Translator helps her sensei
Japanese author lands rare deal with help of her former student
When you consider how many thousands of manuscripts are out there, and how many aspiring writers are knocking on publishers’ doors, every book that actually makes it to publication represents a significant bucking of the odds.
Tomoko Mitani’s new short story collection Will Not Forget Both Laughter and Tears is a rarer creature still. On the one hand, it’s a book in translation, published in a continent that’s notoriously — and unfairly — indifferent to them. On the other, it’s a book that was self-published in its native Japan. Add to that the fact that Mitani is an unknown debut author and you’ve got the equivalent of getting hit by three lightning bolts at the same time.
How did this private, 68-year-old woman from Sapporo land a book deal with the University of Alberta Press?
Well, you’d have to ask her translator.
Yukari F. Meldrum is a full-time translator and interpreter in Edmonton. She’s lived here for more than a decade, but as an elementary school student in Japan, she attended the after-school reading and math program Kumon. One of her teachers there was Mitani. The two of them got along and, despite the generation gap, kept in touch over the years. When Meldrum mentioned, in 2000, that she’d taken up translation, Mitani decided to finally let her secret out: she’d been writing autobiographical short stories for years. In fact, Mitani was planning to self-publish the book in Japanese, but she had some English-speaking friends in Australia she wanted to show it to as well. Was Meldrum for hire?
“At first she was my teacher. My sensei,” Meldrum says of the collaborative process, which lasted more than a year while she completed her PhD in translation studies at the U of A at the same time. “But we developed a friendship, and through the process of translation, I would ask her all kinds of questions. We would enter a discussion about life philosophies. It was really great.”
One thing that appealed to Meldrum about the stories was how they showed a side of life in Japan that rarely makes it onto North America’s limited radar. We know geishas. We know Godzilla. But we don’t know the emotions and routines of a married, middle-class woman in the late 20th century. The 22 stories and one novella in Will Not Forget Both Laughter and Tears are true to the
“Tomoko is unique in that she admits all the funny things she has done. In Japan, you hide the embarrassing stories — especially if you’re a grown woman.”
YUKARI F. MELDRUM
collection’s title, depicting a range of quiet, human moments that are neatly divided into two sections: “Dosanko Oku-San’s Silly Stories” and “Aching Memories.” The concluding novella, “Yoko,” is an elegy to Mitani’s late sister.
Even in Japan, Meldrum says, where these stories may be more familiar, the act of putting them down on the page is not.
“My mother skimmed some of the book,” Meldrum says, by way of example, “and she said, ‘Oh, it’s just normal stories.’ It wasn’t that surprising for her, but it was surprising that Tomoko actually published it.”
That, Meldrum adds, is a testament to Mitani’s character.
“Tomoko is unique in that she admits all the funny things she has done. In Japan, you hide the embarrassing stories — especially if you’re a grown woman. You’re not supposed to talk about those things. You might do it in private, with your close friends, but not in a book.”
A similar thread — gentle but insistent — runs through the stories themselves. The Mitani character is constantly getting into situations that her friends and family find embarrassing, while she merely shrugs it off.
In The Deity of Small Change, Mitani recounts a trip she made to the post office to cash in several large jars’ worth of spare change: too proud to admit that her backpack is now too heavy for one person to carry, Mitani slouches and stumbles her way there, one step at a time, to the shock of everyone around her. When she finally puts the bag down to lean against a pole, “my body went around it just like a hula hoop.”
And in Men Who Don’t Laugh, she makes the rather startling claim that her husband Yoshio “started laughing aloud just recently.” No doubt this is due to Mitani’s influence.
In 2009, several years after finishing her translation, Meldrum attended an event for multilingual writers organized by the Edmonton Public Library’s Writer-in-Exile, Rita Espeschit.
“I went there as a translator,” Meldrum says, “trying to promote translation, and somehow got convinced to come out of the closet — because I was a closet poet.”
That’s also where she met Peter Midgley, acquisitions editor for the U of A Press. To Meldrum’s surprise and delight, he was as interested in the domestic, everyday elements of Mitani’s stories as she was. Suddenly Mitani’s English-language audience, which began as a handful of friends in Australia, has become a whole lot larger.
Meldrum, who is currently at work on a collaborative translation project with the poet Alice Major (not to mention her own fiction and poetry), says that Mitani is thrilled at the new-found exposure.
The only problem? She hasn’t actually held the English version of her book in her hands yet.
Meldrum had a box of them sent over to Japan more than a month ago, but they haven’t arrived.
Let’s just hope that when Mitani goes to the post office these days to check, she leaves the jars of change at home.