only trying to survive, like the Makioka sisters, in a world that is stacked against them. For me they seemed less obsessed with money than trying to protect themselves in a life without a social safety net. I would love to hear more about your thoughts about money and the color yellow. Not only in terms of prosperity but also about hope. And maybe something about the nightlife, or mizu shobai, in which the women work?

MK: On the catchcopy for the Japanese edition, there’s a phrase: “Committing crime. Mad on money.” But for me, Hana, the protagonist, is the most straight-laced of them all. She’s empathetic and responsible; she’s clever, catches on more quickly than anyone else; and from start to finish, she’s always completely sane. That’s precisely why she needed to live the way she did. At the same time, Hana is a lot like other young women her age. Japan has all of these different kinds of fortune-telling, more than you could possibly count. There are horoscopes at the back of virtually every women’s magazine, and lots of women follow them, letting these fortunes dictate their joys and sorrows.

There are always special edition magazines about fortunetelling at the beginning of the year that completely sell out. They tell you what days you should start new projects, what day you should buy a new wallet, the number of strokes that should be in the characters of your name, lucky directions, instructions for romantic chemistry—people can’t get enough. The reason for this is because so many Japanese people give a particular weight to “fortune.”

This world is comprised almost entirely of things we can’t do anything about, problems no person can solve.

Take, for example, natural disasters. Those are something no one person can do anything about. And from antiquity, Japan has suffered under natural disasters—people’s survival has depended on outside forces. Maybe that’s why we have such a strong sense of “fortune.” In some cultures, your fate might be up to God’s will, but there’s nothing so absolute as God here. Maybe that’s why the Japanese people depend on “fortune” almost like a wind that God blows your way. And moreover, Tokyo in the 1990s was in a spiritual golden age, and for Hana, encountering feng shui and starting her yellow collection then was no different than going to the nail salon for us now. Since Hana is so serious, though, once she’s set her mind to something, she can’t be laid back about it—she has to go all in.

Mizu shobai literally means “water trade,” and refers to nighttime entertainment, especially those that involve alcohol or sex. This is a business that offers a place for people with nowhere to go—a place of drifting “fortunes.” Women in mizu shobai believe that no matter how hard you work or try to logic your way through a problem, in the end more often than not it comes down to luck. But, well, there’s no clear rhyme or reason for why we were born into this world, so I suppose you could say that everything that follows is in fortune’s domain. Falling ill, getting into an accident, meeting someone, what age you die—there’s no reason to any of it. This world is comprised almost entirely of things we can’t do anything about, problems no person can solve.

LO: The novel is such an evocative portrait of the character Kimiko, whose name also means beautiful yellow child. In some way, I was reminded of the Great Gatsby’s portrayal of Gatsby through the eyes of the narrator. Kimiko, like the color yellow standing in for money and gold, seems to be what propels the plot with everyone else having differing interpretations of what it all means: money, the house and also about Kimiko. I was curious about what character first came to you as the story unfolded in your writing, the origin of the Kimiko character, and your view of her role in the story.

MKi: I think in a novel, the most important ingredient isn’t the intricacy of the plot or the theme—it’s whether the narrator, whether a first-person protagonist or an omniscient third-person, can earn the trust of the reader. You need for the reader to think to themselves, “I don’t know where this is going, but this speaker, she’s got me, so I’ll give her a shot.” I think Hana Ito served that role perfectly.

Your narrator doesn’t need to be a good person. She doesn’t need empathy and she doesn’t need to be like you. What a narrator does need is a certain something that makes the reader think, “I want to know where this person came from, and I want to see where she’s going.” And I think you can do that all sorts of ways with all sorts of words. With Sisters in Yellow, I think for readers that feeling comes first from Hana’s determination and innocence, even against the backdrop of Tokyo’s underground, and second from a sense that even once she starts committing crimes, part of a reader thinks she’s doing the right thing.

And if that is what readers are feeling, they start living vicariously through her, questioning of their own volition the common sense divisions between good and evil, or the differences between principles and laws. There are so many ways to read this novel—it really is one thing after another for Hana. But I personally think of this novel as her extraordinary coming of age.

LO: There is a haunting conversation that Hana has with a gangster in which he warns her to not become a “money tree.” The gangster says:

People like Kimiko, you can make them do anything, do anything to them. No family, no connections to the normal world, no real ID. If they disappear all of a sudden, nobody cares. There are lots of folks like that working in the dark, and to some people, they’re just things. Things you can use. Because they’re so easy to get rid of, to sink.

That is heart-breaking. Compared to the sisters in Tanizaki’s work or Mukoda’s, you are shining a much-needed light on people who are seen as throwaway by society. It is a brave choice for an author. We see this in all of your novels. If you wanted to say something about this, please do!

MK: The world’s a tough place, isn’t it. The parts of night untouched by the light of day jostle and crowd against one another not just in Japan but all over the world. Many of the people who live in that dark world are suffused with a kind of energy—both positive and negative—that people who walk in broad daylight can’t begin to imagine. A lot of readers have reacted to Sisters in Yellow with comments about how they’d make mistakes like Hana and were grateful to the parents who took care of them in those moments, or how terrible mothers and uncaring adults perpetuate a negative cycle, and some readers have wondered if our current social safety nets could save someone who’s fallen as far as Hana and her friends?

We live in the information age, and if readers want to do their own research, Wikipedia is only a click away.

In modern-day Japan, the people who have the time and disposable income to pick up a book as thick as Sisters in Yellow are always going to be observers. Of course, that’s one of the thrills of reading, too. But—and this is getting to your next question—Sisters in Yellow was initially published installment by installment in a newspaper, in the morning edition. I got a note from one reader that she was living in a place where the rent was ¥13,200 a month (about 84$US) and she wanted to read this novel so badly that she paid the ¥4,000 monthly subscription fee for the newspaper. She was so excited for each installment that she waited up for the 2AM delivery. She and readers like her are the kind of readers I’m proud to have supporting me. The characters in this novel are forced to live in a neoliberal world where their powerlessness is already predetermined, and they’re ignored by society and told to just keep on living.

Yet still they use their minds, and even with their limited choices, they grab onto any goodness that comes their way and they don’t let go, determined to survive. How can anyone look down on them? I don’t write these characters to incite pity, nor do I wish to enlighten readers. I’m simply shedding light on the complexity and fierce brilliance of the lives of people navigating this reality.

LO: Like so much Japanese fiction of that time period, The Makioka Sisters was serialized in magazines from 1943 to 1948. I was delighted to read that the Yellow Sisters was also first serialized. In this case, in the Yomiuri Shimbun before being published in book-form in 2023. I read in an interview that before beginning the series, all you had in mind was the title and that you knew you would stick to themes surrounding money and home. Also, that since it was being serialized in a newspaper you would kick the novel off with the protagonist Hana reading a news article.

I admire that you were discovering the novel as you were writing it and wondered what really surprised you the most as the story organically unfolded? And how much was edited and smoothed out when the serialized version was transformed into a novel? Serialization must have helped propel the pace!

MK: Normally when I write a long work, I don’t face it until I’ve got a detailed plan and structure in place, but this time, all I’d decided on was that the story would be about four women living together, and I knew the number of chapters and the title of each chapter. I didn’t even know what role Kimiko would have yet. Of course I also knew that the work would be appearing in a newspaper, so I wanted it to have an element of critique with regards to the medium itself. Newspapers convey the truth of reality to us, but only ever via summary. Beyond those bare facts are circumstances we can never know and lives that can never be replaced. There are truths that completely differ from the images and impressions imparted by articles and headlines. My hope is that those who read to the end of Sisters in Yellow find themselves surprised at the complications reality has to offer.

LO: I would love to hear from your two translators as well. Did this aspect of the novel having been serialized at first prove challenging? Or maybe the challenge of translating Japanese street slang and dialect into something understandable, but still true to the original, for English speakers: perhaps that was toughest? Or was there was some other aspect of the translation that you found particularly challenging? Another example, there are so many ways to translate “mizu shobai”—in the novel when you are speaking of this industry in general you refer to it as the nightlife. But that is a challenging term to render into English since terms don’t always easily map from Japanese to English.

Hitomi Yoshio: We didn’t start translating until the novel was completed, but I definitely enjoyed the expansiveness and the pacing of the story. Sisters in Yellow is a real page turner—I couldn’t put it down and read the entire novel in three days. You become so immersed in Hana’s world that you don’t want to leave it, even after you’ve turned the last page.

The novel begins in April 2020, where the protagonist Hana is forty years old. In chapter two, we are thrown back to 1995, when Hana is fifteen, a middle school student, and meets Kimiko for the first time. Then the novel progresses mostly chronologically following Hana’s life in the late 1990s, heading into the 2000s. I’m around Hana’s age, so all of the cultural references of Tokyo in the 1990s feel so nostalgic to me.

There are some hilarious moments, like when Viv’s cell phone ringtone turns out to be this song that was super popular back in the day, “Don’t Give Up” (Makenaide) by ZARD. The gap between Viv’s gangster persona and the upbeat tempo of the song made me laugh so much. Music plays an important role in other moments too—like the song “Full of Memories” (Omoide ga ippai) that Kotomi sings in that emotional karaoke scene, and of course, Momoko’s epic rendition of “Kurenai” by X Japan. Laurel and I had long discussions and made a lot of conscious effort to bring life to that late 1990s culture and vibe.

Laurel Taylor: I think when we were working on the translation, I ended up doing the first drafts on a large swath of the yakuza and tekiya chapters so I was thinking a lot about gangster slang. I had dozens of browser tabs open at any given time, and roughly half of those were lists of yakuza slang, mafia slang, and references to things like common street drug nicknames used in the late nineties. The question of culturally specific slang—both in the sense of the mafia and the yakuza—is a tightrope, I think. The mafia and the yakuza are not a one-to-one equivalent pair of organizations, but at the same time, they do share some similarities. Often, my instinct is to trust readers to their own suspension of disbelief, so I integrated quite a few untranslated yakuza and tekiya specific terms. We live in the information age, and if readers want to do their own research, Wikipedia is only a click away. And for readers who are less interested in that research side of things, my hope is that context makes clear enough what they are reading without Hitomi and I overexplaining everything.

LO: Another question I had was about how the tone and pacing of this novel are more akin to noir. This is such an interesting shift. I am thinking of RF Kuang, who also likes mixing things up writing novels one after another in different genres. Did this affect how you approached the translation?

HY: I’ve been translating Mieko Kawakami’s work since 2014, and I have to say, Sisters in Yellow has a depth and scope that is beyond anything I’ve done before. Many of her stories are about slices of everyday life, mixed with memories and philosophical reflections about the self and identity—from young women to housewives to women of old age. Interior monologues are her forte, expressed in a distinctive stream-of-consciousness style. Sisters in Yellow is her first novel that is truly plot driven, dipping into the noir genre, but it’s still interwoven with the complex internal life of her characters.

In the translation, it was really important for me that each character had a distinct voice that would give room for readers to develop their own relationship with them. All of the characters are flawed in some way, but that’s what draws you in and makes them unforgettable. I love how Kawakami keeps on reinventing herself—I think Sisters in Yellow is her best work yet.

LT: This was my first time translating Kawakami, though I’ve studied her writing a bit for research, so I don’t necessarily have the touchpoints that Hitomi does. That being said, for me, voice is always what is driving my translation work, and in that sense, I was thinking much less about genre than I was about Hana as a tragic, anxiety-driven character. I really wanted that sense of her catastrophizing thought spirals to come through, as well as her naivety and desperation. Hitomi and I went back and forth quite a bit on how much to let her spin out—many of her inner monologues consist of paragraph long sentences and that sense of pacing is always a fun challenge in English translation.

LO: In a fascinating interview in Asymptote, Mieko Kawakami’s previous translators, Sam Bett and David Boyd talked about how they divided the work and collaborated on translation decisions together— rather than translating separately and then patching the text. In their case, I believe one handled the dialogue, while the other focused on the narrative sections. They also served as each other’s first readers, something that can greatly increase readability and accuracy, I think. Other famous team translators have handled the work differently, for example husband and wife team Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky are loved (and sometimes hated!) for their translations, with one Russian speaker producing a rough literal translation while the other one, who is a native speaker of English polishes the English. Another well-known example is that of David Hawkes and John Minford’s translation of Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone, in which Hawkes translated the first eighty chapters and Minford the last forty. I wondered if you could share a bit about your process.

HY: When I was first asked to translate Sisters in Yellow, I knew I wanted it to be a co-translation. Sisters in Yellow is such a multi-layered piece, with so many voices and dialects and slang and registers of language, that I thought the novel would gain a lot from working with another translator. Laurel and I had briefly experienced co-translating during the BCLT summer translation workshop in 2023, and I knew we could work well together. So I called her up and she said yes, and that’s how we embarked on this journey.

Since we wanted to unify the tone, we decided to alternate the chapters, so Laurel would do one chapter, then I would do the next, and so on and so forth. Then we’d look over each other’s chapters and heavily mark up the text, with no reservations, as if they were our own text. It requires a lot of trust and respect to be able to edit each other’s work like that. Then we’d spend hours and hours and hours on the phone going over every line, sometimes spending forty minutes on a single phrase or sentence. You can imagine how impractical that is, considering the length of the novel. People think that co-translation saves time, but in my experience, if you truly co-translate, it takes twice the time or more. But it’s so worth it.

What made our co-translation successful, I think, is that we have different strengths that complement one another. It wasn’t a question of what our mother tongues were—it was more about sensibility and our attitudes towards language. The scenes and characters that each of us were drawn to were different too—so naturally the weight would shift between us depending on the scenes and chapters. I tended to gravitate toward Hana’s interior monologues and her relationship with the various characters; Laurel took the lead on the criminal yakuza underworld. I loved how organically that happened. It was also fun to come up with creative solutions. Some of my favorites include the nickname “Snoozy” (Torosuke), the made-up expression “kotatsu burrito” (kotatsu buwan), the rhythmic phrase “been runnin’ up that hill, been going through the mill, but now we’re through” (masaka masaka no saka koete), and so on…

My family might not have had money, but it did have unconditional love and humor.

LT: In essence we both had the roughest of rough drafts for the chapters we worked on and then we handed them off to each other for editing. Once we’d done those edits, that’s when we came together to discuss. Hitomi’s not joking about the hours-long conversations, and because we’re based in different countries, Hitomi was working early mornings while I was working late nights to complete the editing process. I think what was most helpful in that process was relying on each other’s ears, so to speak. We talked a great deal about how sentences sounded in Japanese, what images they conveyed, what affects they achieved, and then we talked about if the English was doing something similar.

Even in our favorite parts here, Hitomi and I differ. There’s a chapter narrated primarily from Yeongsu’s point of view, and he mentions that the other kids called him a piece of goldfish shit (kingyo no fun). I was quite taken with this description, but in the editing process, Hitomi pointed out it was idiomatic—a piece of goldfish shit is a hanger-on. This, however, is one of those points where I think translation creates a richness—what is idiomatic for one language becomes an evocative phrase in another (Anyone who’s ever owned goldfish immediately has a vivid image of what a goldfish mid-bowel-movement looks like.), and Hitomi agreed.

We ultimately kept the description as is, and I think that willingness to bend on literalism versus idiomatic translation is probably one of the greatest advantages that came out of co-translating this work. The editing process was certainly long, but in the end, I know we have a better translation for it.

LO: My final question is for the author. I was struck by the way, despite their lives being composed of so much struggle and precariousness, your “sisters” are serene and happy for the most part in so much of the story. I loved this and wondered if you could talk a bit more about hope and happiness in the characters’ lives and in the book?

MK: I’m so happy to hear you read the sisters that way. Like Hana, I was raised by a single mother. I was born in 1976. Yet despite the fact that Japan was entering the height of its economic bubble and the country was flush with cash and that both my mother and I were working very hard, our lives never seemed to get any easier—there weren’t many families poorer than us or struggling to make it the way we were. But my mother loved me unconditionally.

Add to that, the culture of Osaka where I grew up, and we had a humor that let us laugh through the tears, that let laughter carry us through any difficulties or sorrows. It’s as Michael Ende says— humor is not telling jokes or messing around. To live is to inevitably be driven into a wall at some point, to face challenges so difficult it seems impossible to overcome them. How do we choose to face those challenges?—that’s where humor comes in, what it means to live with humor in your heart.

My family might not have had money, but it did have unconditional love and humor. Our mother raised us to live with humor in our hearts. Unfortunately, she passed two years ago, and I’m still crying every day. Where’s that humor now, right? Now more than ever I have to hold tight to my humor. So it’s great to hear that you felt the joy and hope and happiness in this novel. I feel like no matter how difficult or tragic the stories I write, my characters are always protected by a certain lightness and joy. And maybe that lightness is found not in my writing style, but in my voice—the voice my mother gave me. I want my readers to feel that humor, and nothing makes me happier than knowing it might give them a little bit of power and compassion as they face their own lives.

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1.

In 1613, the Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada sent a spectacular suit of Samurai armor to King James I of England. Created by the Shogun’s master armor craftsman, it was entrusted to John Saris, captain of the East India Company before being loaded onto a ship that would cross the Indian Ocean and round the Cape before docking in Plymouth — a voyage lasting over a year — Only then to be delivered into the hands of an English king who had never seen Japan and almost certainly never would.

By 1662 it was on public display in the Tower of London, where contemporary accounts record visitors confidently identifying it as armor ‘from the Emperor Mougul’ — which tells you everything about how little Londoners knew of Japan!

Objects, it turns out, are more patient than people— since this armor not only outlasted the shogunate that made it, but also the king it was made for, and the empire that put it in a tower and forgot what it was.

For me, this was the one truly must-see object at the big Samurai exhibition in London, at the British Museum, and I was kind of surprised that it was not located in a primary spot, but was instead a bit hard to find. This was perhaps because the focus of the exhibition was on the impact that Samurai culture has had on film and literature over recent decades. Walking in to the darkened gallery you are met with a gigantic screen showing the TV series Shogun on loop, with several smaller screens displaying various films depicting samurai fight scenes.

Samurai costumes and battles do make great TV —I was thinking how many of Japan’s Taiga dramas have taken place during the times of shoguns and samurai, which was why I prized last year’s different choice of a drama about the author of the Tale of Genji, set in Heian Japan. The exhibition route culminates with people standing in front of the actual Darth Vader costume— because, of course, George Lucas was massively influenced by Japanese culture. Being more of a Trekkie myself, I didn’t really realize this and kept walking!

2.
In addition to the marvelous gift to James I, there were also a few small display cases showing tea and calligraphy artifacts that illustrated the way that samurai warriors and their families were expected to be proficient in the arts as part of being an elite class. As is well-known, historically in China, the elite were expected to be culturally literate, with merchants and soldiers not considered top-tier, but rather the country was run by a cadre of artist-scholars, who formed the backbone of government. These were men, who in theory (and often in practice) came from any social class but rose up in society and government because of academic and artistic excellence.

Can you even imagine a country run by artists or philosophers? America has always been run by successful businessmen and lawyers. It is almost impossible to imagine an America run by a poet, something I believe happened in Ireland not that long ago. What a different world we would live in if our leaders were artists or translators!

Because Japan was so enamored by China, the samurai warriors were expected to be literary as well as adept in an art form like the tea ceremony. Christine Guth has a fantastic book called, Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle about how this custom continued down into modern times. I cannot recommend this book enough. And this expectation of successful leaders having beautiful handwriting or being musicians and artists continues down to today, I think. Anecdotally my bosses at Hitachi were all accomplished in an art, my direct boss being someone who performed in music halls playing classical and Spanish guitar.

3.
Samurai 侍 is a funny word anyway. Before I went to Japan I thought samurai meant warrior, but it doesn’t. Bushi 武士 means warrior and has its roots in archery, including on horses. So the exhibition had some gorgeous bows, quivers and arrows. Think of bushido, which means way of the warrior, a later construct.

Samurai is more of a social class, but they were indeed also the warrior class. Even today, in Japan you will meet people who talk of their samurai family roots.

There were several reviews in British newspapers about the “news” that half of samurai were female. Well, being that it was a social class that makes sense. Not all bushi were samurai but all samurai were bushi. They were expected to fight for the shogun and Samurai women were expected to be loyal as well, including serving as pawns by the shogun in the Edo period especially, when leading samurai retainers were made to dwell in the capital every other year, leaving their families there when they returned to the provinces, which was a way for the shogun to ensure they would not be fomenting rebellion since their families would be held at swordpoint! This was called the sankin-kōtai system.

And it was this same system of control and obligation that produced the gorgeous armor now sitting quietly in the British Museum — a gift from a shogun who understood, perhaps better than anyone, that the most powerful gestures are made not with a sword but with an exquisite object, dispatched across an ocean to a king he would never meet. In 1662, Londoners squinted at it and called it Mughal. Now it shares a space with Darth Vader, Japan perpetually reimagined as whatever the West needs it to be in any given century. The armor, characteristically, has no opinion on the matter. It has already outlasted an empire, a shogunate, and a king. It can wait.

On loan from Tokyo: Portrait of Ito Mancio by Domenico Tintoretto

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Ah, the Southern Country! Ah, the Island! Ah, Taiwan!

1.

The International Booker Prize Longlist was announced earlier this week—and I was thrilled to see Taiwan Travelogue, by Yang Shuang-zi, translated by Lin King, on the list!

The book is a wonderful puzzle. An English translation of a prize-winning Chinese-language novel that is itself written as a translation of a rediscovered 1939 travelogue written by a fictional Japanese writer named Aoyama Chizuko. That is the conceit.

In the original Chinese language version, author Yang Shuang-zi playfully had herself listed as “translator” on the book cover. She wanted readers to really get into the idea that they were reading a Chinese translation of a text originally written in Japanese.

The book’s translator Lin King also wanted to preserve some of the nesting-doll narrative quality of the original text in the English version of the story about a Japanese female author named Aoyama Chizuko, who travels to Taiwan during the colonial period, falling in love with her female guide and interpreter known in Japanese as O-Chizuru.

As you can see, it is a play on the old trope of a colonial love affair between a European man and native woman. That said, while the genders and races have been switched up, this story is still very much about power dynamics and colonialism.

2.

Japan’s rule of Taiwan began in 1895. And as translator Lin King notes in an interview in Electric Literature

This novel is set in the 1920s-30s, when Taiwan was part of the Japanese empire. A lot of English-language readers might not know this, but Taiwan was governed by Japan for 50 years, from 1895 to 1945. During this period of time, the idea of Taiwanese identity had yet to be fully formed—it wasn’t a nation, but a place where indigenous Taiwanese peoples and migrants from China had settled and called it home. The idea of Taiwan as a nation wasn’t there. When Japan took over, people in Taiwan were told they were now children of the Japanese emperor. This included my grandparents, who were educated in Japanese as kids. In World War II, they fought in the Japanese army.

I spent a very happy time in Kaohsiung about twenty years ago.

My Japanese husband and I called it Takao 高雄.

Takao is the Japanese pronunciation of 高雄, while Kaohsiung is a Chinese pronunciation for the same characters.

Even when I was there, so many older people spoke Japanese fluently. And Kaoshiung reminded me a lot of Kawasaki. While the south felt tropical and so different from Honshu at least, still it felt very familiar and comfortable coming from Japan—and I think it is safe to say that the Japanese influence is significant.

As King writes that

There’s an idea that Taiwan’s current difference in identity from Mainland China in large part begins with this seismic shift we had during the 50 years under Japanese rule. Taiwanese society is largely made up of Minnan or Hakka people who migrated from Mainland China, and some people use this to argue that Taiwan remains culturally Chinese, but one irrefutable wedge is the half-century under Japan. I think if people in the West were to know more about this, they’d gain a better idea of at least one reason why Taiwan asserts itself as distinct in identity. I don’t know if Shuang-Zi intended it to be political, but I think it’s inevitable to read Taiwan Travelogue through a geopolitical lens.

3.

That is one fascinating part of the novel: the way it highlights this little understood period of time in Taiwan. But another wonderfully done aspect of King’s translation is how she handles language.

The above city name is just one example.

If 高雄 is Takao in Japanese and Kaohsiung in Chinese and in English, what do you do if the narrator of the novel is thinking and speaking from a Japanese female perspective in the 1930s. Well, you call the city Takao and put a map in the front of the book. And the same with all the Chinese romanization—what to do? Even now, Taiwan keeps to the old Wades-Giles system, while the rest of the world has shifted to Mainland China’s pinyin system for rendering Chinese. For example, Kaohsiung is the old Wades-Giles version of the Chinese characters for the city. In Pinyin, it is Gāoxióng.

So, what is a translator to do? Takao? Gaoxiong? Kaohsiung?

The fictional Japanese translator’s name in the novel is Wang Chianhe—but that is rendered in Japanese as O Chizuru—and so I was surprised that the english translator chooses the Japanese spelling—and yet that makes sense since the narrator is thinking in Japanese!

The novel demanded that the English translator make countless such decisions, perhaps most challenging of all was rendering japan’s polite language. Because the characters were depicted under a colonial backdrop, the Japan-born author was considered highest in status, while her guide and translator O-Chizuru was much lower being of Chinese descent (her ancestors came to Taiwan from southern China during the Qing dynasty). In the pecking order, far above people of Chinese descent were the Taiwan “island-born” Japanese people, known even today as “wansei” 湾生.

The bottom rung of society were the indigenous peoples, known as banjin (not such a nice term)

I am telling you all that so you can imagine the somersaults required to depict how O-Chizuru must have constantly been speaking in honorifics to her Japanese-born author in the novel. This polite language does not exist in English or Chinese and so King made great use of a Japanese translation of the Chinese novel to gain a good footing for how to handle it and then she tried to somehow reflect this in her English version in the way she addressed the author or had Chizuru speak more formally.

4.

All of these linguistics somersaults were handled using translator’s notes—giving the novel a wonderful “meta” edge to its telling. Because the Chinese version was masquerading as a translation of an original Japanese text, the author Yang Shuang-zi included footnotes, so for this english version of the novel, the translator was happy to run with that. I was thinking how well it works too.

These days, translations aim for a seamless quality. They are suppose to allow readers to feel as if they are reading the original so that readers never “fall out of the story.” This idea of immersing readers in story is very much prized in writing workshops, and I think it comes from TV: this idea of being immersive in ‘story.”

But I always think that novels can do so much more than TV.

In one of my favorite online book groups, someone said

I don’t read translated fiction, as I believe it adds in another ‘voice’ - that of the translator - and so I imagine it is not the ‘authentic’ prose that the author intended. For me fiction is not so much what you say, as how you say it - I am more bothered about the quality of the prose, than the plot. Therefore the choice of words is crucial. I want that choice to be that of the author - not the translator.

It’s true that a translation will always be a treachery on some level—and yet what if all translations came with extensive footnotes explaining the decisions made by translators step by step? For those who just want the story, they could ignore—but for those who really wanted to have more, the doors would be open to a very different kind of reading experience. I loved how intellectually stimulating it was to read this translation.

5.

In case I have not made a good enough case for how fun and interesting this novel is, I wanted to end by mentioning that while I admired the book for being a tour de force in translation, I fell in love with it for its writing about food.

Anyone who has spent time on the beautiful island of Taiwan will know it has some amazing things to eat!! And this novel describes many of them. Aoyama-san is a self-described glutton… she calls it her monster in her stomach and all she thinks about is eating… this is a stand-in for the desire she feels for her Taiwanese translator and guide—but wow can she eat a lot!!

For someone like me who is endlessly dieting and if I am honest, I am usually hungry too…. it was delectable torture to read the book…. it goes on and on from bamboo-wrapped rice dumplings, meatballs, taro balls, melon seeds, salty cakes, and an impressively wide variety of noodles and desserts to curry rice and sukiyaki…. it made me so HUNGRY!!!!!

• I originally wrote this post before Taiwan Travelogue won the National Book Award in translated fiction (2024). The novel is brilliant, and so I was delighted when it was nominated for the International Booker Award Longlist last week. (I also loved longlisted We are Green and Trembling, which won the National Book Award in 2025).

• For more about Taiwan and food, please see my post about Taiwan’s Julia Childs, Fu Pei Mei.

• Here is my 3 Quarks Daily post about Mai Ishizawa’s novel, Place of Shells (I was very disappointed that it wasn’t on the Booker longlist. No Japanese books were included this year).

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1. It’s the summer of 2020. Germany is tentatively reopening after the first wave of the pandemic. And a young Japanese woman, who is completing her PhD in medieval art history at a university in Göttingen, goes to the train station to meet an old friend from school back in Japan. His name is Nomiya, and he is someone who died nine years earlier in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, but has, inexplicably, returned.

What happens next defies the logic of Western plot. There is no confrontation, no revelation, no catharsis. No plot of character arcs. Instead, the narrator walks with Nomiya through the pages of the novel along Göttingen’s Planetenweg — which is a scale model of the solar system mapped across the city, each planet marked at its proportional distance from the sun. And it is here, in this strange, quiet promenade, that the novel’s true structure reveals itself.

As they walk, her dog keeps digging stuff up along the path—like peeling back the layers of time, seeing the way our lives leave deposits. Seeing how memory is stuck to the landscape of the place. Germany is filled with plaques of the places where people murdered during the holocaust once lived, so the city itself is pocked by history and the dead.

2. Mai Ishizawa’s book is packed with metaphors.

I love Haruki Murakami’s Everything in life is metaphor.. and metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.

Shells are everywhere in the novel—dug up by the dog, mentioned as part of the pilgrimage trail and characters even have a dinner party centered on clams and shells. And madeleines, of course.

Polly Barton translates the title of the novel as “place of shells.”

But the Japanese title is more complicated and disorienting, I think.

貝に続く場所にて

• 貝 (kai) — shellfish / shell

• に (ni) — to / toward / from / at (particle marking relation or direction)

• 続く (tsuzuku) — to continue; to follow; to lead on; to extend from

• 場所 (basho) — place

• にて (nite) — at / in (a slightly formal or literary locative particle)

So a strictly literal rendering would be:

“At the place that continues from the shell.”

This novel was so moving for so many reason. But especially the imagery of the shells has stuck with me. Shells are like husks, empty homes after the creature has moved on. Like the opposite of Nomiya, whose body is gone and yet his spirit or soul remains, attached to the world. In the tsunami his body was never recovered.

We can also hear the ocean in conch shells. They are vessels of stories and sounds. Often found littered along the shore, they do seem to harken to liminal spaces, between the ocean and land. Between this world and the other one.

And the Japanese, “place continuing from shells” 貝に続く場所 does point to a journey, like Saint James’ pilgrimage and all those churches with conch shells, as if our memories are embedded in the place but that we continue to be in constant motion.

Anyway, I loved the book. In a few days the International Booker Award longlist will be announced. I am really hoping this book is on the list. Also rooting for Tokyo Sympathy Tower and Sisters in Yellow.

Sanctuary of Chimayo—in faraway New Mexico is along the pilgrimage route of Saint James… conch shells everywhere.

Shell game: Kai-awase

木蓮の
落ちくだけあり
寂光土
（川端茅舍）

Petals falling all at once
—Magnolia flowers
Reborn in the Pure Land

—Kawabata Bōsha (川端茅舍, 1897–1941)

木蓮の Magnolia flowers
落ちくだけあり petals falling apart completely
寂光土 the land of Quiescent Light
Mokuren no / ochi-kudake ari / jakkō-do

It’s hard to capture in English what this poem conveys about magnolia petals falling. Unlike sakura blossoms, for example, that scatter on the wind like snowflakes—sometimes floating away in great clouds—magnolia petals fall heavily and directly, “falling” not “scattering,” more like peonies. Their descent feels deliberate and weighty. You could almost hear them land. Thud.

What is so brilliant about this poem is how it evokes the seeming willfulness of their descent. As if the flower had undergone spiritual training like a Buddhist anchorite walling himself up to await death with perfect resolution. Climbing up a tree or tower to pray. Or sitting in meditation like Daruma until his legs and arms and eyelids fell off—an admirable commitment to self-cultivation.

My writing mentor says, “the writer is the last person standing.” Perseverance and resolution are everything.

Magnolias, ancient like conifers and waterlilies, must be tenacious indeed, since they’ve been around since Tyrannosaurus was traipsing around in forests filled with ferns.

In Tendai Buddhism, jakkōdo (寂光土) refers to the “Pure Land of Still and Radiant Light,” the highest paradise where Buddhas reside. I love how this poem entangles human emotions with flowers—As the Nirvana Sutra teaches, all beings have a Buddha nature. In just seventeen syllables, you feel the flowers striking out on their path toward becoming a Buddha.

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Some happy news: I sent off a few applications for graduate school programs again this year, four in the US and three overseas and I received my first response: an acceptance! At the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, where Ishiguro and Ian McEwan got their MFAs. Thank you so much to my letter-writer!! He knows who he is! 感謝！

This remains my favorite poem about flowers.

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1.
Last week, I got the chance to see Filipino cinema master Lav Diaz’s Magellan in an Oscar pre-release. They are showing some of the international film entries in some theaters around town. And I was drawn into Magellan straight away.

After the film was over, I happened to overhear two young film-people complaining about how much the movie was in dire need of better editing. “All those static long shots, it went on and on,” one of them said. “Proper editing would have done wonders,” he continued, sounding almost angry.

It’s true, the movie was not filmed in the usual Hollywood style. We were not like a fly on the wall following characters in scene after scene, in some version of a naturalistic story arc.

Magellan maybe has more in common with how it feels standing in front of an Old Master painting. Long, static shots went on for minutes on end, as the audience sat there breathing in a stream of breathtakingly gorgeous painterly moments.

Like The Triumph of Death in the Prado by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, an opening shot lands on the aftermath of a battle, bodies strewn everywhere, the waves are washing up on the blood-soaked sand. Minutes go by. Then we register motion: a man in a conquistador’s silver helmet stumbles forward. Is it the hero? Magellan, portrayed like a fragile and almost clueless man is not really the focus anyway, as this movie is not actually about the explorer.

“It's all about greed.”

Says the character.

“It's all about greed.”

says the director.

Is anything new in the world?

I wonder.

2.
I don’t know why, but about ten years ago I became obsessed with Tableau Vivant, when people try to recreate through costumes, lighting, and posing famous scenes from a work of art. I especially love the ones that attempt Renaissance old master paintings. Tableau Vivant suddenly became popular during Covid, and I could not get enough of them!

I kept thinking how much I wanted to recreate the Arnolfini Portrait—maybe because of the dog? Or that killer green dress? There are other paintings I have imagined but more than anything, it has been that van Eyck. Isn’t her hand beautiful? But doesn’t the man look so much like Putin? Maybe it really is all about that adorable pup (isn’t it always about the pup?).

I don’t know why I keep thinking about it.

But perhaps like may rains and falling flowers, or like a whale surfacing or a ship sinking, it is just something that grabs my attention: images that feel frozen or captured. Like intensely heighten moments that conflate time, in the way an Old Master painting does. Or how in the Catholic Mass the moment of the Eucharist is, as people say, closer in time to the Passion than it is to today. I have felt something similar in certain poems. Or in the tea ceremony. When things get slowed way down. Especially when there is a breath or beat as the tea master picks up the bamboo ladle and holds it in front of themselves…. like looking into a mirror and taking stock.

When the moment matters and the looking matters…

3

In one of my favorite books, All the Beauty in the World, a man experiencing deep grief over the death of his older brother resigns from his promising job at the New Yorker and finds work as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

His brother was only twenty-seven when he was struck down with cancer. Before he died, the author spends days on end sitting at his brother‘s bedside with his mom in the hospital room. They are devastated into silence. A shaft of light streams in through a curtain one morning toward the end, and his mother says something like, “Look at us. We have become a fucking old master painting.”

Like a pieta.

In the museum, the author is confronted with scenes like that. Battleground scenes and moments of sickness and death. But there is also so much beauty. The author slowly heals as his mind is re-ordered by the beautiful works of art he stands in front of every day for eight and twelve hour shifts. Especially when he looks at Old Masters.

The book is just wonderful. And I thought of it a lot watching Diaz’s magnificent movie. Because there is a way of telling a story that is not caught up in scenes and action, but in stopping or pausing in a particular moment to allow the meaning to arise. As if captured in a picture.

Do you have a painting you would like to bring to life?

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I think tomorrow they are releasing the nominations… so far, I have not seen any of the movies other than this one. But next up, the movie Kokuho! I am so excited to see it!!

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1.
After seven painful rejections, I finally got accepted to the Tinhouse Writers Workshop. The workshop doesn’t start till February, but we’ve been having online panels with agents and editors this past week. And in one of the first panels, we heard a lot about “comp titles.”

Comp titles are things a writer puts in their query letter—or sales pitch— to agents or publishers offering two or three comparative titles to your own, preferably books published in the last five years and that resonate with your work in terms of tone, of form, or maybe intended readership. This is from my query letter:

SHIPWRECKED will appeal to readers who love polyphonic and multi-layered storytelling like Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land and Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain; as well as readers who gravitate to art stories, such as Dominic Smith’s The Last Painting of Sara de Vos. SHIPWRECKED will also attract readers of Asia-based epics, such as A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki and readers fascinated by stories about heirloom objects handed down through time, like the movie the Red Violin or Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book.

Because I am one of those people who cares about which book sits next to another on the shelf, I loved creating my comp title list. I love imagining what books might have a commonality to mine. Love thinking about this when I write book reviews as well. And I get really excited when mentors give me suggestions. Like People of the Book and A Tale for the Time Being were both suggestions from Katie Kitamura, and an agent at Bread Loaf this summer suggested I swap The Red Violin for Edmund de Waal’s book on netsuke.

2.

A few years ago, I shared a short story with a mentor about two old friends, once lovers, who decades earlier took a life-changing trip to India together. It changed both of their lives and the woman imagined they would end up together. But then life got in the way, and the two drifted apart. Somehow though, decades later, they both ended up living in Tokyo and meet up at a kissaten.

My mentor immediately told me I “must read Bryan Washington” because, she said, “he also writes about alienated people in Tokyo.” I really didn’t think that is what I was doing (not at all!) but still I was so curious, so started reading all of Washington’s stories in The New Yorker —and immediately fell in love with his work!

Even though my stories are nothing like his, still something about his latest novel Palaver, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and takes place in Tokyo, resonated deeply with me.

A book about expats, one critic in the Japan Times wondered why the novel needed to be set among the expat community (and the Japanese people who engage with these expats). What if the character had Japanese-speaking friends? What if we felt more about life in the “real Japan”? they asked.

But why not the expat community? My own two decades in Japan were spent in a very different way, though I did have three or four years in Tokyo with expat friends. But then, after leaving Tokyo and moving to the countryside, my life became increasingly enmeshed with Japanese-speaking friends and later family. My personal experience was that the warmth and security that Washington depicted among his expat “found family” was exactly what I felt with my Japanese friends and family. He depicts something universal: the way companionship can make life beautiful.

But this leads me to a weird thing that happened to me during those years, when I was teaching English at one of the big conversation schools. There was this Canadian guy there and he told me the reason he came to Japan was because of a photo he’d seen of a white man in the Philippines, he was some kind of anthropologist, he said, and the guy was surrounded by three or four gorgeous YOUNG women. They were dripping off his arms, he said. And he decided after seeing this picture that he just had to come to Asia. He was around forty years old… twice my age at the time. And I think he was testing me to see if I would say something in righteous indignation.

3.
For whatever reason that guy is burned into my mind (even that expression, dripping off his arms).

And I was thinking about this Canadian man (I think his name was Paul) when another mentor more recently remarked after reading my novel manuscript in its entirety, which was the first time I’ve had this opportunity to be edited in full, that I had to read this book called Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski. This novel was also a National Book Award finalist, from 2009. I had never heard of him. And getting a copy, I was blown away. It is SO GOOD!!! I was so happy he thought of it while reading my novel manuscript, telling me the tone felt similar to mine. And like my novel, Fieldwork also takes place in Asia.

In Berlinski’s book the setting is Thailand. The story revolves around an American woman, who is an anthropologist, who came to Northern Thailand to conduct anthropological fieldwork. She is already dead when the novel begins and the story unfolds as the narrator slowly uncovers clues about her life. Early on, a former boyfriend describes being dumped by her immediately after she graduates from UC Berkeley, when she informs him that she was going to go traveling and he “shouldn’t wait.” She then goes on to send him a multitude of postcards and letters — “letters from the craziest places,” like eastern Turkey or Afghanistan, and the far reaches of India. He says he was just dying to talk to her again, hoping to hear she still loved him and how she missed him. But instead she would just write these long letters about the people she encountered and the places she went and about how interesting it all was.

Reading this, I laughed since I did something similar when I, also at UC Berkeley, went off traveling and wrote letters like that to my ex boyfriend. Did my mentor sense in the pages of my novel that, like the woman in Thailand, I was also quite thoughtless and annoying when I was young?

4.

While both Palaver and Fieldwork are on the surface nothing like my novel, which is not a book centering around expats in Asia, still both novels touched on something deeply felt from my younger days when I first went out into the world.

When I was young, expat stories and novels, as well as travel literature in general was popular. Not so any longer— especially when the foreign place is used as a sort of backdrop for the protagonist’s self-growth or escape… place becomes a kind of mass-tourism, I suppose in some way. That said though, with the absolutely horrific news here at home, I could sure use an escape myself—and the expat life sounds so fantastic to me right now, even just reading about it makes me want to embark … the further away the better.

Notes

• I started a big re-read of Moby Dick and wrote about it at 3 Quarks Daily. One of the recent re-tellings of Moby Dick was Guo Xiaolu’s new novel Call Me Ishmaelle. I wrote about it in the LA Times, here. In addition to Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy, I heard a new space opera based on Moby Dick will be coming out in 2026.

• Speaking of 3 Quarks, they are looking for new essayists (deadline in Jan, 26th). I have loved writing there. While it doesn’t pay, the group of writers and their readers are fantastic.

• Finally, I wrote this essay about Washington’s new novel it in the Pittsburgh Review of Books, a wonderful new site.

• One of the agents was talking about “vibe comps” and I would say Fieldwork is mine and my mentor nailed it. Berlinski had a new book come out last year and am really looking forward to reading it next! I didn’t send it as a newsletter but my favorite reads of 2025 is in the post just before this one.

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My Top Ten Reads of 2025

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine
(National Book Award winning novel)

Endling, by Maria Reva
(Booker Longlist)

What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan
(Obama Top reads 2025)

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai
Booker shortlist, Obama top book, National Book Award finalist

Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon

Audition by Katie Kitamura
(Obama Summer List and Booker shortlist)

The Persians, by Sanam Mahloudji (finalist for Women’s Prize): see my 3QD essay here.

Bryan Washinton’s novel Palover (National Book Award finalist)

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

Trip, by Amie Barridale

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Favorite Re-reads: Ruth Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being Dayswork, by Chris Bachelder, and Jennifer Habel The White Journey, by Edmund de Waal

Favorite works translated from Japanese:

The Third Love, by Hitomi Kawakami (Trans. Ted Goosen)

Sympathy Tower Tokyo, by Rie Qudan (Trans. Jesse Kirkwood)

Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa (Polly Barton)

Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, Polly Barton (Translator)

Favorite guilty pleasure: Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping [On a Dead Man] (Vera Wong, #2) I also read all of Chris Pavone’s thrillers this year.

Nonfiction (National Book Award winner—best book of 2025) One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad

Traveling in Bardo, by Ann Tashi Slater

And one of the best art memoirs I’ve ever read: The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, by Benjamin Moser

**

2026 new fiction that I loved: Guo Xiaolu’s Call Me Ishmaelle (already out for a year in the UK) and Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow.

The above 2025 books brought me so much pleasure--Please tell me your favorites!

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Oshogatsu--

My first impression of the Japanese New Year was of how very quiet it was. This was surprising at first, given how it is the most important holiday of the year in Japan. In the days preceding the first day of the first month of the new year, people would return to their hometowns in great waves, emptying the cities. And as families gathered together in their homes, it felt as if the entire world had been blanketed in the hush of heavy snowfall.

The First Month-- in addition to its names referring to the coming of Spring-- 新春、猛春、開春—the old calendar term for January was “mutsuki” 睦月. Mutsu means “intimate, harmonious or friendly,” so mutsuki signifies that this was the month “when people come together.” It’s true, for even nowadays, oshogatsu is a time for families to re-connect. On the times we didn’t return home to my husband’s hometown in Shizuoka, I was astounded at the way Tokyo felt like a ghost town during the New Year holiday, when even Shinjuku Station slowed down.

In Japan, this is a time of quiet reflection and contemplation. Of course, in America, we make our New Year’s Resolutions, but for most Americans, New Year is more of a party. A celebration of what will probably be another great year.

Along with spring, the self is also reborn on January First. And one should experience all the blessings in life as if they were happening for the first time. Contemplation underpins this holiday in a way I wouldn’t have been able to imagine had I not gone and lived there. And I love that. You look at your image in the mirror all the time. The First Glance in the Mirror, however, urges you to step back, empty your mind and really look. 改めてみること。Look again; look deeper, and look with a clear heart, explained my tea teacher long ago.

The first dream 初夢
The first visit to the Shrine 初詣
The first bath 初湯
The first smile 初笑
The first glance in the mirror 初鏡

Mirrors have long played a religious role in Japan. Like many cultures, the Japanese thought they had the power to show a person’s soul. Symbolizing wisdom, one of the Three Sacred Treasures (三種の神器) of the Japanese Imperial family from the beginning of time in Japan has been a mirror. Mirrors are also a symbol of Japanese New Year in the form of glimmering white and transparent mochi. The most popular New Year’s decoration, kagami mochi 鏡餅、is just as the name implies in Japanese, “mirror rice cakes.” Long ago, they were solely offerings traditionally made at shrines and temples. White rice cakes like mirrors to reflect the image of god as well as the soul of the person making the offering.

In Zen literature, there is a recurring motif of an empty-mirror mind. As David Hinton says in China in his new book, China Root, “When thought stops, that moment of awakening, we are wholly present in life as moment-by-moment experience of incandescent perceptual immediacy.” To stand fully present in the moment looking out at the world with mirror-deep eyes. Now that is clarity to strive for!

Wishing you all the happiest and healthiest of new years!!

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Booker award-shortlisted author Hitomi Kawakami’s latest novel to be translated into English, The Third Love, follows the story of Riko, a young woman who marries her childhood crush Naa-chan. Older than her by a decade, Naachan is someone who has been in her life since she was a child. A neighbor and family friend, he was always around, always nice to her. As soon as she grows up, she initiates a relationship with him and soon they fall in love and marry. Why not? She’s been in love with him since she was ten.

Unfortunately, soon into their marriage Naachan embarks on a series of affairs, including one with Riko’s beloved koto sensei. All these things should be heartbreaking to her —and of course they are— and yet Riko cannot help but berate herself. Naachan is all that, so of course, other women fall for him. The guy is a shining prince charming.

A shining prince? Japanese readers will have recognized echoes of the Tale of Genji, especially the storyline when little Murasaki is basically adopted by Genji when she is a small child and groomed to be his wife. The pain of sharing Genji with other women is always there for Murasaki, something that marks the days of her life. But Genji is a prince and back in the tenth century, love and marriage were different than they are today.

Marriage definitely was different—but could love itself also have been so unfamiliar to how we experience it today?

The character of the shining prince Genji is based partly on the adventures of the real-life seventh-century poet Ariwara no Narihira. Infamous for his scandalous love affairs, some of which were memorialized in the Tales of Ise, a text that predates the Tale of Genji by centuries, Ariwara no Narihira is considered one of the greatest Heian period poets in Japanese literary history.

Kawakami has received numerous awards. In addition to being shortlisted for last year’s International Booker Prize, she also received the prestigious Akutagawa Award. And more importantly for the novel, she is no stranger to the Tale of Ise, having come out with a modern Japanese version in 2023. As she translated the ancient tale, Kawakami pondered the poet’s popularity with the ladies. Why did they put up with him? Could love really have been that different back then?

In the novel, as Riko endlessly waits for her husband to return night after night, she thinks of ways to better support him, wondering if the demand for monogamy is not just a Western concept imposed on them from the outside. If she truly loves Naa-chan, shouldn’t her love be more tolerant and supportive? Aren’t there many kinds of love? And yet, the Japanese word for love in the novel’s title is the word for passionate love, koi恋——not the more abstract word for love “ai” 愛 as would be implied by Riko’s questions above.

But then, no matter how she tries to understand and forgive, still Riko finds herself falling deep into a depression over her marriage. Just when things are getting too much to bear, she happens to run into an old acquaintance.

Mr. Takaoka was the janitor in her elementary school, a man who had been kind to her when he found her hiding in a room with a novel instead of playing with the other children at recess. Meeting by chance twenty-five years later, he notices she is depressed and at a crossroads in her marriage. But instead of helping her figure out what to do next, he gives her techniques for escapism.

Not unlike when she used to take refuge in the world of stories when she was a child, he shows her how to launch herself on magical dream journeys within her mind. These go well beyond mere daydreaming as much like a novelist, Riko begins to live a secondary life back in time in her imagination. In the first journey, she becomes a courtesan in the infamous 17^th century Edo period pleasure quarters of Yoshiwara and in the second she becomes a lady-in-waiting to a princess back in the Heian period, the time period spanning both The Tales of Ise and the Tale of Genji.

These two settings would be fun to a Japanese readership since the past two years has seen NHK’s Taiga drama, (the year-long series in which NHK puts the lion’s share of its budget) set in exactly these two time periods: in 2024 with NHK’s Hikaru Kimi e, a wildly popular retelling of the life of Murasaki Shikibu, the author of the Tale of Genji, followed by, in 2025, Unbound, a show about life in Edo’s Yoshiwara Pleasure Quarters. The novelist doesn’t have to do much heavy lifting since so many Japanese readers will have these images fresh in their minds from NHK’s sumptuous period drama TV shows.

The translator Ted Goosen, who has translated Kawakami before, has nailed the voice and tone of her first-person narrator, which is in Kawakami’s trademark deadpan tone. This is consistent in all three sections of the novel, since the two time-slips occur in the mind of a modern-day Japanese woman, which makes her commentary more interesting than if she had gone back and actually taken on the mind-set of an Edo period courtesan for example. It would be like if you or I went back to that time period and tried to fit in!

In further fun in intertextuality, the character of Takaoka is drawn from another of Kawakami’s favorite books, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa’s 1989 novel Takaoka’s Travels, a surrealist novel that I wrote about here, about a ninth century prince who embarks on a long journey of his own through the lands of Southeast Asia as he searches for the route to India. Takaoka’s Travels, like The Third Love, also opens when the protagonist is still a child. This is when his desire for India begins when his father’s favorite consort, Fujiwara no Kusuko, tells him about that magical land, whispering in his ear those three magical syllables: Hin-du-stan, which cause him to “quiver with sweet intoxication.”

Escapism is not liberation, of course—and doesn’t Riko deserve to be treated better? And yet, reading this novel in the midst of my first bout of Covid, I couldn’t help but appreciate the power that stories and dream journeys can have on us—how they can keep us hopeful and serve as a balm for the fractured soul when times are bad. For days on end, I wiled away the hours in stories. Head pounding, all I could so was listen to novels on Audible, and then when my headache finally retreated to read on the page. What is life without stories? And are we not storytelling creatures after all? And who is to say that the life of the mind if not what really matters anyway. It reminds me of an apocryphal Borges quote: “Some people say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Surely Riko would agree.

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My favorite 2025 translations from Japanese are below—please tell me yours!

1. Sympathy Tower Tokyo
   by Rie Qudan (trans. Jesse Kirkwood)

2. Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa (Polly Barton)

3. Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, Polly Barton (Translator)

1.

I just finished re-reading Ruth Ozeki’s brilliant novel, A Tale for the Time Being.

The story, which I did not fully appreciate on my first read, begins when a middle-aged Canadian woman named Ruth finds a diary washed up on the beach near her house in British Columbia. Protected inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox and wrapped in layers of plastic bags, the diary is written in Japanese inside a book that has Proust’s In Search of Lost Time on its red cover.

Ruth is half-Japanese, and she quickly understands that this message in a bottle was written by a teenage girl named Nao. Possibly cast into the sea during the massive earthquake and tsunami that occurred in 2011, the diary causes Ruth to worry that the gigantic wave didn’t just sweep the diary out to sea, but the girl along with it.

Ruth doesn’t know Nao. There is nothing in it for her to pursue her inquiry and yet she becomes deeply concerned, spending countless hours searching for Nao online, thinking about her and worrying about whether she is alive and okay, despite the fact that more than a decade has passed since Nao finished writing in the diary.

The two women are separated by space and time. Or space-time. Or are they? For according to the Zen priest Dōgen, time is not what we think it is. Dōgen’s idea of time (有時 uji, “being-time”) is not so unlike that of the physicists. Rather than being a one-directional container in which things happen and exist sequentially, time is existence itself. Everything, everywhere all at once.

To be is to be time. Or a time-being, in Ozeki’s words.

• 有 (u) = to be / existence

• 時 (ji) = time

2.

In addition to being a famous novelist, Ozeki is an ordained Zen priest and has written a story deeply rooted in the philosophy of Dōgen (1200-1253). The founder of the Sōtō School of Zen Buddhism, Dōgen’s work is sometimes compared to that of Martin Heidegger’s, not just for its focus on time and being, but also in both philosophers’ focus on care.

In Heidegger’s philosophy, Care (Sorge) is the fundamental structure of human existence (Dasein). We are, at heart, creatures that care about things. Likewise French philsopher Gabriel Marcel’s Homo Particeps (Human as participant) also captures this idea of human beings out in the world, deeply engaged and participating with others. This concept of concern and care is both active and temporal. And in Dōgen’s philosophy it points to a radical inter-dependence and co-existence.

According to Dōgen, this kind of empathy happens when beings come to understand that all we have is there here and “now” (Nao’s name) and that each presencing “now,” contains all past and future moments, revealing the true interconnectedness of everything and everyone.

Each being is time
Each moment is the whole

3.

The monk Dōgen, not long into his career, became deeply dissatisfied with the Buddhist teachings available to him in Japan at the time. And so, he traveled across the sea to Song China. He arrived about fifty years ahead of Marco Polo.

Now, we have the Internet.

Ruth also wants to know the truth. So she spends hours online, writing emails to experts and doing endless Google searches looking for clues about the girl and her mysterious diary. Dōgen, back in the 13th century, didn’t have that luxury—and so he risked his life to cross the dangerous waters from Japan to China.

A man on a mission, he wanted to uncover the “true Buddhism.”

This is a story repeated again and again as Buddhism made its way East. Monks and priests, feeling like something had to be “lost in translation,” took to the road in search of the true word. From Japan to China and from China to India—and sometimes as far as to Afghanistan, these early translators were seeking to understand the wisdom that was embedded in the words themselves.

Or maybe what they were really seeking was beyond words?

Like Heidegger, Dōgen loved playing with words and etymologies and “uji” is a non-standard reading for 有時. At the time, and now too, people would say “aru toki” meaning “sometime” or “that time”… another possible meaning is yuji (having time). But Dōgen is trying to de-orient us in order to help us look at the world with new eyes. Like Heidegger. And like Proust.

4.

有時
古仏言、
有時高高峰頂立、 有時深深海底行。 有時三頭八臂、 有時丈六八尺。 有時拄伺拂子、 有時露柱燈籠。 有時張三李四、 有時大地虛空。

Uji
An ancient buddha said:
For the time being, standing on the tallest mountaintop,
For the time being, moving on the deepest ocean floor,
For the time being, a demon with three heads and eight arms,
For the time being, the golden sixteen-foot body of a buddha,
For the time being, a monk’s staff or a master’s fly- swatter,
For the time being, a pillar or a lantern,
For the time being, any Dick or Jane,
For the time being, the entire earth and the boundless sky.

This above is how Ozeki translates Dōgen’s poem, which I love so much.

If we, like Dōgen, view the world in this universal big picture way—without distinction, so that in the big sweep of time, we become all things (like mountains and Buddhas and oceans and fly swatters), then we are experiencing the boundaries between beings disappearing. This is the enactment of jita funi (自他不二), literally “self and other undivided.”

Or in the words of Shinshu Roberts:

Uji is the universal multidimensional enactment of reality. From the standpoint of our being-time, it is experiencing our life with all beings without obstruction. When we fully embrace this vision, we will respond to our particular situation in such a way that we include everyone and everything.

Within Ruth’s care and concern for Nao, the boundaries between them disappear—and in the novel those moments where Ruth imagines Nao light up the story within what has become a luminous and awakened reality as as the bond between Nao and Ruth, conflates past and future, good and bad, and expands outward to connect all beings, alive and inanimate. Not unlike Schrodinger’s cat, evoked at the end of the novel, Nao is both alive and dead. Held by care in a kind of superposition, time conflates and boundaries dissolve as we discover that Ruth has the power to affect Nao’s fate in her reading of that diary.

And what of the diary?

I think its easy to forget that Dōgen insisted that the objects themselves are on their own journeys of salvation or enlightenment.

無情説法 The insentient preach the Dharma Mu-jō sep-pō.
Or
一草一木 悉皆成仏 All beings have a Buddhist nature (Nirvana Sutra).

5.

People read fiction for so many different reasons. Some just love to be swept away by a story. While others love the mind-meld of character-driven novels, like when they feel they are walking around in someone else’s skin. Still others are hungry for philosophical ideas and thought experiments. Big concepts and space operas. As someone who, until recently, considered herself more of a nonfiction reader, I definitely fall into the last category. I love philosophical novels like the Brothers Karamazov or anything by Calvino, Borges and Herman Hesse. And I would now count Ruth Ozeki, in this category. A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliant illumination of Dōgen’s thinking.

Instead of telling, Ozeki shows.

A Tale for the Time Being is very sad, and Nao’s life so harrowing. It was too dark for me to recommend it to my loved ones. But this novel is one that I love and admire so much, because it really does bring to life what Dōgen was trying to do in his philosophy. The darkness of the story is inevitably, I think, part of the truth that Dōgen was trying to uncover: this idea that if we step away from our relentless self-focus and self-clinging, we can see the way that time is nothing but the impermanence of things, each moment arising like particles popping in and out of existence, but by dropping our egocentric self and fully participating in the total activity of all beings’ time, we can now perceive ourselves as part of the whole.

And so Ruth is Nao and Nao is Ruth.

I loved this book so much.

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For more on Dōgen:

Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji, by Shinshu Roberts,

Zen Time: Dōgen’s Uji in Context (SUNY Press Open Access) by Raji C. Steineck (Fantastic book. FREE if you download on Kindle)

3 Quarks Daily: Trials in Translation: The Monk Dōgen and His Birds (I love that first poem!)

Kind of technical for me so slowly reading:
Did Dōgen Go to China?: What He Wrote and When He Wrote, by Steven Heine
Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time in Heidegger and Dogen, by Steven Heine
Impermanence Is Buddha-Nature: Dо̄gen’s Understanding of Temporality, by Joan Stambaugh

Two Translations of a Section On Being and Time (uji 有時) from the Shobogenzo 正法眼蔵

1.

A descendent on her mother’s side of Bizen sword-makers and Buddhist priests, American artist Miya Ando‘s childhood was spent between her family’s temple in Okayama, Japan and the California redwood forests near Santa Cruz. Her work in metal, canvas, and sculpture is deeply rooted in Buddhist philosophy and her meditations on the human experience of time, the seasons, and ephemeral reality.

They are also created out of a deep commitment to craft.

It was the exquisite craftsmanship of her work which first drew me in. I looked at so much of her work online when I was preparing to interview her for Kyoto Journal, back in 2020. That interview (along with one of my essays) was included in the book Ma: The Japanese Secret to Contemplation and Calm: An Invitation to Awareness.

Ando works in so many mediums—from wood to metal— but for whatever reason, I was drawn to her drawings in indigo on mulberry paper. Maybe because when I lived in Tochigi, I spent time at a traditional dying workshop that everyone should visit if they’re in the area since its such special place to experience traditional indigo dying practices in a shop housed in a two-hundred year-old building with a thatched roof.

Indigo dying like pottery and perfume making is a hands-on craft. A sensory journey into the local. Terroir. Plants and clays and flowers and oils…

During the Covid lockdown she was working on beautiful drawings of the moon in indigo and micronized pure silver on mulberry paper—but now she has turned her attention to rain.

2.

When I returned to California in 2011, I arrived in a drought. I was so worried that my little boy would forget what rain was. This was the boy who loved rain so much when we lived back in Japan. I have a vivid memory of him, in the midst of a downpour in the time of the plum rains, and he and his papa were heading out to the market. All suited up in a bright yellow raincoat and matching rubber boots, he turned back to face me with the happiest smile on his face, chin tilted up toward the rain.

He was in was wonderland.

I recently called him on the phone and told him I was happy he was living in a land of rain showers and rainbows again, in Hawaii. And he said, “yeah I still love the rain.”

3.

Ever since she was a child, Ando says she was entranced with these rain words. It all started with one of my favorites:

Kitsune no Yomeiri (狐の嫁入り) rain that falls even though the sun is shining/the day foxes have their wedding ceremony.

This expression was so surprising and wonderful for her (and for me) and started her down a path of “listening carefully to hear what the rain is saying” 雨を聴く ame of kiku.

And in her words “perceiving in the fleeting beauty of our brief time on earth.” “Perhaps you too can listen to the sound of rain as it seeps into your heart and soul and be calmed by our precious, perfect impermanence… “

To slow down and quiet all the noise (anxiety and mental scrambling) and to listen carefully and notice one fleeting and particular moment~~ isn’t that a wonderful thing?

銀河倒瀉　ginga-tōsha “a very heavy rain or a large waterfall/a galaxy descending to earth”

雨詩を催す ameshi o moyōsu “Rain that provokes a feeling inside to read poetry”

Special ones for me are the rains in may:

蝉時雨 semi-shigure (the rains in early summer can sound just like cicadas)

五月雨の空だにすめる月影に涙の雨ははるるまもなし
”Moon shadow in the May rain, my tears unending”—Akazome Emon

And here is a new one:

Zennyo Ryūō (善女龍王) “Female rain dragon deity whom Kukai famously made appear during a rainmaking contest in 824 at the Kyoto Imperial Palace.

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To read:

Fox Spirits (狐 hu) and Barbarians (胡 hu) and The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

My interview with Miya Ando

1.

Imagine being born in Japan, a third generation child of Korean immigrants— but even now, you do not have permanent residency, much less citizenship. Despite the fact that you do not speak Korean and have never been there, still you are discriminated against in the land of your birth when it comes to renting an apartment or buying a home. You find it tough to inter-marry into some Japanese families and probably will not be hired as a police officer or teacher, because it is clear: you don’t belong.

That is how it was for the Zainichi Koreans when I was in Japan—and I wonder, has much changed in the last decade there?

And anyway, what does it mean to be Japanese? Is it just blood, or is it language? We know cultural or even legal belonging is not necessarily about where you are born. Like my son was born in Japan, but I don’t think he would ever be fully accepted as Japanese— mainly due to his loss of language skills and cultural fluency, but also he is half-caucasian. He is taking an advanced level language class at university now, but I’m still not so sure he can speak or read or write! And he looks more Hawaiian than Japanese, which is perfect since that is where he lives!

There are levels of belonging in all groups, and what it means to be Japanese is not the same thing as what it means to be American. But then what of those people who are living in limbo, like the characters of Korean descent living in Japan depicted in Susan Choi’s novel Flashlight. And what about the ones in Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko? The years depicted in the novels range from pre WWII down to the late 80s and early 90s.

2.

I have written so much about the Chinese influence on Japan. But have not mentioned the significant impact of Korea. The history is so brutal. That was the main reason why I steered away from the wildly popular novel and gorgeous TV series Pachinko— I was afraid of watching the harsh realities of what was a brutal Japanese colonization of Korea. But I finally read the novel last week and then watched season one of the show—and yes, it depicted this awful history. But it was so much more than that.

Japan and Korea have been culturally intertwined for a very long time, it being a cultural exchange that far pre-dates the Chinese influence. At first, it was one-way as so much superior technology arrived on Japanese shores from Korea, starting in the fourth century, when skills like writing and metallurgy arrived, alongside Buddhism. But this peaceful exchange did not last.

Japan’s first early invasion took place under Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the late 16th century, which was when the Kizaemon teabowl I wrote aboute arrived in Japan as part of the Shogun’s plundering of the country. And it wasn’t just ceramic bowls they grabbed, but the potters who made them were also conscripted to come to Japan and work as indentured slaves.

The truly cruel period of colonization happened in the late nineteenth century with the assassination of the Korean queen. Pachinko starts shortly after this when the Korea is brutally occupied by Japan. Many Koreans found it harder and harder to keep their heads afloat and so came to Japan to work in mines and do other kinds of menial labor. Living in slums, and shut out of much decent-paying work, some of them turned to the underworld, including the running of Pachinko shops.

The second generation male characters in the novel get into this business, but they do so without any ties to the yakuza. The first generation of these characters came as Methodist ministers to preach within the Korean neighborhoods.

3.

I loved the Pachinko metaphor. It perfectly evoked the way unseen forces and events bear down on us, just like in that game. Life is a slot machine? It’s the luck of the draw in so many ways in our lives I was so incredibly touched by the characters in this book. Like I said, it is a sweeping multi-generation family saga. Very Tolstoyesque (Is that a word?)—with that opening line: “History has failed us, but no matter.”

And there is an omniscient narrator.

The author has mentioned that she wanted the tone of the novel to reflect the narrator’s objectivity in looking at history. She wanted the tone to always be fair without overly blaming the Japanese. Noa and Solomon, second and third generation characters of Korean-descent, deeply admire Japanese people and will always stick up for them in heated family conversations. But at one point, I think it is Noa who has a Korean-American girlfriend who challenges him:

In America, there is no such thing as a Kankokujin or Chosenjin. Why the hell would I be a South Korean or a North Korean? That makes no sense! I was born in Seattle, and my parents came to the States when there was only one Korea,” she’d shout, relating one of the bigotry anecdotes of her day. “Why does Japan still distinguish the two countries for its Korean residents who’ve been here for four fucking generations? You were born here. You’re not a foreigner! That’s insane. Your father was born here. Why are you two carrying South Korean passports? It’s bizarre.””

I usually never say this, being a book worm of epic proportions but I enjoyed the show even more than the novel. I thought they updated the storytelling with two timelines and the cinematography and costumes and acting was fantastic …. I loved it.

++

Note:

Maybe because I am re-reading Hamlet and this fantastic book called Hamlet in Purgatory, but I have been thinking a lot about being in limbo—and about liminal states in general. When I lived in Hong Kong, I sometimes liked poking around the Chungking Mansions, where many refugees and immigrants, who landed in Hong Kong and found themselves in a stateless situation, live. Many can stay but can’t work or study. They can’t return to their home countries and have no onward destinations. Some live like that for many years. You can see Anthony Bourdain’s episode on Hong Kong where he has a meal and talks to people inside —

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The Erosion of Meaning: A Review of Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan

November 12, 2025 | in Reviews | by Leanne Ogasawara

In the novel we see the ways in which AI . . . neutralizes and algorithmicizes language, rendering it less precise and more ambiguous. . .

Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan, translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood, Penguin, 2025

Rie Qudan’s latest novel, Sympathy Tower Tokyo, garnered controversy in Japan when it won the prestigious Akutagawa Award in 2024. Questions immediately arose after the author announced that she used AI to help write parts of the story: around 5%, she specified. This led to the expected outrage regarding the dangers of AI in the arts, especially considering that the prize committee was unaware of its usage when they selected the novel. This is particularly interesting when at its center, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a book about language—how words shape our thoughts and build our dreams—but it is also about the social consequences when language begins to lose its meaning.

Set in the near future, the novel’s igniting incident is a gigantic new prison being constructed in the heart of Tokyo. The commission for the building’s design has gone to celebrity architect Sara Machina, who wants to create a big beautiful tower, one that will stand in conversation with Zaha Hadid’s National Stadium. In this alternative Japan, Hadid’s stadium was built in time for the 2020 Olympics, which took place as originally scheduled (contrary to its delay due to COVID). The new prison, the titular “Sympathy Tower,” is intended to be a place of rehabilitation for those labeled Homo miserabilis, or “humans deserving sympathy.” It is thus meant to convey the idea that incarcerated prisoners are themselves victims of systemic economic and social injustice—including murderers and rapists.

This tower will be the crowning achievement of Sara’s career, but she is filled with doubt. First, might this kind of sympathy lead to a lack of criminal accountability? Sara is herself a victim of sexual assault, and she believes that she has never gotten justice for what happened to her because she lacked the language to adequately explain the experience. In her case, she was blamed when it was discovered that the rapist was her boyfriend—someone she loved and invited into her home. For Sara, that violence of that fact was beyond conveyance.

In addition to this, she is also worried about the relationship between the sanitization of language and the execution of actual change. For example, how will simply renaming the prison “Sympathy Tower” address economic inequality, believed to be one of the root causes of urban crime? In Japan, it is common for companies, cities, and even train stations to change their names, often for reasons related to branding or to renew public image in the aftermath of scandal. In bringing this practice to the forefront, Qudan goes beyond interrogating wokeness and how we use language to ameliorate social ills, asking if, in addition to policing words, we have done anything concrete to solve pervasive problems? For example, in changing the word for criminal from 犯罪者 hanzai-sha—which literally means someone who commits a moral crime—to ホモミゼラビリス Homo miserabilis, has any real resolution taken place?

It is in his skillful tackling of such linguistic issues that Jesse Kirkwood’s English translation really shines. Japanese has three different scripts, all of them being used in various combinations to communicate. In addition to Chinese characters (kanji), Japanese is also written using the phonetic systems hiragana and katakana. The famous landmark Tokyo Tower, for example, is written using a combination of kanji for the word Tokyo and katakana to render the English word tower into Japanese. In Sympathy Tower Tokyo, Sara had originally expected to name her tower in a combination of kanji and katakana_, or even in all kanji as 東京都同情塔 Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō—which has a natural rhyme. She is later disappointed when she is informed that the stakeholders have decided to render the name entirely in katakana asシンパシータワートーキョー. In Japanese, the medium of written script is part of the message, and Kirkwood, in his translator’s note about the use of katakana at the start of the book, explains the situation as such:

These days, their use is often associated with buzzwords, sales jargon, pop culture, and a general desire to make things seem cool, modern, exciting, new. As our protagonist, Sara, notes, katakana-based words combine versatility and vagueness in a way that makes them an attractive choice for anyone wanting to avoid a firm commitment to meaning.

This quandary regarding vagueness and katakana’s neutralizing function has a long history in Japan. After the nation’s defeat in World War II, the famous novelist Naoya Shiga proposed that the Japanese language be abolished, suggesting instead that the country adopt French—“the most beautiful language in the world.” This created a national uproar, especially given Shiga’s prominent stature, and also fed into the contemporaneous suspicion that Japan’s exceedingly difficult language could be holding them back in terms of development. From this time onward, however, loanwords from English and other European languages—all rendered in katakana—have been used extensively, a custom that has only escalated with the rise of social media and AI.

Qudan, in an interview with The Guardian, said that her novel was written in part against the backdrop of prime minister Shinzo Abe’s assassination in 2022. Like many, she was astonished by the level of sympathy that the assailant received, despite the outrageousness of the crime. This was due to the childhood trauma the assailant experienced after his mother joined the controversial Unification Church; she impoverished the family through her unsustainable donations, and, according to the assailant, severely neglected her children. Some people felt that he was the victim of a cult, in addition to having suffered the overwhelming economic malaise and social turmoil that many people his age felt in contemporary Japan. This led to a surprising public demand for leniency, despite the fact that he murdered a former prime minister in a public place, using a handmade handgun.

Qudan also based Sympathy Tower Tokyo on Norway’s famously luxurious—and humane—Halden Prison, which has been cited as having contributed to Norway’s extremely low recidivism rates, among the world’s lowest. Like Halden, the Sympathy Tower of the novel is constructed in a way that views the incarcerated as sympathetic subjects by housing them in relative comfort, overlooking a park and focusing on rehabilitation. Indeed, the place is so pleasant that many of the incarcerated choose to remain after their sentences have been served. Despite their imprisonment, some feel that perhaps they are better off inside, and this is the conclusion reached by one of the other main characters in the novel, Sara’s much younger boyfriend, Takt. The son of a single mother, Takt was raised in abject poverty and watched as his mother being led into a life of petty crime, eventually ending up in Sympathy Tower alongside her son.

The relative solace of such imprisonment seems like a positive—and yet such captivity still affects the body, mind, and ultimately social relationships. In Sympathy Tower, all language is regulated, and only pleasing words are permitted to be spoken. Policing has become internalized, with people burdened by something Sara describes as her “brain censor.” She cannot escape the feeling that the changes to language—led by both AI and progressivism—are ultimately harmful to culture and society.

In the novel we see the ways in which AI, like social media before it, neutralizes and algorithmicizes language, rendering it less precise and more ambiguous, thus decreasing meaning and social connection by diluting the power to communicate with nuance and sincerity. AI language models are programmed to give the most “average” or “likely” response to a prompt, erasing individuality, novelty, and ultimately any potential of true empathy. As Qudan writes:

It would be Babel all over again. Sympathy Tower Tokyo would throw our language into disarray; it would tear the world apart. Not because, dizzy with our architectural prowess, we had reached too close to heaven and enraged the gods, but because we had begun to abuse language, to bend and stretch and break it as we each saw fit, so that before long no one could understand what anyone else was saying. The moment words left our mouths they would become to our listener a baffling tirade. A world ravaged by ranting. The era of the endless monologue.

In an interview with NHK about writing this novel—and specifically about her controversial use of ChatGPT to help with the AI dialogue—Qudan explained that her original motivation was the discomfort she felt in seeing how social media and AI were enabling the distortion and carelessness of language in Japan, causing divisions and issues in critical thinking. As such, both the narrative and the process of Sympathy Tower Tokyo aims to illustrate the harm of offloading meaning to algorithmic methods. In Kirkwood’s brilliant translation of not only Qudan’s original prose but also cultural and linguistic particularities, even readers who have little experience with Japanese will be fully engaged in its politics—as distinct as they are global—when reading this extraordinary novel.

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This year marked the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 and of Nagasaki three days later. It’s not surprising that several new books have come out about the history. Based in Japan where he is a professor at Shizuoka University, MG Sheftall—or Bucky to his friends—came out with Nagasaki, his second volume in his embers history series. His book was very prominently displayed at the Harvard bookstore this summer —

At 1102 local time,” Sheftall writes, “Fat Man exploded at an altitude of five hundred meters over a tennis court in Matsuyama-cho, two hundred meters east of the racetrack [pilot Kermit] Beahan had used as his aiming point. For approximately eight seconds after detonation, everything (and everyone) out to about a kilometer and a half from the bomb’s fireball was bathed in thermal radiation to a temperature of some four thousand degrees Celsius, which was hot enough to melt the surface of ceramic roof tiles.”

The subtitle of Nagasaki is: The Last Witness.

It’s practically a cliché that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, but this could encapsulate Sheftall’s life work. Devoted to capturing (and honoring) the stories of those involved, I first came to know his work in oral history where he shared the stories of kamikaze pilots in his book Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze.

My auntie in Honolulu was at the time the presidents of the war widows association at Pearl Harbor, and her group was devoted to bringing together soldiers from both sides, in Japan and out at Pearl Harbor. She enlisted me to help her communicate with a few former kamikaze pilots—and one of my letters was even printed in their association newsletter! (I wrote it in tategaki).

They were elderly and it was important work for healing.

I was thinking of Bucky while watching the recent Netflix show House of Dynamite—did anyone see it?

I was not impressed with the show, which is a nuclear countdown thriller that tells the story of an impending nuclear strike on Chicago from several points of view as the characters are basically trying to figure out how to retaliate before the missile hits.

The first problem is that they have no idea where the bomb originated. The satellite somehow missed where it was fired from. So how can you retaliate when you don’t know who did it? But they feel they must do something because the logic is, there could be a second missile that could hit our missile silos and infrastructure first before we can even get any missiles fired back in return.

I understand that they’re basically gaming it.

But then what? You just fire nuclear missiles at Russia and China —and North Korea, even though you are not sure the North Koreans have a capability like that to hit Chicago?? What if the whole thing is fake news— I watched Mission Impossible, after all and saw the submarine scene where AI made it seem like a Russian sub was under fire—and the sub fired back! At nothing.

But yeah, striking China Russia and North Korea does feel like suicide since all the missiles would basically be passing theirs in the sky. How scary!

But the only thing that gave me any comfort was the computers and silos looked very up-to-date compared to the absolutely terrifying depiction in Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety – by Eric Schlosser. In his brilliant nonfiction account, there was nonfunctioning and glitchy silo equipment manned by sometimes drunk operators. That read kept me awake for nights!

One last book for you—This one is a novel that I found sitting right next to Bucky’s book Nagasaki at the Harvard bookstore with a gorgeous cover, called Daikon, by Samuel Hawley.

I’ve only just started the book, but I didn’t realize that the Imperial Japanese Army had their own atomic bomb program in 1941 —though apparently this was a very small program with a minuscule budget and never more than 20 people working on it. The Imperial Navy had a second, larger project which started in 1943 but they didn’t get very far before the war ended. The problem was fuel…. the technology for enrichment eluded them. This is the launching point for the novel, which I recommend for the author’s note—an essay— in the back of the book alone.

Discussing the origins of his novel, Hawley writes of possible missing uranium— the accounts all say that every last speck of it was shipped to the Pacific to be used in the two bombs—but in his intensive research, he uncovered other accounts of more uranium being shipped—enough for three bombs. And so he envisions this story of a third bomb, that never detonates after falling to earth in Japan where it is then found by the Japanese.

Hawley writes of being fascinated by a second bit of history. The fact that while the bomb tested at Alamogordo (which was a static test of an implosion-type plutonium bomb, not the uranium-gun-type design) was a success, still there had not been viable experimental detonations from b52 flying at altitude. So these two data points formed the foundation for his alternative history.

Like I said, I haven’t really started reading yet—just devoured the essay in the back, which includes a very thoughtful view of the ethics of using the bomb. He basically looks at all sides, including the idea, that was floated by scientists at the time, of dropping a demonstration bomb in an unpopulated area to show the power of what would happen if they did not immediately surrender, and also of allowing Japan to keep its emperor in the Potsdam Declaration, something I only learned about myself auditing a class on Einstein at Caltech’s Einstein Paper Project (Caltech holds half the Einstein papers). Einstein was famously against the use of the bombs for all the obvious reasons.

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I was finally caught in Covid’s net. My first experience with the virus… For days on end, I wiled away the hours reading stories. Head pounding, at first all I could do was listen to books on Audible. Then when my headache finally retreated, I was able to read on the page. I mostly read novels—and by the end of the week, I couldn’t help but wonder: What is life without stories? And are we not storytelling creatures after all? And who is to say that the life of the mind is not what really matters most.

For whatever reason, so many of the books I was reading were about secrets. Like the Kate Moore spy novels by Chris Pavone—which are more about all the hidden stories within a marriage than the secrets kept by the spies themselves. And the latest translation of International Booker Prize shortlisted writer Hitomi Kawakami’s novel, The Third Love. Also a book about stories and secrets that I want to write more about here next week since it was my favorite work in translation this year. (I know the year isn’t over yet).

The only work of nonfiction I read was actually a third re-reading of Edmund de Waal’s book The White Journey. I am such a huge fan of his work, and this book about the history of porcelain is one of my favorites.

Porcelain— I think it was the greatest-kept secret in history. As early as the 15th century, China was already supplying the world with it. They held an almost complete monopoly. There are stories of Ming dynasty shards which washed up on African shores and were thought to hold magical powers.

The stuff seemed supernatural.

The Europeans judged porcelain by its translucent quality when held up to the light. How could something so strong be so thin? How had they done it? The Europeans could not get enough of it. Of course, the Chinese knew that eventually the foreigners would learn how to make it for themselves, but until then mountains of money could be made.

I have written about one of my treasures.

From the Wanli Shipwreck (+/- 1625), which was a European vessel loaded with Chinese kraak porcelain--mainly from Jingdezhen. I really wanted a bowl from the wreck and this was the only one I could afford. It is incredible how well it withstood hundreds of years underwater.

Chinese porcelain was so well made and the potters back then would create works for export, like my bowl, that suited the homes and tables of people all over the world, creating large soup bowls with the crests of Renaissance kings and holy water vessels that could be used to celebrate the Mass. They made different styles for different cultures, including trying their hands in inscriptions written in languages other than Chinese— like Arabic or Latin.

As European kings went deeper and deeper into debt because of their hunger for porcelain, they desperately tried to figure out the recipe. Edmund de Waal, who is a famous potter working in porcelain in England, followed the trail from China to Dresden and then on to France and back to England to trace the story of the discovery of the recipe for making porcelain.

He is going over the same grounds that an art historian wrote about in the late 90s in her book, The Arcanum, when Janet Gleeson tells the story of the invention of European porcelain and the start of the porcelain industry outside China and Japan. And what a story it was! When basically a German monarch imprisoned a self-proclaimed alchemist in his dungeon and told him he would only be released if he figured out how to turn metal into gold…. the guy later after decades asked if he created porcelain instead if that wouldn’t be enough to earn his release.

It is such a great story— to make porcelain you need to figure out all three ingredients as well as attain the high temperature needed to achieve vitrification. That is what seals the glaze and gives porcelain that glass-like quality. In Europe, this is what defines porcelain, but in East Asia, it is the sound it makes, like a bell when struck that gives porcelain its defining quality. This is why in Japan, when you buy a set of dishes or cups or bowls, the shopkeeper will flick every single piece with their finger before wrapping them so the customer can hear the sound of the porcelain ring.

Porcelain gets its name in English from the Italian for cowrie shell, porcellana. We also call porcelain “china” since that was the country that knew its secret.

Can you imagine, this secret was kept for four centuries! I was trying to imagine other secrets that were kept this long but couldn’t come up with any.

Personally, I prefer high fired stoneware to porcelain and eat off Mino-ware. But I do have a small collection of Herend porcelain—that I started collecting, mainly buying used on ebay, after reading the Aracanum book, which really lit up my imagination when I first read it. I only use my Herend dishes maybe once a year, if that. I always feel so fancy when I use it. Herend is one of the oldest porcelain makers in Europe—not as old as Meissen which was the first to produce true porcelain outside of East Asia, but Herend followed not long after.

I chose the Queen Victoria series, which are supposedly my Easter dishes —but then more recently I started collecting a few Rothschild birds plates, which were commissioned by one of the Rothchilds to commemorate the time when a pair of birds stole a valuable necklace from their house. After a day of searching, the family found the pair of birds playing with the necklace in their garden in one of their trees.

What a great story, right? Edmund de Waal’s book is filled with stories like this!

It all reminds me of an apocryphal Borges quote: “Some people say life is the thing, but I prefer reading…” That was sure true last week! I am testing negative now—but still my sense of smell has not come back. This is hard and I feel like I am living with one hand tied behind my back without my sense of smell! Not to state the obvious—but I sure wish I had got my Covid vaccine this year!

Yikes!

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In Susan Choi’s Booker Prize short-listed (and National Book award long-listed) new novel Flashlight, a ten-year old girl is walking on a beach in Japan with her father. Something happens and she is knocked unconscious. Woken up later, still on the beach, she cannot recall what happened to her but her father is gone. There is no body, but he is presumed drowned.

In an instant, I thought: he was abducted by North Korea.

My first decade in Japan roughly overlapped the Clinton years. Clinton, who famously declared the border between North and South Korea to be the most dangerous place on earth. Maybe it still is the most dangerous place on earth…? Still, when Japanese journalists back then began suggesting that a dozen missing people in Japan had really been abducted by North Koreans, like many people, I dismissed it as a crazy conspiracy theory. Like being abducted by extraterrestrials.

Fast forward to 2004, when an American named Charles Jenkins is suddenly splashed on the front page of Japanese newspapers for days. This guy was not kidnapped by North Koreans, because, no, he freely defected! A soldier in the US Army, he simply up and abandoned his post at the DMZ, when he (and his gun) walked across the border. Arriving in Pyongyang, Jenkins is stunned to meet three other American defectors. All soldiers without even high school diplomas, all four shared the unhappy experience of having had very rough childhoods.

In the 2006 documentary about one of the defectors Joseph Dresnok, called Crossing the Line, the narrator (Christian Slater) mentions that the army has long been a place of refuge for boys arriving from extremely harrowing childhoods. That the military serves a kind of social function as a place for boys like this to go, learn skills and be educated. As an aside, in an essay I wrote a few months ago at 3 Quarks Daily about the writer Craig Mod, he makes a similar point about Japan having served that function for him. It was, he writes so beautifully, a place where he could find release from the anxiety of his challenging childhood and feel safe.

I say this because I would then have expected the army was a safe enough place for Jenkins and Dresnok—and yet still they still freely walked across the border into the great unknown. Both Charles Jenkins and Joseph Dresnick have told their version of what happened to them. Each who despised the other man could not have told more different stories either. For Jenkins, North Korea was hell on earth. He writes of hideous treatment. While the other man Dresnok speaks of it as a safe space, where he at last felt some modicum of peace.

The four men were housed together and made to appear in propaganda films. They taught English and most interesting, they both had wives who were themselves abductees. Jenkins wife, Hitomi Soga, was Japanese. Hence the HUGE media stir in Japan. I had forgotten all of this until reading Choi’s novel, when the memories came flooding back of Jenkins and his wife. The Japanese press made much of their “love story” and pressure was put on President Bush by the Japanese PM to go easy on Jenkins, since he was so frail and elderly by this time. He was a deserter so something had to be done, but in the end, the military gave him a month in the brig. After that, he became a local legend living in his wife’s hometown on Sado Island (thank you Karen!) where he worked in a senbei shop.

So why were the Japanese citizens (some eight men and nine women according to Wikipedia) kidnapped? Well some to serve as spouses to Japanese terrorists and spies, but most were there to teach language and culture at a North Korean spy school. Dresnok’s first wife in North Korea was a Romanian artist. She was kidnapped as a wife to produce white babies that were fluent in Korean and dedicated to the cause of communist North Korea. His second wife was herself a product of a diplomat from Togo and a North Korean woman.

Choi’s novel is brilliant. And heart-wrenching.

Adam Johnson has a new novel out called the Wayfinder. I was reminded of his earlier Pulitzer Prize winning work the Orphan Master’s Son—also about North Korea. I guess it is natural that North Korea would be fascinating to novelists. But what about Jenkins and Dresnok? Whoa~~!

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Today in my ikebana lesson, we used maple leaves. Surprisingly fragile, or feathery as my sensei says, they remind me so much of my son’s tiny hands when he was a baby.

Momiji 紅葉 means maple leaf—but it also refers to the splendor of autumn foliage. Compared to a beautiful brocade, autumn leaves in Japan are incomparable! It is so dramatic there that it’s easy to imagine how the ancients struggled to understand what mystery—what miracle— caused the trees to change colors like that.

The etymology of the word momiji can be traced back to the belief that the autumn colors were somehow “rubbed out” (momidasu 揉み出す) of the leaves at that time of year. But why? And how? Well, according to this 10th century poem, it was the morning dewdrops that caused it.

白露の
色はひとつを
いかにして
秋の木の葉を
ちぢに染むらむ

How is it that
dewdrops of pure white
stain the leaves
of these autumn trees
so many, many colors?

-Toshiyuki no Ason
Kokinshu

I also love how “autumn foliage viewing” in Japanese is not called “viewing” like it is for flowers, like “hanami” for cherry blossom viewing—but rather, people go “autumn leaf hunting!”

紅葉狩り Momiji-gari.

I think the hunting meant that people were encouraged to pick up and touch the fallen leaves. Not just look or take a picture but to touch. Or maybe collect them and bring them home, press them between the pages of a novel?

But also like with blossom viewing, in leaving the city and traveling into the mountains to view the maple leaves, one’s eyes are inclined toward the vertical and gazing at the trees further and further up the mountain, there comes a place where trees and leaves, and skies and mists meet. This is where heaven and earth touch. And as a meeting place, it is also where humans and gods can come together- however fleetingly.

One more thing: we also used zinnias.

In Japanese these are called ジニア (jinia) —the romanization of the English. But there is also a native Japanese word: 百日草 (ひゃくにちそう / hyakunichisō) — literally “hundred-day flower. This name reflects how long zinnias bloom—often for a hundred days or more.

I never knew that—But I also had never heard that in the language of flowers, zinnias symbolize 不在の友を思う (fuzai no tomo o omou) — Thinking of absent friends.

This reminds me of the Analects and the famous saying that:

“有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎”出自《论语·学而》“oh, the joy of friends from afar”

I could be wrong, but I always felt that this Chinese emphasis on friendship—from Confucius down to today— did not carry across in the same way to Japan, where it never took as central a role socially or philosophically. It is something I admire deeply about China, this understanding that friendship can be a place for intellectual exchange and love!

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