On Translating Haruki Murakami, and New Japanese Storytellers

From left to right: Roland Kelts, Jay Rubin, Ted Goossen,
Motoyuki Shibata, Aoko Matsuda, Satoshi Kitamura.

Literary translation and Japanese masters fictions were the topics last night at a Japan Society talk that brought together two North American translators of international cult favorite Haruki Murakami, a Japanese translator of American fiction, an emerging Japanese novelist and a top Japanese illustrator.

Is translation art or merely the mechanical act of transcribing one language into another? What happens when the novelist who is being translated is an accomplished translator himself? What inspires the longtime translator to attempt penning a novel? These were some of the issues addressed in "The Magical Art of Translation: From Haruki Murakami to Japan's Latest Storytellers."

Jumping right into the craft of inspecting words and phrases, panelist Ted Goossen, a Murakami translator from York University in Toronto, expressed uncertainty that there was anything "magical" about the act of translation. His colleague Jay Rubin, emeritus Japanese literature professor at Harvard, opined that yes, translation did involve some sort of magical alchemy, yet flatly denied that the process was in any way creative. Okay, every person has his or her own take on the matter.

Motoyuki Shibata, who recently retired from his post teaching American literature and literary translation at Tokyo University, pointed out that both Murakami and his predecessor, Futabatei Shimei, (whose novel Ukigumo, or The Drifting Cloud, published in 1887, was one of my grandfather's favorites), both wanted to break free of the stifling Japanese literary conventions of their day. Shimei, a translator of Turgenev, wrote his first fictional paragraph in Russian, and Murakami, who has translated Raymond Carver, wrote the first paragraph of Hear the Wind Sing in English.

Rubin was incited to write his first novel, The Sun Gods, out of sheer anger, he explained, over the illegal roundup an imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II. His book is set in Seattle and the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho before, during and after the war. Rubin was shocked to learn of this chapter of U.S. history when he was in graduate school, and urged audience members to read Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter to learn more about the period.

Rising Japanese novelist Aoko Matsuda said that she valued her translation work (of the writer Karen Russell) as much as her fiction writing, explaining that both occupy the same part of the brain that tries to fix free-floating voices on the page, and that both have made her "love literature more and more."

Picture-book artist and illustrator Satoshi Kitamura deftly brought the discussion of translation into the realm of images, explaining that he is trying to translate the feeling and tone of the text into pictures. He's worked with poets John Agard and Charles Simic, and showed work from those books as well as his charming illustrations from the children's book The Yes, by Sarah Bee. Shibata interjected here, saying that often when he feels that a poetry translation of his falls short it is Kitamura's illustration that helps bridge the gap and make the translation feel whole.

Panel moderator Roland Kelts told us after the discussion that far from micromanaging his translators, Murakami adopts a fairly "laissez-faire" attitude, leaving his translators free to do their work unhindered. The panel also introduced me to new Japanese fiction writers that I'm eager to check out. Several, including Mieko Kawakami and Hideo Furukawa have been published in the journal of new writings from Japan Monkey Business, which is edited by Goossen and Shibata.

The Interconnected Worlds of Japanese, Western Craft Beers

The Red and the White: Kagua beers on display with yuzu and sansho.

I didn't know we had Jimmy Carter to thank for the legalization of home beer brewing back in 1976. Yet we do, and it's why Brooklyn Brewery's maker-in-chief Garrett Oliver says of our often unappreciated former President, "He did all right by me."

Oliver had lots to say about beer, Japanese kaiju monster movies (which were the first thing about Japan he ever liked) sake, and many other beer and non-beer topics at a recent Japan Society event, "The Delights of Craft Beer & Japanese Cuisine."

Oliver pointed out that beer is by far the more popular drink than sake in Japan. There are 40 Belgian beer bars in Tokyo alone, and Japan is the fourth largest beer market in the world. The major Japanese beer companies, Kirin, Sapporo and Osaka Beer Company (later renamed Asahi) were all formed in the late 1800s not long after Commodore Matthew Perry cajoled Japan's doors open to the West.

Japanese beers have traditionally been made in the style of German wheat beers. Since about 2000 or so, however, the country's brewers, inspired by the wild craft beer goings on in America and the West, have been experimenting with beers that express distinctly Japanese characteristics.

Oliver warming up the crowd with thirst-creating stories and pictures.

Among the brews we tasted from eight Japanese or Japanese-style brewers, we particularly loved the Kagua Blanc and Kagua Rouge. Both are scented with yuzu, the beautifully aromatic citron (in this case from Kochi Prefecture), and sansho, the lemony pepper with the heat of its close relative the Sichuan peppercorn. The white beer is brewed with wheat and the red with roasted malt.

The beer, described as "Japanese scented beer," was dreamed up by Tokyo-based Nippon Craft Beer Inc., which sends the raw ingredients for Kagua from Japan to Belgium to be brewed by a a master brewer there. The bad news on this enticing beer is that it's not available in the U.S. just yet.

Other standouts that are available here included the Yoho Brewing family of beers, Yona Yona Pale Ale, Aooni IPA, and the luxurious Tokyo Black Porter. They not only tasted great, but had the most beautiful can design, too.

In one example of how American brewers have influenced Japanese styles, Oliver told the story of his own invention, Brooklyn Brewery's Sorachi Ace, made with a hop that was developed in Japan by Sapporo in the late 1980s. With its strong lemongrass flavor it was considered a dud at the time. Oliver stumbled upon the hop, love it, and created his beer. In the strangest chapter of the story, he boarded a plane with 11 pounds of the hops to reintroduce them to Japan, which was by then ready to embrace their own invention. Oliver returned home and found out from his supplier that the Japanese had ordered 800 pounds of the Sorachi Ace hop.

Fermentation, Miso, and the Health Benefits of Soy

In the past two weeks, I attended two lectures that vastly increased my knowledge of two powerhouse fermented ingredients in Japanese cooking. One was a lecture on shiokoji, the miracle flavor enhancer and umami conductor that has for some time been all the rage in Japan. The other was a nutritional talk on the miracles of miso, the fermented soybean paste at the heart of miso soup and countless other flavorful Japanese dishes.

Nutrition researcher Lawrence H. Kushi, ScD, delivered a scientifically detailed and convincing ode to miso at a recent Japan Society lecture. The room was packed. Who knew there were so many miso lovers in this city?  Miso paste is pretty simple stuff. It's made of three ingredients: some type of grain, usually soybeans in Japan, koji (mold-innoculated rice) and water. 

Dr. Kushi's main points were nutritional. He  pointed out that Japan is third in worldwide average life expectancy (compared to the United States' sickly 51st place), despite Japan's famously high sodium intake. Dr. Kushi showed slides of numerous epidimiological studies. One of the earliest studies on miso and chronic diseases followed 250,000 people in Japan and showed a clear link between daily consumption of miso soup an a lower incident of stomach cancer. Miso has also been associated with lower rates of breast cancer. The doctor noted that "what you eat early in life makes a difference," so a high intake of soy products during childhood can exert a protective longterm effect. And even though miso is high in sodium, studies indicated that it is "a safer salt vehicle than salt," Dr. Kushi added.

There is a controversial side of miso, as one audience member pointed out. Soy contains isoflavones (a naturally occurring chemical compound) that are are similar to the hormone estrogen. The worry is that for women undergoing treatment for breast cancer, soy products may negate the effect of estrogen-blocking breast cancer drugs. Both Dr. Kushi and the American Cancer Society (see their "Expert Voices blog post on the topic) point out the shortcoming of studies that raised these fears, and stress the much more abundant evidence on the protective effects of soy.

Kushi, by the way, comes from a long line of educators; his father was Michio Kushi, the famous proponent of macrobiotics. One last interesting point, also raised by an audience member, is that studies have shown that gut bacteria of people in different cultures differs significantly. Apparently there is some evidence, for example, that Japanese people can extract more nutrients from seaweed-based foods than non-Japanese. Dr. Kushi noted that intestinal microbiata (the microbes that live in our intestines) are of great interest to the NIH, but that more study is needed. He also pointed out that when people move to another culture "they take on the disease characteristics of the place they live as they take on different eating habits and food choices."

If you're interested in how the typical Asian diet differs from a standard western diet, check out the Asian Diet Pyramid. Rice, noodles and whole grain products form the base, eaten daily, while meat is at the tip of the pyramid, a once-a-month rarity.

Since I didn't even get to the fascinating lecture by Japanese cooking expert Hiroko Shimbo on shiokoji, stay tuned for my upcoming post, which will be all about that!