Literature that Crosses Borders

DARTOIS-AKO  Do you ever read the English translations of your work?

NAKAMURA  I try! Or listen to the audiobooks. But I’m not in a position to judge their accuracy. I just have to leave it to the translators. Sometimes I do wonder about how certain key words are translated and flip through looking for those parts, though.

DARTOIS-AKO  It’s very rare that this happens, but when I translated Last Winter We Parted, I got permission from the publisher to exchange manuscripts with the English translator, Allison Markin Powell, before either of our books were published. Because she can read French. And we were both so surprised by each other’s work. It depends on the translator and the publisher, but in France fidelity to the original comes first, while in the English-speaking world they are attentive to the reader, and—from my point of view—have a tendency to do rather bold “editing.” It’s not that one is good and the other bad, just that each country has its own culture of translation.

NAKAMURA  I think it’s fine to take the approach that’s suited to that country’s situation. For Turkish and Armenian, there aren’t any translators who work from Japanese, so those editions are retranslations of the English version. There’s no way to check that. So far, The Gun has been published in English, French, and Chinese (traditional characters); the German translation is in progress, and apparently there’s interest from Russia too. I sometimes think that some books are appealing to translators themselves in some way.

Still from The Gun. (© Yoshimoto Kōgyō)

DARTOIS-AKO  I think any translator who read The Gun would want to give it a try. First and foremost it’s that style. I translated The Thief first, which won the Ōe Kenzaburō Prize, and the offer to do The Gun came after, but the story was unusual, the protagonist had a real inner voice, and the style is sharp. It was all there—it made me eager to take on the challenge.

NAKAMURA  The Gun has been out in Japan for 17 years, but it’s still in print. It’s still finding new readers, which I’m grateful for. I wrote it in a very gloomy mood; I was 23, with no steady job and no money. I had a phase where I wrote with the idea of making my debut in mind, but by that point I realized that I needed to go back to the drawing board and just write what I wanted to. And then, years later, it comes out in English and French, and now there’s a movie—it’s a strange feeling.

(Originally published in Japanese on November 16, 2018. Photos by Hanai Tomoko. Text by Matsumoto Takuya of Nippon.com.)

The Gun (2018)

© Yoshimoto Kōgyō
  • Cast: Murakami Nijirō, Hirose Alice, Hinami Kyōko, Lily Franky
  • Director: Take Masaharu
  • Original Story: Nakamura Fuminori
  • Screenplay: Take Masaharu, Shishido Hidenori
  • Distributor (Japan): Katsu-do, Uzumasa
  • Running time: 97 minutes
  • Winner of the Japanese Cinema Splash Best Director Award at the thirty-first Tokyo International Film Festival
  • Japan release: November 17, 2018

Trailer (Japanese)