Literature in Translation: Teaching Issues and Reading Practices

Identity and Relationships

identity and relationships ∂ 100 literature in translation identity & relationships in translated japanese literature 101 101 Identity and Relationships in Translated Japanese Literature Tomoko Aoyama and Judy Wakabayashi This chapter explores Japanese concepts of the self and interactions with others as manifested in translated Japanese literature. After outlining how Japanese understandings of self and identity differ from these concepts in the West, we note some of the challenges these differences present to literary translators working in Western languages. The challenges are accentuated by the intimate conceptual relations among ideas of the self, identity, and language, as illustrated in the texts examined here. Identity encompasses many aspects, such as group identity (traditionally more emphasized in Japan than in the West); the historically more recent focus on individual psychological identity; and geographical, cultural, family, gender, age, political, economic, and religious identity. Race, ethnicity, and nationality do not necessarily coincide with each other or with the native language of the writer or translator. Class is not a major theme in contemporary Japanese literature, given that 97 percent of the population regard themselves as “middle class” (Strecher 298). Class and occupational identities are, however, intimately implicated in the question of the burakumin, a social (not ethnic) minority who have long been discriminated against in Japan. Sumii1 Sué’s seven-volume work The River with No Bridge (1961–1992; only volume 1 is available in English) is an important work on this topic, as is Shimazaki Tōson’s The Broken Commandment (1906). In ancient Japan, it was women writers who dominated genres such as fiction and diaries, so that a generalized woman’s “manner of writing, her perceptual stance, and her aesthetic orientation, where they can fairly be generalized at all, have become naturalized in the tradition as its source” (Vernon 6). Although women writers were subsequently eclipsed until the twentieth century,meninheritedthistradition,whichwas“characterizedbysentimental 102 literature in translation lyricism and impressionistic, non-intellectual, detailed observations of daily life” (Ericson 3). Classical literature also lacked clear demarcations between first- and third-person narration, resulting in multivoiced complexity; a blurring among author, narrator, and characters; and an absence of autonomous selfhood. Thus, in translations of premodern works, the use of the English I, a term that refers exclusively to one person independent of context, constitutes a fundamental shift in perception from the “contextually and relationally defined” (Miyake 43) nature of Japanese personal pronouns. Even with contemporaryworks ,“Therearemanyfirst-andsecond-pronounformstochoose from in Japanese, each with particular connotative or indexical association withtheage/sex/classofthespeaker,therelationshiptotheaddressee,andthe formality of the context of use” (Shibamoto Smith, 103). In translation into English, however, these associations usually disappear; conversely, the use of overtself-referenceandfrequentsecond-personaddressintranslationsmight make characters seem more assertive than they are in the original Japanese. In premodern Japan the Confucian moral system took precedence over individualism, which would have undermined the hierarchical social order; but Japan’s opening to the West in the 1850s led to a perceived need for selfredefinition as a modernizing nation and for a reconceptualization of the individual “self” in a rapidly changing environment. Stimulated by Western literary models, in the 1880s the translator-writer Futabatei Shimei initiated narrative reforms that detached narrators from characters’ and readers’ speech situations, and newly available Christian ideas fostered conceptions of the individual as having value and being individuated from others. The new focus on writers’ inner lives coexisted with a desire to maintain continuity of the Japanese cultural self, resulting in a “complex negotiation between the formal insistence on the ‘I’ and the ideological suppression of the self” (Miyoshi, “Against the Native Grain,” 155). Starting with Tayama Katai’s Futon (The Quilt and Other Stories, 1907), the “I-novel” (shishōsetsu)2 subsequently became the dominant novel form in Japanese literature. This introspective, male-created tradition valorizes personal experiences over thought or the presentation of protagonists in confrontation with the social environment in an autonomous fictional world. Japan’s subsequent defeat in World War II challenged national identity, questioning the individual-state relationship and destroying many writers ’ beliefs in themselves and their narrators. The shishōsetsu became less influential, but the conflict between this confessional genre and those who identity & relationships in translated japanese literature 103 reject the possibility or desirability of representing the sincere “self” (Snyder and Gabriel 4) is ongoing, and the genre retains a tenacious hold (e.g., in the writing of Nobel Prize winner Ōe Kenzaburō). InpostwarJapanthefailureoffamilyrelationsandnationalaffluencetoact asbasesforidentitytriggeredanexistentialcrisis,andtheculture’sconsequent plunge into consumerism...