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- [00:02]
A
Hey NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network Audience Survey and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most, and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries and institutions we partner with when we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users. It opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately a stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing, if you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network. Foreign
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C
welcome to the Books on Asia podcast. I'm your host, Amy Chavez, and today I'm talking with Ted Goosen. He is a translator and has translated many, many books, among them those by Naoyashiga Haruki Murakami and Hiromi Kawakami, who we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about her most recently released book, Glass the Third Love. So most people may have heard of Hiromi Kawakami from her novel Strange Weather in Tokyo, which won the Tanizaki Prize in 2001. So today we're going to talk to her translator for her latest book, the Third Love. Welcome Ted.
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B
I'm very happy to be here and thank you very much.
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C
It's very exciting to have such a well known translator with us. And I also wanted to mention to people that you are a co founder and editor of the English version of Monkey, New Writing from Japan, along with Motoyuki Shibata and Meg Taylor. And I know that I have read some of your translations of Shigenoya's short stories in Monkey as well.
- [02:33]
B
Yes, I've been very lucky, really. Working with Motoyuki Shibata and Meg Taylor, I'm able to translate a wide variety of works by Many, many writers. And they also edit my stuff. So Motoyuki goes over the, or Moto, as we call him, goes over the early draft and finds out where I really screwed up and so I can fix it. And then, and Meg, then later is a wonderful literary editor dealing with my style.
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C
That's great. It's so lovely to have people to work with that you really get along with and that you can play off of and you know, you can help each other.
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B
That's true. Certainly true.
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C
Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself? Like how did you become interested in Japan and when did you start translating and what's your ongoing relationship with Japan?
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B
I went to Japan. I'm in Canada now, but I grew up in the States and I went to Oberlin College and Oberlin had an exchange program with Japan. And so I went on that exchange for a year in 1968. It was a very good program. They immersed us. I was immersed after arrival, within a few weeks after arrival in a Japanese farm village where the family I lived with spoke no English and no one in the area spoke English. And I had never studied Japanese in school because in 1968 there were very few universities that had language programs in Japanese. That, that changed in the 1970s, but in the 1960s it was rare. There were just a few. So I had to learn that way like a, like a baby might learn. And it has its benefits, but also sometimes its drawbacks.
- [04:08]
C
When you say benefits and drawbacks, which are you referring to?
- [04:12]
B
The benefit is, I think that I learned it organically and as part of daily life, talking with people around me who at the beginning treated me like a two year old because my understanding of the language was at that level. And then gradually during that first year, I became more adept and more able. My Japanese homestay in, in Tokyo also was non English speaking, so I had to use Japanese all the time. I played on the Waseda basketball team. I, you know, I hung out in Shinjuku. I did all the young man things, but I did them all in Japanese.
- [04:51]
C
Wow, that's great. That is the best way to learn, isn't it? Just to surround yourself by it, be immersed in it and have no one speaking English to you, which is not the modern Japan.
- [05:01]
B
It's not. And, but the drawback is that I did not receive a structured grammatic grammar based introduction to the Japanese language. I was a, a mimic a parrot. And I learned that way. And it, it was good. I mean, it was good because it was based in so many friendships. And relationships and, you know, to this day, I, I, I treasure them. But sadly, I mean, it's not that easy to get back and forth to Japan. I, I've lived there, all told about 10 years, but going in and coming back and going and coming back and flying back and forth across the ocean like a migrating bird. As I got older and had more responsibilities here and my teaching and so forth, I wasn't able to get there as much as I would have liked.
- [05:44]
C
That's right. You teach at York University.
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B
Well, I retired a couple years ago from the teaching part. I still do translations.
- [05:51]
C
Okay, and then how did you get into translating Japanese?
- [05:54]
B
That's a good question. I loved reading as a child. I was a child who was isolated in the country, but we had a lot of books. So as a 5, 6, 7, 8 year old, I was spending most of my time at home reading because there was nothing else to do. We didn't have a TV. And we're talking now about the mid-1950s. That gave me a love of literature. And that was always there for me, has always been there. When I went to university, though, I majored in anthropology. I tried majoring in English literature. I didn't like it. I didn't like the very rigorous and theoretical approach, the literary historical approach that they were using. I just loved reading. I loved literature and didn't really want to pick it apart, you know, like the butterfly image comes to mind, but I didn't want to do that. Japanese literature was a wonderful merger of my love of literature and anthropology. So. Yeah, my mother's an anthropologist. That's part of it too. So the first time I lived in a foreign country without, without English was when I accompanied her to her research in the French West Indies. I think I was 15.
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C
Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, 15. Okay, great. Did your mother go to.
- [07:10]
B
She came and visited me a couple times, yeah. And she's great. I mean, uh, she's no longer with us, but she was an adventurous woman in her own way and she didn't mind the discomforts of living in a different, in a different type of lifestyle.
- [07:26]
C
Yeah. And in Japan at that time, it really was traditional Japanese style.
- [07:30]
B
Yeah, 1968 was a kind of, it was in between. Right. So the, the guys who had fought in the war were now all in their late 40s or early 50s at that time. And the war was still very fresh. And there were problems which come with industrialization and mechanization. There was a lot of pollution and not a lot of air conditioning. Those modern Comforts were yet to come.
- [07:58]
C
Definitely, yeah.
- [07:59]
B
Also were connected to the countryside. And that's the biggest change for me is Japanese would leave Tokyo and go back to their furusato, their old home. At certain times of the year, like Obon in the summer and Oshogatsu or New Year's in the winter, Tokyo would empty. You know, you get on a normally crowded train and there'll be almost no one in it, because everyone was off in the countryside, and that's where the grandfathers and grandmothers lived. Right. It was their link to the old culture. So even though Japan had already changed tremendously since the end of the war, that link was still operating. And so much of Japanese culture is based on that. And so today it's a little bit adrift. I think Japanese culture is having a hard time mooring itself, especially given the loss of population and the movement of people to the cities.
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C
That is so true. I live on a small island in the Inland Sea, and there are 350 people left. People still come back to retire there. So the. The people who moved off the island in the 60s to go to Osaka or Tokyo to get jobs, they all want to retire, you know, on the island, and they come back. But that's because they went to high school there. So they have a connection. But the next generation after that, their children will not come back because there isn't that basic connection. And they will have stronger ties to Tokyo and such. So we really see that change a lot. And now it's the countryside that's emptying out, isn't it?
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B
And I think this connects to the third love to the book that we're discussing today, because what Kawakami has done is create that linkage, not to the small villages and so forth of Japan, but rather to the past. So that when you read her, in a sense, enter into daily life in Edo Japan, which was between about 1600 and 1868. And then after that, an even longer section deals with life in Heian Japan in the 9th century. So it doesn't just kind of refer to these things, it enters into them. So you feel that you're living in a particular world in both cases. And her point partly is that Japanese women in particular need to find linkages with older ways of living. To see Japanese women of the past as having. Sure, they had to put up with a lot, and there was a lot of injustice in those eras, but not looked at through the modern lens, looked at through the way people who lived at that time felt. There is that sense of daily reality. That's very hard to find anywhere else.
- [10:41]
C
I found reading it, I found it like I felt like it was a coming of age novel for married women. Right. So once a woman gets married or anyone gets married, all kinds of things happen that you have to deal with. She, I guess we can say she time travels right back to Edo period or to the Heian period, and she sees what the women are doing there. And in the Edo period, she is a high ranking court.
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B
She starts out as a poor girl in a, in a rural village and then she becomes a courtesan through much work.
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C
Yes, right. And then in the Heiang period, she is a lady in waiting to be princess. She talks about the pros and cons of the women's lifestyles. Right. But in many ways she is, I don't want to say jealous, but she admires them because they do not have to deal with the things that the modern woman in Japan now has to deal with. And of course, one of those things is that now Japan is a monogamous culture, right? Where before, you know, you had, at least among the aristocracy, you had in the court life in the Heian era, you had the men who were sleeping around and you all. But also the women were sleeping around. And this was great. This is such a good point. And she, as a lady in waiting, would, you know, sleep with different people. She was saying, let me find it, because there are some really good quotes in here. She says love was more direct and free, like that of creatures in their natural habitat. And so she says that in aristocratic society, both sexes could have multiple loves. But the infidelity of today makes choosing the wrong partner a disaster to the rest for the rest of your life, should you make that wrong choice.
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B
And I love the way that you, that you characterize that. It is part of a long evolution which was always headed in the direction of becoming more like the west or valorizing romantic love of a certain sort. And it didn't really fit with much of Japanese tradition. You know, the, the first time a Japanese translator, we're talking about 1880s, though, first time a Japanese translator, he was working on a Russian novel and the phrase I love you came up and he couldn't translate it, there were no words to translate it. So he came up with something like, I want to look after you. Because the Japanese word for love was very physical. And it was physical and emotional. But it is perhaps a universal fact that young people especially are strongly drawn to each other and they want to sleep together or be together. And that is a kind of love, right? And that was the word for love. And it could be extended, but it didn't have the spiritual aspect of romantic love. The idea of Platonic love, for example, that couldn't be. I mean, even for us, I think it's. It could be difficult to navigate all these various terms around love. So what happened was in the late 19th century, so in the late 1800s, a word was developed and it was a character taken from Buddhism. It really in Buddhism meant more like compassion, but it could also be extended to male, female relationships. But it wasn't at all like romantic love in the West. So they took that word, which was I, and I is quickly adopted into Chinese. If a Chinese person says I love you, then that is using that word I. But that didn't exist in China before the 20th century. So this translation decision was very important in the development of Japanese culture and Japanese, that's very Japanese literature. So there is a discussion between the husband and the wife. They've gone to a resort to try to fix their broken marriage and he starts talking about how, how he loves. And the two of them interrogate, as it were. The language of love is I or I. Joe, is that a, A, a spiritual category? Does that mean that if you are truly in love, right? If you're truly in love, then it has to be I. But if you're just attracted to the other person then, or you become romantically involved without the so called spiritual side, then it's koi, the other word. Never before in my translating have I been allowed to use original Japanese words in my translation. And I don't want to do it either. I don't think in most cases it's necessary, but in this one case it was necessary because the novel does interrogate love and by doing so it brings into the conversation words which were used for love in the past. And not just the words, but the way in which love was manifested and experienced. Right. So there is then a kind of. What Kawakami is doing is opening the door which had become very narrow, a very narrow passage, right into a monogamous and western style type of marriage. And opening that door and saying, look, there are these other ways, right? There were these other people, women had to experience and live through these facts, and they did so without losing their, their, their selves. We're not looking at diminished women who, you know, who tunnel around after their husbands. Not at all. Right. These are strong women. So the women described in this book are strong and yet they come from historical Periods which we tend to see and Japanese tend to see as somehow backward. That, I think, is a huge accomplishment. Of course, it becomes a discourse on modern marriage and how it's possible for people who have loved each other, who've lived together, who've created children, to be torn apart by an infidelity. And so that the weight of infidelity, which is so heavy in a modern marriage, is lightened when one looks at the past and all the various arrangements that were made.
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C
Yeah, I think what came out to me with the book was that romance has been around forever, and there's nothing we can. You know, we cannot deny that. And there were certainly lots of court rituals that were very quaint. There's love poetry, which was just. It was just something you did. And if you wanted to sleep with a woman, you sent her a poem, and if she wanted to sleep with you, she would return your poem and. And these things. But the difference to me seemed to be that, like, marriage was different. Marriage was between families. It was something that someone used to raise their own position by marrying the proper person. Or it was something to procreate and to function more like, you know, a business. You didn't marry your love.
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B
Very different than the countryside. In the countryside, you know, 90%, 85 or 90% of Japanese during these eras were farmers. And they had a very pragmatic view of marriage. I mean, there it was for work purposes. A man and a woman had to be a team. He did the male things, and she did the female things. And they got through it like that. And they chose each other through a custom called yobai, in which young men. We're talking very young men now 15, 16 years old, would go out into the villages and find the girl that they were looking for. And they would meet secretly, but not so secretly, because her parents probably knew what was going on. They were given that freedom, that privacy, and that was how they chose a mate. So you might sleep around in that sense because you were looking for a compatible partner. And once you found that mate, then you became married in a very simple, straightforward way. And then hopefully, the marriage worked. But if it reached a point where it didn't work anymore, you were able to find a new partner. So it was a kind of sequential monogamy that ruled the farm culture. It's very different than in China, for example. The aristocracy had, in a sense, extended, amplified, aestheticized, especially aestheticized, that type of arrangement so that men and women, when their passion cooled, would be able to. To look around.
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C
The other thing, kawakami says that really hit home was that these women, like you said, they were strong women, but they were respected for their roles and the things they were doing. Where now she feels like as a modern woman, if you're not out of the house and working in a career, like doing what men are doing, then you're. You're not worth as much. And she struggles with this. In the older days, the women were happy doing women's work, what they wanted to do. And everything was, you know, it was separated. This is men's work, this is women's work, and maybe the work as a team, but. And it's one of the first things I noticed when I came to Japan is the women don't want to be doing what the men are doing. No, no, no, we don't want to do that. We don't want to take part in that festival, or we don't want to have that duty. So they're fine with this. We would call it inequality, but to them it's just a different balance.
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B
And, you know, Ueno Chizuko, who's Japan's preeminent feminist or has been in the past, told me once that she felt that her grandmother had a freer life than she did. Now Ueno and I are the same age, so that meant her grandmother was born back in. In. In the Meiji period, in the 1880s, probably. Her grandmother had more. Agency, I guess is the word we would use today. Her grandmother had more agency. She was before the massive push towards Western education. She was before the middle, you know, when Japan was transformed into a wannabe samurai culture where people tried to follow all the samurai dictates and including those about love and marriage. So once that process was well underway, women lost the agency that they had had before, and I think, to some extent, at critique. And there is a critique of Western feminism. It comes from various directions in Japan, and it also acknowledges some of the positive things that have derived from Western feminism. But it critiques it in the sense that Western feminists tend to place themselves at the front of a progression and relegate other women from other cultures to lesser roles in that. Because they're not cutting edge, right? They're not on the. In the. In the vanguard. And that's rather offensive to. To women who have their own, you know, Japan has its own feminist traditions. So, you know, those are. Those come through in a. In a novel like Third, the Third Love certainly does.
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C
And she did a great job at educating her readers. And I'm sure not. Not just, you know, foreigners reading it. But even the modern Japanese readers don't know a lot of this history. So she did really well introducing a lot of culture and the customs. Like, I didn't realize that if a couple hadn't been together for three years that they could just be divorced. They were considered divorced. So I mean, you could get out of your obligations if you had to and, or wanted to. And we tend to think of women as not having those choices. But in Japan they did. It was, it was.
- [22:15]
B
It depends which class too. I mean, when you. We're shown two very different classes of women. One, and the narrator participates in both roles. But the first role is of a poor girl, poor but talented, who becomes a geisha, a high ranking oiran, you know, in the pleasure quarters. And the other is a handmaid, the woman she serves, the mistress she serves is less free than she is. The farther up you move in society, the more strict rules governing female behavior becomes. And then you get down to the base level of the countryside and there you can see something which is different than what the elite expect of their women.
- [23:00]
C
Right. And what she does really well in this novel is she. Well, first of all, there are lots of literary references. You know, anything from the tale of Genji to the tales of Ise. There is references to more folklore type of things like the Tanapata festival. And there's the bamboo cutter, the tale, and there's even the non fiction book, the illustrations, the illustrated guide to the Yoshiwara, I think it was right, which I don't know what that is. It sounds to me more like it would be like a wood, an old woodblock print book that, you know, introduced the courtesy. But yeah, is that what it is?
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B
No, I've never seen a copy of it, but I think it may be updated to fit. See, the problem, of course is when one is dealing with these past eras is the change in language. So we can't read Tales of Issei in the original today without a book to explain it to us because the language is so different. The same thing is true of, of the Edo period writing, though people who are well educated can make it out, but most people can't. So that means what Kawakami is doing is explaining and kind of detailing aspects of the old culture to a readership unfamiliar. She creates links, let's say, with the boredom that students feel in Japanese literature class in high school, you know, when the teacher is raving about how wonderful Ariwara no Narihira was as a poet. All of these things are boring.
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C
Right.
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B
To a 15 year old. And she describes that. Right. And that's connecting with the audience because most people feel the same way. But when you break through all that linguistic, kind of that web then and get inside, then you can appreciate who they are and what they did. But to do that she has to use modern Japanese. She doesn't try to replicate patterns of speech from Edo or from Heian because that would be very taxing on her readership. And what she really wants to do is reach, as you said, those married women who are struggling to find themselves in their marriages or outside their marriage. You know, that's a for. For. For her, I think. And that makes it easy to translate or easier to translate because I too know the general history, cultural history of Japan. I taught it for over 40 years. So, you know, I can connect to the Heian period or the Edo period using all that reading that I did in the past for my teaching, you know, as a background. And that made, in a way, this is a difficult, it's especially difficult to translate this novel because of all the various levels of communication that you're looking at. Elite, very high ranking people who have their own way of interacting with the people below them and then those people below them. And the people below them is kind of upstairs, downstairs. You get a much fuller idea of what it was like, right, to be a court lady in Japan by reading this book. Nothing could be better, in fact.
- [26:05]
C
Absolutely. It's perfect for that, really.
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B
And so, you know, when I'm translating and I'm trying to imagine as I read in Japanese what it would sound like in English, then that problem of hierarchy, as you know, language in Japan is based on levels of formality, which, which means levels of hierarchy. So that is very much part of this novel. I try to, try to suggest how those, how those lines sounded, you know, sounded in Japanese. But I enjoyed it. I mean, I, I found this to be one of my favorite all time works to translate.
- [26:42]
C
Oh, that's great. And it's such a lovely read. And it's, it's a very complicated story. It goes in and out of time periods quite frequently, but in the hands of Hiromi Kawakami, she just did it beautifully and it was quite easy to follow because of that. And I think Alessa writer, there's no way they could have pulled that off. There's so much in there, there. And you meet these real historical characters, as you had mentioned, Narihira. And of course when I first read his name, I started laughing because, you know, he's, of course, a ladies man. And I thought, this is going to be fun. And we meet Prince Takaoka from Takaoka's Travels.
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B
Yeah, I mean, Takaoka's Travels is a book that can be connected to the Third Love in a very profitable way. It was written by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa and the novel's translated by David Boyd. And it's one of the novels that Monkey was able to. To publish and promote through Stonebridge Press. It gives you a sense of this kind of magical aspect, you know, when you talk about magical realism and stuff like that. And, of course, writers like Murakami are masters at being able to create unreal reality, as it were. Right. And draw you into it. And Kawakami does in this book, too, the same kind of thing, but it's from a closer distance. It always strikes me that Murakami is like us. He is creating a world that. It always strikes me that there is a distance between Murakami and those worlds that he describes, that he is looking at them and describing them not from the inside, but from approximate position outside. Whereas Kawakami tends to. I think, because her basis is classical literature. Her husband is a classical poet, a haiku poet. She's. Yeah, she's imbued with Japanese traditional. Her references are very, very natural, very spontaneous. Murakami tends to use them in a much more, perhaps modern way. You asked me about the future of Japanese writing, of Japanese literature, like where things are headed. I think that when I arrived In Japan in 1968, the war was so omnipresent and the effects of it and the kinds of things which people were struggling to deal with. I think that Kawakami and Murakami, certainly the core of his writing, the central focal point of his writing has been the war one way or the other, from the very beginning, right up until the present day. And, you know, for myself, born the same time as Murakami, I can kind of see that, you know, why the questions of what our fathers did in the war, for example, and so forth should be. Should be central. And in the case of Kawakami, I don't feel that to be the case. I mean, certainly she's fully aware of the things that took place in the war, and she is a pacifist. She's committed to a peaceful vision for Japan. But I don't see her writing as pivoting around the war to the same extent as other writers. And I think that's what's changing in that sense. She's a forerunner because younger writers don't naturally. They grew up, you know, already the war was long gone. So we, the baby boomers, in a sense, have been carrying that torch. And in countries around the world, and now as we die off or are replaced, then the memories of the war become less. Less specific and less compelling. And that can raise problems in Kawakami's case. So she, in this novel, is able to center the novel not around the war, but around women, marriage, and the past.
- [30:44]
C
And do you see any trends in Japanese literature? We've gone through all kinds of trends, you know, from cats to healing literature to. Even the women writers in Japan are really doing very well yet. When I was in Australia last month, I went into a bookshop and I asked if they had any Japanese literature, and she just kind of looked at me with a far off gaze and she said, well, we just got some of the first Japanese literature ever on this shelf over here. And there were like a dozen books, and they were mostly Murakami novels. And I feel like maybe the US and the UK and Canada have been reading Japanese literature a bit longer, and that's where some of these trends come from. But I presume the trend started in Japan and then the certain novels were translated and then they took off. Is that how cat literature becomes a trend?
- [31:42]
B
Yeah. I mean, you asked me why this novel, A Third Love. Third Love came out twice, once in the UK a year ago, and now once in the United States. And I think it's a problem when you have writers who suddenly become highly visible, but who've been writing for a long time. And then you have all those works that you would like to introduce, and you farm them out to different translators, and now you have a bunch of translations, but you can't publish them all at once. That wouldn't be smart. A sales approach, right? You want to parcel them out and not necessarily in chronological order. You may want to put the most recent novel first and the older novel after that, or, you know, it's up to the publisher. So they're trying to get readers, trying to, you know, make a buck.
- [32:30]
C
So it's a multi pronged approach rather than just, you know, canvassing the world with one, one version of something, because I guess you never know what's happening in the world either and what's taking off from different places. I bought this Third Love novel. It was either six months or a year ago. I picked it up in a bookstore in Bali. I just bought it immediately. I was like, oh, I didn't know this was out, I didn't even know it existed, right? And then it took me six months to realize that it hadn't been actually released in other parts of the world. And I think that in Indonesia, they got a lot of UK books that were printed there, and the covers are different, and sometimes they even have lots more information, like in the back they'll put in some references and stuff for reading Japanese literature. It could be a glossary or it could be a little explanations of some of the references in it, or they don't give you that in the US which is a shame, because it's quite interesting.
- [33:29]
B
There's one other thing connected to what we're talking about that, that, that's interesting, which is that Japanese women writers now are at the center. It used to be that if you went into a Japanese bookstore, they would have a shelf dedicated to women writing. Women writers. It was a separate, you know, kind of was a ghetto of Japanese Japan, you mean? And then serious literature by men and women were an adjunct to that. That's not true anymore. I mean, if you did that, the women's writing shells would outnumber the rest of the shells, right? Because so many of the best writers know, if you think about it, Yoko Ogawa, Mieko Kawakami, who's often confused with Hiromi Kawakami because they have the same
- [34:17]
C
last name, but she writes a lot of feminists, and I say feminists for breast and eggs and.
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B
And she's of a younger generation. So Kawakami is 68, and I think Mieko is somewhere in her 40s. But still, women's writing has become mainstream and, and there, I think, reason. Reasons for that. And men's writing too, has evolved into. Into a particular kind of thing. So you can recognize fairly quickly when you pick up a book and start to read it, whether it's written by a. A man or a woman. Perhaps women's concerns are more pressing now, or perhaps they have a view of a future which is denied or reduced for guys who are in the system, right, Doing their desk jobs and so forth, to, to. To be able to make a living as a writer, as you know, is a very precarious thing. So if you are someone married to a partner who's able to support the family, then you're free to write. And that often that's not necessarily women, but it can be. Often women take advantage of that, right?
- [35:20]
C
And after all, no men are out there writing about the women's issues. So it's Good. That. And so when you're not translating, which it doesn't seem like there is ever a time you're not because you have so many books out there. And I mean, anyone who's read Japanese literature has read one of your translations. At least I'm sure they. They just didn't realize it. But when you're not translating, what do you like?
- [35:45]
B
So that's a good question. I tend to read shorter things now in Japanese because I'm old. I'm 77, and my eyesight isn't as good as it used to be, or my stamina isn't as good as it used to be. I don't really feel like tackling long works in Japanese. I just don't have the time. So I read short stories. One of the reasons I love Kawakami's people from my neighborhood is because the stories are all so short. So short and so much fun.
- [36:15]
C
Right, and you also translated that.
- [36:17]
B
And I'm still translating that. She's still coming out with more stories from, from. From that series. Yeah.
- [36:23]
C
Oh, that's great.
- [36:23]
B
So I get to. I get to do those. But other works. Well, let's see. Takaoko's Travels we've mentioned. I read that recently. I read David Boyd did an amazing job with that translation.
- [36:35]
C
That is such a fun book.
- [36:37]
B
And there's a writer named Ruth Ozeki and she has written a few books. The one I read most recently was the Book of Form and Emptiness and it's about a schizophrenic young man and I have a brother who's schizophrenic. So I was very, very kind of drawn in to that story and how you deal with voices in your head. It was a great, great novel that way. And she also wrote something called the Tale for the Time Being and I like that as well. So Ruth Ozeki would be one of my favorites right now.
- [37:09]
C
Oh, good.
- [37:10]
B
She writes in English, by the way, not in Japanese.
- [37:12]
C
Yeah, I read her My Year of Meats. I think that was it. Yeah, that was very funny and very good. And also the one about the tsunami tale for the Time Being, it's narrated by two characters, a 16 year old and Japanese American girl living in Tokyo who keeps a diary and a Japanese American writer. And what happens is her diary washes up on the west coast of the U.S. yeah, that was really good.
- [37:42]
B
So you've given me Ruth Ozeki, Tatsuhiko Shibuswa.
- [37:47]
C
Yeah, Shibusawa. Shibusawa, right. Okay. Did you have a third or two?
- [37:51]
B
A third would be an old book. Can I stick in an old book?
- [37:55]
C
Please do.
- [37:55]
B
It's called the Anatomy of Dependence and it's written by Takeo Doi D O I. He's a psychologist who studied Freudian thought and at a certain point realized that there was an entire aspect of Japanese culture that could not be encompassed by Freudian thought. And it affects everything. If you. If you read that book, then you can see the. And this is important for anyone who wants to translate as well, because there's so much lurking behind simple terms like love.
- [38:29]
C
Does he talk about love in that specifically?
- [38:32]
B
But he talks about how dependence, dependence of men on women or women on men or children, that how much dependence, mutual dependence is at the basis of Japanese psychic wholeness.
- [38:45]
C
That's right. There's a word for it too, amai in Japanese.
- [38:50]
B
So in Japanese, the name of the book is amai no kozo, or the structure of the amaya.
- [38:55]
C
Okay.
- [38:56]
B
It was translated by John Bester, I guess, probably 50 years ago or more.
- [39:02]
C
You know, he has a lot of good books there. Yeah. As a translator, right? Yeah.
- [39:06]
B
He's a permanent full time gig. I think he was a kodansha and he was paid to just to translate.
- [39:13]
C
He has lots of books out there. It takes a while to find them, though, because they're older books that aren't being published anymore. I've been having lots of fun with, you know, getting his translation.
- [39:22]
B
You did a wonderful job with a novel called Black Rain by a writer named Ibuse.
- [39:27]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [39:28]
B
So IBU I B U S E so that was about the bombing of Hiroshima. And it is a great book that came out of a terrible tragedy and
- [39:38]
C
it became a movie, didn't it?
- [39:40]
B
There were two movies called Black Rain, but one of them was based on his novel. Yeah.
- [39:45]
C
And I just wanted to say that one of your little things you added into the book, I'm sure, in order to explain things to English speakers, but I had to laugh, is you had a sentence that said it was the month of running teachers. And then in parentheses you put December. And that was so funny because I didn't realize that December was the month of running teachers. But there are all kinds of months like that, right? There's like the no God month for the 10th month and this and that. So that was. I presume that was not.
- [40:19]
B
It was in the original. That was a literal translation. A word for word translate.
- [40:22]
C
Yes, your kid. So the Japanese people wouldn't have known it either.
- [40:26]
B
No, they wouldn't. Because it's way, way back, a thousand years Ago. Yeah.
- [40:31]
C
Okay. All right, I see. No, it's not like no God month that everyone knows. Okay. Well, it has really been wonderful talking to you, Ted. Is there anything else you wanted to say before we.
- [40:43]
B
No, Amy, but thank you very, very much for a really pleasurable conversation. I hope it works out okay. I hope that. I'm sorry that my. My voice quality may not be. I'll tell you one story very quickly. And I did all these programs for CBC and I would take. I had an old uher tape recorder. It was pretty heavy, but it was lighter than the Nagra, which was the best, but too heavy to carry around. And I carried it around. I carried it to Japan. I interviewed a lot of people. I wanted to interview Oikenzaburo, so I phoned him. I got a contact.
- [41:17]
C
Oh, I love him. I just finished a personal matter. Sorry. Go on. Oh my gosh, it's amazing.
- [41:25]
B
So I. And of course, you know, he has a brain damaged son named Hikaru. And that son became a composer. So that was a huge breakthrough for. For the family. But at the time I phoned oe, his son was. Was there in the house. And I asked an innocent question because we're always worried about sound quality, right? Like that's the word I was getting from my producers at cbc. I bring something in and say, well, I'm sorry, but the quality isn't quite good enough, you know, to put on the air. And I'd been through that. So I just asked Oy politely, is there a quiet room in your house? He hung up on me. He was angry because he was. He felt that I was somehow, you know, impugning his. His household and his son who was. Was given free rein in the house. And if the sun broke in and started chattering, then, then, you know, there was nothing he was going to do about it. So I blew my interview. I got to meet him later and we. And we hit it up.
- [42:23]
C
Wow, you've met. I bet you've met some interesting.
- [42:26]
B
I met a lot of writers, you know, dozens of writers. It's been a great pleasure.
- [42:30]
C
Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you. I feel lucky to be been able to talk to you. So thank you so much for your very valuable time today. Ted, it's been a great pleasure to talk to you.
- [42:39]
B
Thank you, Amy. It's been. Been my ple. And I hope that listeners out there will have a chance to look at a third love.
- [42:46]
C
Absolutely. We've been talking to Ted Goosen. He's a translator of Hiromi Kawakami's latest novel, the Third Love. You can pick it up worldwide at any bookstore and also, of course, on Amazon. So thank you so much.
- [43:01]
B
Thank you.
- [43:02]
C
And I'd like to give a shout out to Plum Rain Press for their support of the the Books on Asia podcast.