Merely a Beautiful Dream? A conversation with Hitomi Yoshio, translator of Mieko Kawakami’s “Dreams of Love, Etc.”

Mieko Kawakami won the Akutagawa Prize in 2008 for her novella Breasts and Eggs (Chichi to ran), which she expanded into the novel Natsumonogatari in 2019. Sam Bett and David Boyd’s English translation of Natsumonogatari, published in 2020 with the title Breasts and Eggs, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and one of TIME’s Best 10 Books of 2020. Kawakami’s other books include Heaven (Hebun), published in English translation earlier this year, and All the Lovers in the Night (Subete mayonaka no koibitotachi), scheduled to be published in English in 2022. For years, Hitomi Yoshio has translated Mieko Kawakami’s writing for Monkey Business, where she originally published “Dreams of Love, Etc.” in 2013. Her translation was also included in The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories edited by Jay Rubin. In this interview, Hitomi discusses this modern classic and several structures specific to Kawakami’s writing – from long sentences to musicality – and what she’s done as translator to honor them in English.

David Boyd & David Karashima: “Dreams of Love, Etc.” has many stylistic textures. As the translator, how did you approach this? Was one part of the text more difficult to handle than the other?

Hitomi Yoshio: One of the unique characteristics of Kawakami Mieko’s works is her stream-of-consciousness style. “Dreams of Love, Etc.” is a first-person narrative, featuring a forty-something woman who recounts her domestic life and daily routines in a suburban neighborhood in Tokyo. The narrator’s interior monologue is accented by conversations with those around her, and these dialogues are often unmarked by line breaks or quotation marks, and buried within the narrator’s thoughts which flow from one line to another. The long flowing sentences create a distinct rhythm and narrative flow that are both soothing and challenging for the reader.

In my translations, I generally try to preserve all the idiosyncrasies in the author’s style as much as possible, even if it means that the translation sounds jarring in English. However, editors (especially if they don’t read the original Japanese) often want to make the text as clear as possible. So, what becomes the final version is often a product of compromise – how much I am able to push my objective and preserve the original style and tone, and how much needs to be altered when taking into account the readability in translation.

For the dialogue in “Dreams of Love, Etc.”, I convinced the editors that quotation marks should not be added, but compromised in adding line breaks to clarify the change in speaker in certain scenes. In the original Japanese, despite the run-on quality of the narrative style, the dialogue can often easily be differentiated because of the way speech is gendered or through different levels of polite language. For example, you know when it is the husband or wife speaking, or if the narrator is speaking to an acquaintance or with a shopkeeper. In English, this becomes less clear, so the line breaks help a lot. Kawakami herself does this in certain moments – for example, in the conversation between the narrator and the elderly neighbor next door – so I felt that the added line breaks were still in the spirit of the original.

Another challenging aspect in this story was humor. There are so many comical moments in the story – for example, the scene where the narrator visits her neighbor’s house for the first time. The narrator’s interior monologue on macarons, an expensive gift she brings with her, perfectly captures the irony and performativity of polite, suburban life. There is a comical gap between the narrator’s thoughts, which is candid and not marked by feminine language, and the polite, feminine words the women exchange, while ingesting this overpriced yet aesthetically beautiful confection.

Another comical scene is where the two women decide to adopt the obviously western sounding names “Terry” and “Bianca.” This is a laugh-out-loud hilarious moment, since the absurdity of the clearly un-Japanese names is not lost on the narrator. I was worried the sense of comedy in these scenes wouldn’t be fully conveyed in the translation, but it seems that the English readers have still found the scenes funny.

DB & DK: As you mentioned, the story works with foreignness in a number of ways – macarons, piano, the names Terry and Bianca. What challenges did these elements pose in translation?

HY: Yes, there are some elements in the story that perhaps get lost in translation, precisely because of the “foreignness” presented within the Japanese cultural context. The objects and references that are marked as foreign, written in katakana, play an important role in the story of establishing a façade of the luxuries of middle-class life, but when translated into English, the impact of the “foreignness” becomes less noticeable to some extent.

In my mind, the macarons, piano, and the names “Terry“ and “Bianca” also conjure a certain nostalgia for 1970s shōjo manga famous for their Westernesque settings, like Oshima Yumiko or Hagio Moto. In the manga, the characters are very Western looking with their big eyes and ringlets, with the backdrops of the Western mansion and roses blooming. Hagio Moto actually has a short piece titled “Bianca,” so that piece came to mind when I was reading Kawakami’s story. Bianca literally means “white,” and is also a famous character in Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew, who appears to be obedient and sweet-tempered in contrast to her sister Katherina/Kate (the “shrew”). So, this image of purity and innocence has a cultural resonance that is carried on in the name.

The connection that the two women feel in “Dreams of Love, Etc.” perhaps comes from this shared cultural context, despite their difference in age. They both willingly dive into the role play by adopting the Western names, and the two women create a shared fantasy world of their own surrounding the piano. Their entire interaction is so performative, as if they are on stage – and this allows them to escape from the mundaneness of their everyday lives.

DB & DK: “Dreams of Love, Etc.” was originally published in Monkey Business, edited by Motoyuki Shibata and Ted Goossen. Later, it was included in The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, edited by Jay Rubin. What were these two editing processes like for you? What was it like to revisit this story with Jay Rubin?

HY: It was a pleasure to work with Motoyuki Shibata and Ted Goossen, then later with Jay Rubin. They are all extraordinary translators, but also amazing editors.

For Monkey Business (now reborn as Monkey), Moto would first look over the translation by carefully checking whether the original meaning in Japanese is accurately conveyed into English. He always sends a scanned copy of his handwritten notes in different colored pens, and I love seeing his distinct handwriting on the pages of the draft. It’s a work of art in itself. After going over the draft several times with Moto, the draft then goes to Ted. Ted mainly focuses on the flow of the English, going back to the original Japanese when necessary. This is another few rounds of drafts. After this extensive process, the translation gets sent out for a final check with the editor of the publisher, A Public Space. In 2015, Meg Taylor, who had been working with Monkey Business behind the scenes, officially joined the editorial team, so I’ve also really enjoyed working with her.

I published a total of six stories and prose poems by Kawakami Mieko for Monkey Business. Jay Rubin had read every issue of Monkey Business, and when he was putting together The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, he chose to include “Dreams of Love, Etc.” I was really happy that this story got chosen, because it’s also one of my favorite pieces by Kawakami.

I have a funny episode regarding the editing process with Jay – a few rounds of edits in, we suddenly realized that we were working with different texts. My translation was based on the original publication of the story in the Japanese Monkey Business, whereas Jay was referring to a later version included in her short story collection, Ai no yume toka. The biggest difference was that in the original version, the neighbor Terry is described as being in her fifties or sixties, but Kawakami adds an entire decade in the book version. We ended up going with the book version, but we really laughed when we realized our mistake.

DB & DK: We’d like to ask for your thoughts on the line “ippatsu de kimete miseru kara,” which you translated as “knock it out of the park.” This is a line that needs to sound unusual coming from Terry, but how did you arrive at your final translation?

HY: I also have a funny story to tell about that. My original translation in Monkey Business was more neutral: “I’ll make it in one go.” This is more of a direct translation. But for the Penguin book, Jay Rubin suggested the expression “knock it out of the park,” which is a baseball reference. I thought this was quite clever, so I accepted the change. However, the Penguin editor made a further suggestion of changing the sports reference to basketball: “It’ll be a slam dunk.” They thought this would be more familiar to the U.K. reader. I just could not imagine Terry saying “slam dunk,” so I insisted on keeping the baseball reference instead. The phrase seems just out of character enough to induce humor, but not too jarring.

There were other U.S./U.K. differences, such as how to call the floor levels. Since what you would call “second floor” in the U.S. would be “first floor” in the U.K., we decided to change one of the expressions to “my kitchen window upstairs,” rather than specify the floor.

Another interesting discussion that spanned over many emails was whether to make the title singular or plural, “Dream” or “Dreams.” The title is taken from a well-known piano piece by Franz Liszt called Liebesträume (“Dreams of Love”). But the piece that Terry plays is Liebestraum No. 3 (“Dream of Love”), which is one of Liszt’s three Liebesträume. In Japanese, there is no difference between plural and singular forms, so “yume” could be either “Dream” or “Dreams.” In the end, I insisted on using the plural in the story title, even though the actual piano piece is singular, because I felt that the “Dreams” refers more abstractly to various forms of women’s longings and desires to escape the mundaneness of everyday life.

DB & DK: When you teach “Dreams of Love, Etc.” at university, how do your students respond? What do they pick up on?

HY: I teach this story in my undergraduate seminar, “Contemporary Japanese Fiction in English translation.” The lectures and discussions are conducted in English, and every week, we read one or two stories by one writer in both the Japanese original and in English translation. We discuss the stories themselves in class, and also compare the original and the translation to see what interesting issues we can find. I usually begin with some essays on translation, and teach stories by Murakami Haruki, Ogawa Yoko, Kawakami Hiromi, Kawakami Mieko, Tawada Yoko, and so on.

Students generally love this story by Kawakami Mieko. They love the soft, calm, dream-like tone of the story, and way the narrative draws the readers in. They also read the story from a critical perspective, especially through the lens of gender. They always come up with interesting ways to interpret the story, but one dominant response is that the entire encounter between “Terry” and “Bianca” may be a dream. The use of the Western names, the fact that the two know nothing about one another, the clapping and kiss towards the end – all of these point to a theatricality and performativity that adds to the unreal quality of the two women’s encounter.

I also teach this story in the context of the 3.11 earthquake and nuclear meltdown. The story presents two distinct realms: the youthful and feminine fantasy world of flowers, macarons, and piano music, juxtaposed with the much darker world affected by trauma and memory. The story is in fact, set soon after the Great East Japan Earthquake, but the disaster is only briefly mentioned in the beginning and quickly dismissed, as if it is already a thing of the past. But the 3.11 experience brings to surface all of the anxieties that had been brooding inside the female protagonist, like her inertia with being a housewife, her relationship with her husband, and her lack of identity outside the domestic home.

So, my students think about this story on many levels, but it’s Kawakami’s narrative style and beautiful language that seems to capture their attention the most. It’s often their favorite story in the class.

DB & DK: Could you walk us through your thoughts on the following section in your translation?

“I sat down at the dining table and wrote the Chinese character for what. It felt like a totally useless exercise, until I discovered that the character for what looks exactly like my face when you examine it closely.”

HY: This was a hard one. I thought about coming up with an equivalent character in English, but I settled on a simple solution of explaining that the narrator writes the Chinese character. I could have added another sentence to explain what the character looked like (a face with a gaping mouth?) – since the character does seem to signify a hole, a kind of emptiness that the narrator feels about her life. But adding the explanation felt like interfering with the text too much, so I decided to keep it simple. I supposed I could have added a visual quality by asking the editor to include “何” in the translation, but they probably would not have agreed to that.

DB & DK: Could you say a little about what music meant to you as you translated this story? Kawakami’s writing is often connected to musicality. Could you share your thoughts on that and what it means for you as her translator?

HY: Music is an important motif in this story. It’s the music that enables the two women to connect in a meaningful way beyond polite words, in a way that is impossible in polite society. They don’t need to exchange pleasantries or ask about their personal lives. All of their awkward yet endearing interactions revolve around Terry’s clumsy attempts at perfecting Liszt’s piece on the piano. Through piano music, the monotony of suburban life falls away momentarily, and the two women become joined in their desire to connect, and to escape.

When I was translating “Dreams of Love, Etc.,” I listened to Liebestraum No. 3 over and over. And I realized that there is a musical structure to the entirety of the story as well. The way the story is structured mimics the way the piano piece itself develops – from the gentle opening to the gradual crescendo to reach a climax, then it suddenly stops and dissolves into a quiet ending. With the last lingering note, the story leaves us with the questions: Has anything changed in the protagonist’s life because of this episode? Or has it been, as the title indicates, merely a beautiful dream? What is the role of these dreams, these fantasies, in our lives?

I now play this piece in the classroom when I teach the story too. It’s such a perfectly constructed story, and it gives me goose bumps every time I read it.

Hitomi Yoshio is Associate Professor of Global Japanese Literary and Cultural Studies at Waseda University in Japan. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2012 and has published articles on women writers and feminist literary communities in late 19th and early 20th century Japan. Her current research focuses on the contemporary writer Mieko Kawakami, and her translations of Kawakami’s works have appeared in Granta, Freeman’s, Monkey Business, Denver Quarterly, Words without Borders, Wasafiri and The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories.

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.

References
Yoshio, Hitomi, trans. “Dreams of Love, Etc.,” by Mieko Kawakami. Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan 3 (2013): 157-167.
Yoshio, Hitomi, trans. “Dreams of Love, Etc.,” by Mieko Kawakami. The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, edited by Jay Rubin. London: Penguin Classics (2018): 278-290.