NOTE ON THE CURRENT TRANSLATION

Why? That was the first question asked when I proposed a new English-language translation of Osamu Dazai’s masterpiece, Ningen shikkaku. After all, Donald Keene translated the novel (published under the title No Longer Human) over fifty years ago. It is still in print, and it sells well. Keene is, indisputably, one of the most important translators of Japanese literature into English, and this new translation is certainly not intended as a criticism of his work. In a way it is a product of Keene’s work, as it is through Keene’s translations that I first came to know, and eventually to love, Japanese literature. For that I owe him and the other incredibly prolific translators of his generation a tremendous debt. I am very cognizant of this debt.

Despite the obviousness of the question, the first time I was asked, “Why?” I had to struggle for an answer. This translation was not so much as planned as it was a somewhat self-indulgent accident. I had read the novel—in Keene’s translation—some decades ago, and, not being a terribly sensitive reader at the time, I had put it down and didn’t willingly go back to Dazai. It wasn’t my cup of tea, or so I thought. A few years ago, however, students in my Japanese literature reading group asked for something a bit more demanding than what we had been reading, so I printed out a few pages of Ningen shikkaku from the Aozora Bunko edition. I was immediately struck by Dazai’s vivid, wandering, shifting, endless, labyrinthine sentences. How in the world does one translate something like this? Our reading group became translation practice sessions with a graduate student over beers at the Wig & Pen. The novel gradually turned into something of an obsession with me, and a few years and many, many drafts later, the translation was finished. Only then, with a completed manuscript, did I consider the question “Why?”

Each translation is an interpretation. For me, that is the most compelling answer to the question “Why?” Each translation, if successful, is a distillation of the translator’s understanding of the work. It is the result of hundreds and thousands of decisions, large and small. The cumulative effect of these choices is enormous. Naturally, one cannot (or should not) choose to interpret the word “shoes” as the word “tiger,” and in that respect the translator is bound in ways that the author is not. Yet, when translating between languages that are very different—and it is difficult to imagine two languages less alike than Japanese and English—the translator’s interpretation plays an enormous role in the translation process.

All conscientious literary translators seek to stay true to the original. But what is the “original”? If a text has as many meanings as it does readers, how much truer does that hold in translating? What is the text trying to achieve in a certain passage? What impact does a particular expression, a particular phrasing, a particular structure have on the reader? What impact did it have on a Japanese reader in 1948? How does one recreate that for an English-language reader seventy years later? This is why we see—and should see—multiple translations of works worthy of the attention. Each translation enables us to see different elements of the original.

This translation is my attempt to answer the questions above as best I can. After finishing my translation, I reread Keene’s version for the first time in many years. My answers, I think, differ significantly from Keene’s answers. I do not say that they are better or worse than Keene’s—they are simply different. After all, this is literature, not mathematics.

In my translation, and in my interpretation, of the text I have tried to emphasize Yōzō’s voice. The intimacy and directness of that voice are, I believe, central to the novel. I have attempted to convey a voice that will pull the reader, effortlessly, into Yōzō’s heart and mind—or at least as much of the heart and mind Yōzō decides to reveal.

At the same time, I have also tried to avoid “editing” Dazai’s novel, even when doing so might have made it easier for me to convey the voice that I think is so critical to the text. Where Dazai is inconsistent or confusing in the original, I have tried to replicate this in the English. I have tried to retain cultural particularities even when they do not have a ready English equivalent. Where Dazai uses Japanese translations of foreign poems, I translated the Japanese translations Dazai used rather than using the originals. The result is perhaps less graceful in places, but I believe it to be truer to the original. Though I was sorely tempted, I chose not to use footnotes to explain the various references to poems, literary journals, and so on that litter the work. In the end I think that the benefit of these notes, of interest to only a small number of readers, did not justify the disruption in the narrative that they would cause.

Beyond providing a different interpretation of the novel, I hope that this translation will help to renew interest in Dazai and to encourage readers to explore his works more widely—and in different translations. He is truly one of the great writers of twentieth-century Japan.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the support and help of people without whom this translation would not exist. Meredith McKinney was kind enough to read drafts of the translation. I am grateful, too, to Orion Lethbridge, one of the original reading group members, a translation practice participant, and a thoughtful reader of drafts. I am very grateful to the University of Chicago’s Center for East Asian Studies Committee on Japanese Studies for supporting my translation by selecting it for the William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award. I would like to thank the staff of Stone Bridge Press for all of their work on behalf of the translation. Peter Goodman’s painstaking copyediting of the translation, in particular, was invaluable. I would also, of course, like to thank my wife Miyako for her support, advice, encouragement, and superhuman patience.

—MG