Eli K. P. William’s translation of Keiichiro Hirano’s story, “Red-Hot Amber,” appears in the autumn 2021 issue of The Southern Review. Here, he discusses how he came to translate Hirano’s work, Hirano’s place in the Japanese literary world, and whether or not some books stand the test of time.
Jake Zawlacki, Editorial assistant: How did you come to translate this story, and Keiichiro Hirano’s work more generally?
Eli K. P. William: To answer this question, I have to tell you about a collective I’m a member of called Humans in Literary Translation (HILT). The group is composed of fellow literary translators Alison Watts, Louise Heal-Kawai, Matt Treyvaud, and yours truly.
During one of our translation workshops in 2018, we were discussing the topic of what sort of work, in the ideal world, we would like to translate, and my answer was fiction similar to the kind that I write. As soon as I said this, Alison, who had read my first novel, Cash Crash Jubilee, told me to go read Dawn by Keiichiro Hirano. I had never heard of it, and had never read anything written by the author, though I knew his name.
After the workshop, I went straight to a bookstore and fell in love with the novel on the first page. Dawn is indeed strangely similar to Cash Crash Jubilee, both in how it depicts personal relationships in the near future and in its focus on the politics of technology, but also heads in a slightly more postmodern direction that I found enthralling.
When I told Alison my impression of Dawn, she and Louise both kindly helped to put me in touch with, Hirano-san. I arranged a meeting with him and his agency a few months later and in the meantime decided to pick up his latest novel, A Man (Aruotoko), then only available in the magazine, Bungakukai. (It was published in book form the following year.)
My intention at the meeting was to ask about the rights for Dawn, but it just so happened that they were looking for a translator for A Man, and I was in the serendipitous position of being able to tell them I had just finished and loved it. The agency, Cork, then asked me for a sample translation of the prologue, and the publisher, Amazon Crossing, selected mine out of a list of other samples.
After my translation of A Man was released in 2020, Cork sent me a list of short stories and essays they were considering having me translate. “Red-Hot Amber” was the short story I chose, and I have since translated several of Hirano-san’s essays and talks, often in collaboration with fellow HILT translator Matt Treyvaud.
JZ: How does “Red-Hot Amber” stand out compared to other contemporary Japanese fiction?
EW: The story was originally published in Bungakukai in 2014. Other prominent Japanese works of that decade tend to bear the influence of American fiction, but I would say that “Red-Hot Amber” is more redolent of the French literary tradition. Hirano-san’s early novels take place in Europe of the early modern period, so one can trace his Continental aesthetic to the very beginnings of his career. He has since spent some time living in France.
JZ: I’m struck by the epigraph from Dark Night of the Soul. Besides the obvious reference to the fire so central to this piece, I’m curious as to a possible spiritual interpretation. I keep thinking of the alleged Rosicrucian meaning of the Catholic INRI: Igne Natura Renovatur Integra (“by fire, nature renews itself”). When you translated this, did you feel any spiritual undercurrents in the original? And if so, how did you translate a subtlety such as that?
EW: Hirano-san describes himself as non-Christian but Christian motifs enrich much of his work. Given that he is especially interested in Christian mysticism, it is unsurprising that he would choose this epigraph. Although I am not a Buddhist myself, I have a tendency to layer hints of Buddhist mythology and philosophy throughout the stories I write. I suspect that Hirano-san and I are driven by mirrored creative impulses that reflect in opposite cultural directions.
The prose of “Red-Hot Amber” transitions through a range of moods, from the farcical to the profound. One of those might be called poetic or spiritual. There are passages where the protagonist, amidst attempts to rationalize his fetish, reaches planes of almost pure symbolic expression. Those certainly could be seen as resonating with Dark Night of the Soul and perhaps with the Rosicrucian quote you have given.
Since I am unable to read Latin, I did not attempt to translate the epigraph. Instead, I excerpted it directly from E. Allison Peers’ English translation of Dark Night of the Soul. I thought this translation read well and matched the Japanese text perfectly, so I made no modifications.
JZ: The piece opens with the idea of the narrator digging a hole, filling it with this story, and then burying it. I know, for me, translating can feel like an even more isolated pursuit than other creative endeavors, maybe like a one-person archaeological dig. Does the act of translating ever feel like excavating another’s work to you? Do you ever come up empty? And is it all worth displaying the gems at the end?
EW: It’s interesting that you compare translation to an archeological dig because that is the metaphor Stephen King uses in his great book, On Writing, to describe the process of writing fiction. For King, a writer initially comes up with a vague concept, as though unearthing a relic obscured by various sediments and accretions. The writer’s job is to carefully expand the concept into a full story, as though delicately cleaning the dirt off the relic, revealing all of its various parts and colors, without damaging it. This analogy has definitely held true for me in writing my trilogy, the Jubilee Cycle.
I personally don’t find the metaphor of excavation helpful for thinking about translation. For me, it is less about preserving an artifact than constructing a simulacra. I once attended a talk given by the children’s literature translator Arthur Binard where he compared the process of translation to rebuilding a house in a new country. You wouldn’t take a whole house standing on a street in, say, Japan and ship it all the way to America. You would note the design of the house and try to build an approximation out of the materials available, taking into account the building codes, climate, and so on of the destination. Every part of the new house would be different from the old one, but their designs would correspond in some way. Similarly, when translating a text from one language into another, you cannot simply convert it into the target language because all of the words will be different. You have to recreate an approximation of the original using the words at hand. In the end, the original text and translated text will be distinct works of art that nonetheless correspond according to structural elements such as plot, character, voice, and tone.
As to your second question, I sometimes come up empty momentarily while translating, usually because my brain is tired. If I draw a blank for longer than that, it means my subconscious mind needs time to work on the puzzle. In such cases, I set the translation aside and return to it when I’m ready. You have to be passive and trust in the deeper workings of your creativity, but the answer always comes . . . eventually.
The hard work of translation is worth it if you like the piece you are translating. I often find that even if I wasn’t crazy about a story at the beginning, I form bonds with it through the act of translation. By the end they’re all gems. Thankfully, with “Red-Hot Amber,” that wasn’t an issue at all. I loved it on the first read.
JZ: I’ve never been to a Japanese confectionary shop or tasted the sweetness of a wagashi. I am, however, craving a lemon square. Are there any sweets that’ve been on your mind lately?
EW: There was a raw wagashi shop almost exactly like the one described in the story literally 30 seconds from the apartment in Kamakura where I lived when translating “Red-Hot Amber” and I couldn’t resist dropping in to sample their wares. Call it field research—they were gorgeous and delectable. Here’s an example:
As for sweets on my mind recently, just yesterday I tried a bite of someone’s Mont Blanc in a hot dog bun. The world of Japanese sweets isn’t all refinement and tradition.
JZ: I recently watched Keiichiro Hirano’s TED Talk where he addresses self-love. He framed it not as a carte blanche justification for indulgence and excess as we seem to use it in the U.S., but rather a way of looking at “self” as an amalgamation of many selves based on their experience with others. Do you think there is a cultural aspect to the narrator’s desire for isolation that is missed for an audience less familiar with Japanese culture?
EW: I’m not sure how much this issue has to do with Japanese culture specifically. Hirano-san has invented a philosophical theory of personhood that has informed his fiction for more than a decade. He calls it “dividualism,” not to be confused with theories of the same name put forth by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze. Hirano’s dividualism asserts that we have a different self for each person we interact with and that who each of us are is an aggregate of these many relational selves. The idea is explored more fully in his novels, including A Man and his sci-fi masterpiece Dawn (yet to be translated into English).
JZ: Have you read any of the books mentioned in this piece—Ernst’s The Hundred Headless Woman, Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden, Kawabata’s Snow Country, or Fouque’s Undine? If so, did they color your reading of the original? Would you recommend any for us?
EW: Some of the titles are used in the story as examples of the mother’s pretentious taste for esoterica, so perhaps it reflects well on me that I haven’t read them. In fact, the only one I have read is Snow Country. I think the novel is mentioned because it ends with a shocking fire.
Personally, I don’t recommend Snow Country. It’s considered by some to be Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata’s magnum opus and appears frequently on Japanese literature syllabi in both Japan and elsewhere. I’ll admit that the prose is lush and evocative. Kawabata’s facility for subtle expression is hard to deny. But I didn’t find the protagonist, Shimamura, even remotely likeable or relatable. Basically, he’s a wealthy, privileged urbanite who aestheticizes his adulterous pursuit of poor, vulnerable country women so callously it verges on the sociopathic. That’s not to say that all protagonists and narrators have to be good people. Vladimir Nabokov does an eerily skillful job of warming readers up to the pedophile Humbert Humbert in his infamous novel Lolita. It’s that Kawabata doesn’t even seem aware of his protagonist’s moral failings—or at least doesn’t care. In my opinion, the novel is due for a reevaluation; it just hasn’t stood the test of time.
As a point of trivia, Hirano-san shares similar sentiments about Snow Country—or at least he seemed to after several glasses of wine one night at a bar in Ginza. My memory of his exact words are a bit foggy . . .
JZ: I’m simply in awe of this sentence on 556:
“After all, why listen to someone else when no one could have possibly dedicated as much time and focus to thinking about me as I have?”
It comes off as incredibly self-assured, almost narcissistic, but is also quite plainly true to character and believable. How did you manage to nail the complexity of a man who is self-aware, almost to a fault, in a way that would make most characters look foolish?
EW: Thank you! I’m glad that line worked for you.
In terms of nailing the complexity of the character, I think that was achieved by the author. Hirano-san excels at capturing the internal contradictions of the human mind. The unravelling of these contradictions often drives character development in his novels.
For example, Kido, the main protagonist of A Man, becomes obsessed with the possibility of leading someone else’s life as a means to understanding his own mind. In other words, he lies to himself about who he is in order to pursue a deeper kind of self-honesty. This internal paradox is what drives Kido to solve the novel’s central mystery and to almost have a candid conversation with his unaffectionate wife . . . almost.
JZ: What projects are in the mix for you now? Anything you’re particularly excited about?
EW: My third novel, A Diamond Dream, is set for release in February 2022! This is the final book in my Jubilee Cycle trilogy. It is set in a dystopian future Tokyo where every action—from blinking to sexual intercourse—is intellectual property owned by corporations that charge licensing fees. The first book, Cash Crash Jubilee, came out in spring of 2015, and the second book, The Naked World, came out in fall of 2017, so readers have been waiting four years for the series conclusion. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and other factors, publication of A Diamond Dream was severely delayed. I’m extremely excited that it will be out in the world at last. I’ve been working on the trilogy for more than a decade!
To find out more about me and my work, visit my homepage https://elikpwilliam.com/ and follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Dice_Carver
Many thanks to The Southern Review for inviting me to do this interview and to everyone else for reading.