The Invisible Onlooker: A conversation with Lucy North, translator of Natsuko Imamura’s The Woman in the Purple Skirt

Imamura Natsuko won the Akutagawa Prize in 2019 for The Woman in the Purple Skirt (Murasaki no sukāto no onna). Lucy North’s translation of the darkly comic novella was published the following year by Penguin in the United States and Faber in the United Kingdom. About North’s translation, Kirkus wrote, “Imamura’s pacing is as felt and quick as the best thrillers, but her prose is also understated and quietly subtle.” In this interview, North discusses what went into capturing the subtleties of Imamura’s writing in English.

David Boyd and David Karashima: The Woman in the Purple Skirt is a great title. What were your thoughts when you were considering how to translate Murasaki no sukāto no onna?

Lucy North: For me, the title of the book evokes a Hans Christian Andersen-type fairy tale. I’m thinking of “The Little Match Girl,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.” “The Snow Queen” is another. I also think the title is keying into certain Japanese urban legends such as “Aka Manto” (Red Cape) or “Aoi Manto” (Blue Cape), and other urban legends such as Kuchisake no onna (The Slit-mouthed Woman). The structure of the title in Japanese, a descriptor phrase that involves an item of clothing and the title ending with “onna,” surely echoes these urban legends. The word “murasaki,” rendered in the rounded script of hiragana, throws up possibilities of softness, youth and femininity (is there some sort of link with the figure of Lady Murasaki in Tale of Genji?), ironically foreshadowing one of the features of the Woman in the Purple Skirt, which is that she is not young at all––or at least young in the way a woman needs to be, apparently, in the context of the assumptions underpinning society in this narrative.

I hope that I have captured an element of horror in the “creepiness” in the slightly mannered, deadpan tone of the narrative in English. There is something inherently creepy in the narrator’s attitude, indeed about any fascination with another person that seems to involve so much “tailing.” (As I write, I am wondering if “watching” is one of those inherently contagious activities, like yawning, laughing, and crying?). And there is also something starkly creepy in the figure of the Woman in the Purple Skirt––she is almost like an automaton. The disparate, almost disembodied elements of her––her purple skirt, her hair (always unclean and unkempt), the age spots on her face. Is it her dishevelment that is creepy? Her essential unknowability? Is it her precarity? Or her marginality? It is an evocative title, anyway, and one that doesn’t give up all its meanings easily, even in Japanese.

DB & DK: In the opening pages of the book, when we meet the Woman in the Purple Skirt, she’s eating a “cream bun.” What thoughts did you have about how to present kuriimu pan to an English-language readership?

LN: The translation of this word kuriimu pan I found to be so tricky. Kuriimu pan is a loanword that can translate (or transliterate) as “cream bun.” (“Kuriimu” for “cream,” and “pan” for bread, pan being a generic word for all things bready, including buns and rolls, derived from the Portuguese word for bread, pão.) How to translate this imported word, given that the comestible that it refers to has likely morphed away from its original? If I used the Japanese word, should I italicize it? Leaving words for foods untranslated and unitalicized is now the favored way, I was aware. But would kuriimu pan work? Some readers would not make the connection between “pan” and bread in a Japanese context. Then I realized I didn’t know what a kuriimu pan was. I didn’t think I’d ever even seen one of these… what were they? Rolls, buns, puffs? Pasties?… Judging from internet posts, many Japanese people associate kuriimu pan, soft, warm, with their childhood––it seems to be a typical childish treat. I did a quick bit of research. The history of bread in Japan goes back to the sixteenth century, when Europeans made their appearance, though bread-baking proper began much later. It turns out that kuriimu pan is one of a number of rolls and buns, including an-pan and jamu-pan, invented in the late nineteenth century, to emulate the fare given to westerners in hotels. It is a roll with custard cream inside––though nowadays, with the endless inventiveness of the food industry, the cream can be chocolate cream, matcha cream, and other kinds. (So, the “cream” is not “cream” in the strictest sense.) So, a kuriimu pan is different from a cream bun, in fact. One of the chief differences seemed to be that a kuriimu pan is filled with the “cream” before being baked, rather than being piped with cream afterwards. The dough also seemed bready rather than spongy. Bearing that in mind, maybe I should go for kuriimu pan––in other words, keep the Japanese? Perhaps hyphenate it, as kuriimu-pan? Kuriimu looked unrecognizable to me as a word. Perhaps I should use “cream pan”? “Cream pan”? I didn’t think I’d have the time and space in the second paragraph of the novel, which is where the cream-bun-eating episode comes, to give a gloss. By this time, I had learned that my publisher’s house style would require that if I did use kuriimu pan, it would be italicized. There would be no macron over the ‘i’. Was the particularity of a kuriimu pan enough to insist that it not be rendered as “cream bun”? I thought and I thought. I searched for images of kuriimu pan, endlessly. As a transliterated word in English, and especially italicized, would the word kuriimu pan not seem to be demanding a lot of attention? My editor, who knew the story by now, urged me to use “cream bun.” “I like the sound of it, the legibility of it, the quirkiness of it,” he told me. “I don’t think we need to get overly specific or technical.” In the end, bearing in mind the exigencies of house style, that’s what I went for, with residual anxiety, although I added a stealth gloss to make sure that the reader would understand that the “cream” in the “cream bun” was not cream but custard.

DB & DK: How did you approach the relationship between the Woman in the Purple Skirt and the narrator? There are some comical elements in the book, but what did you do to get them across in the translation?

LN: There are two women in this book: the narrator, who calls herself The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, and the object of her obsession, whom she calls The Woman in the Purple Skirt. The book is titled after the latter. The relationship between the two women, who seem, by their names, to fit neatly together, is the subject of the story. We are introduced to both characters in a passage (more of a rant) in the first few pages, in which the narrator writes about the Woman in the Purple Skirt, and all the women in her past that she reminds her of (the comparisons seem almost random) and compares her to herself. She tells us how she, the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, wants to get to know her. There are questions of identification and projection and idealization. The use of these nicknames by the narrator, serves to highlight her obsessiveness, and perhaps her fear of intimacy. She longs for the other woman, but she puts her on a pedestal, distances her, gives her a name one might find in a story. The nicknames also give the narrative a childish feeling. The narrator seems like a person who has never quite grown up––though “growing up” in this narrative seems to involve acquiring social adroitness, the ability to conform. This mixture of childishness and adultness is what gives the narrator her strange voice.

This narrative is narrated by a person who is definitely there in the story that she narrates, but who has very little “presence” for those around her. She almost seems not to exist. She is seeing and hearing, but she is not seen––or only very rarely. The degree to which she lurks and hides, and the degree to which she is overlooked––excluded––is one of the central questions of the book. In the course of her narrative, she gradually emerges to the reader (there is a sort of “reveal” at the end), and our impression of her changes as we read. The overwhelming amount of detail she records about what she sees and hears as she lurks contributes in a paradoxical way to the impression that she is invisible. Surely only someone who is a fly on the wall can see and know this much. The narrator wants to be seen. She longs for and admires the Woman in the Purple Skirt precisely because, in contrast to her, she is seen.

At the same time, there are places where the narrator can barely acknowledge herself in her own narrative. It is as though she has internalized her own invisibility and exclusion. For example, in the voice practice scene, carried out in the trash collection area of the hotel; the narrator talks of the scene as comprising “just two people,” when there are surely three––the narrator is watching the Director and the Woman in the Purple Skirt in the shadows. At another point, when the supervisors are distributing stolen fruit from the hotel rooms to the cleaning teams, the narrator can’t acknowledge her own presence in the room, and refers instead to “someone else, standing a little way away.” When all the supervisors are holding out their water bottles for the Woman in the Purple Skirt to inspect for traces of alcohol, the narrator again cannot acknowledge that she is there too, holding out her own water bottle, and refers only to “a water bottle just outside the circle of women.” These points add to the poignancy and the humor, I think––although we laugh with uncertainty. Her invisibility, her lack of presence, her “nonentity” is confirmed at the end when the Director suddenly becomes conscious of her sitting there in his hospital room, when everyone else has left––even though, as she tells him, she has been “here all along.” There’s a link to be made of course between her invisible onlooker status and her age, her gender, and her marital status.

The narrator’s invisible status means that often she is merely listening to conversations––as she lurks in a restroom, or on the edges of a group of cleaners in a linen room or sits on a bench in the park; as she stands behind a changing room locker door or loiters in the street outside the Woman in the Purple Skirt’s apartment. At these times, the story is driven by dialogue. This aspect is one of the things that gives the narrative a kind of manga-like feel: we’re not looking at speech bubbles, but almost. (The story is rather cartoon-like, and it gets more so towards the end when some disturbing scenes take place. So, we are invited to laugh at possibly shocking scenes.) In these overheard conversations, Imamura uses a lot of emotive sounds, or interrobangs, in her narrative, like 「あっ」or 「あッ」or 「うわああ」 or 「ハハッ」 or 「えっ」「エッ」「あらー」「えー？」「んがっ」「え？」「え……、はい、まあ」,「ええ、はい……。フフ」,「うん」「ううん」, 「うーん」「いやいや」 「ふうん」 「うん、うん」 「ひえー」 「げー 「はあ？」「は？」 「まあ」「もお」「わ、わ、」, 「うわっ」as well as phonetic renderings of laughter such as「フフッと」 or 「プフッ, アハハハッ」and 「あはは」. As a translator I couldn’t afford to ignore these expressions. For one thing, they drive home the aural nature of what is being recounted––the fact that the narrator is overhearing the scene. They also seem to me such an integral part of what Imamura does, which is to present a poignant, even painful story, with hilarity (the humor designed to expose the cruelty of conventionality), and caricature. But I couldn’t reproduce these sounds as they are in the Japanese, (for example, the over-the-top exclamation “Hi-e-e” just wouldn’t carry). I thought there was an opportunity for a bit of slapstick, which I tried to achieve in English through the use of exclamation marks, occasionally doubled, also used together with question marks. At times I had to replace the emotive sounds with an actual verb like “guffawed,” or “gave an outright laugh.” It was fun and effective to reproduce the Japanese as is when I could––for example “Wa ha ha,” which I used at one point. (I was also allowed by my editors to get away with the expressive “…”, signifying a silence in which people’s brains tick over as they absorb and process certain information. Here again, there was an over-the-top feeling, because the information is extremely trivial yet shocks small-minded people.)

Other sounds, or near-sounds, which again reminded me of manga conventions (though they are commonly used in Japanese, as mimetic giseigo and gitaigo, adding a kind of embodiedness to the language), heard by the narrator are the noise (or imagined noise, or imagined action) of the Woman in the Purple Skirt chewing her cream bun, her mouth crammed full, もぐもぐ, mogu mogu, which I rendered as nom nom, and the sound of the toasted almonds falling off the cream bun, パリパリ, pronounced pari pari, which I rendered as pitter patter. I was pleased to be able to go some way towards rendering the sound of a person taking a satisfying swig of champagne and feeling the fizz in their nose, in Japanese プハーッと (puhā-t-to), as mmm-tum-tum-tum, although I was conscious that as a translation this only went so far. These words, especially ones like mogu mogu and pari pari, I felt, weren’t used for comic effect, but to add a childish atmosphere to the narrative, perhaps giving it, in these parts at least, a kind of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale feel.

Lucy North’s translations include Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories (New Directions, 1996; 2018), 10 stories by Taeko Kono, Record of a Night Too Brief (Pushkin Press, 2017), a collection of 3 stories by Hiromi Kawakami, and The Woman in the Purple Skirt (Faber & Faber and Penguin Books, 2021), a novel by Natsuko Imamura. She lives in Hastings, East Sussex.

David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated fiction by Hiroko Oyamada and Mieko Kawakami, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat won the 2017/2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

David Karashima is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University. He has translated the works of a range of contemporary Japanese writers including Hitomi Kanehara, Shinji Ishii and Hisaki Matsuura. His nonfiction book Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami was published by Soft Skull Press in 2020.