At first I was skeptical. A lecture by an American who’d mastered Japanese and was writing novels in Japanese. His name was Ian Hideo Levy (b. 1950). I had homework. It was a Thursday. It had been a long week.
But boy am I glad I went – even though it was just for an hour.
He’d been immersed in Japanese for decades, reading and writing only Japanese. It felt much more natural for him to speak Japanese at lectures, he said, but he chose to speak English. He spoke it beautifully, mostly without referring to his notes. He paced, gesticulated. Sometimes he’d trip over a word, or there would be stoppage in his throat, an English word trying to make its way out.
He used to be a translator of Japanese literature. For many years, he stuck with translation only before a Japanese writer, Kenji Nakagami said to him — after drinking with Levy till six o’clock in the morning, “Join us.” Don’t just translate, Kenji was saying. Start writing in Japanese.
He told a useful story, one I knew I could use in this blog, about the problem of translating plural and singular out of Japanese into English. The same problem exists for Korean. He spoke of the expression “新宿の光” how he’d always thought of it as “Lights of Shinjuku.” He said it wasn’t until he saw the nine thousand or so signboards illuminating the night, bleeding into one another, that the 光 did not refer to many lights, but one innumerable, indivisible thing.
As if that wasn’t good enough, he went on to say this about literature. First he reminded us of the commonplace that we often hear about translations – that good translations should have a sense of being its own original. He turned it around to say that all good literature in these times – no matter where it is set, no matter who it’s about – should have some sense of being a translation, a sense of a way of communicating, a way of feeling, a way of being that has been lost in the final product.
He talked about zainichi writer Yi Yang-ji (Yangji Lee/이양지/李良枝) who wrote in Japanese. One of the themes that zainichi writers explores is the idea of going back. Right now Korea is divided, but the idea is that they will return from Japan once the Koreas have unified. Zanichi (在日/재일) is interestingly untranslatable. Literally, it means “residing in Japan” and refers only to ethnic Koreans. In an English article in Japan Times, he said that Yi had been described as a “South Korean writer residing in Japan” which reminds you of a bestselling writer from Pusan taking some time off in Japan and writing.
He talked about Yi, as a young zainichi woman, going to Korea as a foreign student to reconnect with her Korean heritage. She realizes that she cannot accept the langauge. There is a split between 母語 (mother tongue) and 国語 (national language). She talks about 言葉の杖 (언어의 지팡이) which Levy translated as the “cane” or “staff” of language. Every morning she would wake up and wonder to herself — should she reach for the “아” or the “あ”?
He told a story about how he got a call from a woman who sounded very young, like a freshman in university. The voice said “This is Yi Yang-ji.”
It said, “I read your novel, Levy-san. It was wonderful. Keep working hard.”
You could tell how much this meant to Levy, even as he described the exchange for us. A zainichi writer 先輩/선배 who wrote in Japanese, cheering on her an American writer 後輩후배 writing in Japanese.
He asked her if she could consider herself 韓国系日本人/한국계일본인/Korean-Japanese. She said that was such an American question. She said that is not how identity works, that it is not some social contract.
A few days later, he saw the headline, “Korean writer dead.” He pictured an old male
writer, a Nobel Prize contender perhaps, having passed away in Seoul, wearing hanbok.
They were talking about Yi.
Yi Yangji is a FANTASTIC writer. Her works have all been translated into Korean (I think) and one story, “Koku”, has been translated into English. It’s in an anthology called “Into the Light” (http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-6678-9780824834906.aspx) alongside other translations of Zainichi writers into English. Hers story generates endless discussion in the classroom.
Hideo Levy was at AAS last year in a panel dedicated to his work. Now I’m sorry I missed it!
Thanks for that, Dafna. I am definitely going to check out her work, and have ordered “Into the Light” from our library’s off-site location. I am guessing more of her stuff has been translated into Korean?
I wonder where this event took place and when. I am a kind of kicking myself for not even knowing, let alone missing it.
I remember I saw Levy in Waseda Univ. Tokyo years ago in an event for the undergrad Creative Writing program. He has always surprised me for his profound understanding in literature and innovative and challenging posture to open new horizons in the otherwise cloistered literary scene in Japan.
I did not know the part where Kenji Nakagami suggested Levy that he write in Japanese instead of being content with just translating Japanese. This episode only makes sense to me given how Levy was just meant to write in Japanese only if there was validation and encouragement. And only Nakagami ‘issued’ it and included Levy to the writers’ community just fairly for his talent instead of dismissing or objectifying him for his ethnic background or whatever. Nakagami was legendary for his keen sight and strong determination to shed lights on margin of the society and represent the people who live there, so Levy should only feel SUPER HONORED for being recruited for this ‘foreign region’ for new literature in Japan, and I bet he still does.
Yi Yanji was also an interesting author, who really passed away young unfortunately. I remember Levy mentioned her in the lecture that I attended in Tokyo that I raised earlier.
My current interest is N. Korean communities in Japan, and I have been impressed by Dr.Sonia Ryang (currently in Univ of Iowa) ‘s works in the last couple of years. Her intensive studies and insights on the meaning of the marginalized yet strong communities are valuable. This is a kind of ‘ONLY IN JAPAN’ phenomenon, and I know mere reference of this sort might raise S.Korean people’s eyebrows. Yet, all the more, I can’t get enough of it. Only in Japan, or only in the US, and only in academia there are things that transcend, which I fully embrace.
Thank you for your comment. The event took place at Columbia University — and was no so widely publicized outside (or perhaps even inside) the university community. I was told about it by a colleague and decided to check it out.
I enjoyed Levy’s perspective. At first I thought he would be something of a novelty. Levy seemed to appreciate for being “recruited” as you put it. The power dynamic at play is of course enormously interesting — it is tempting to read into an American’s sense of “gratefulness” for being invited in as a kind of condescension. Since a minority (for me, by definition, non-white) writer in Japan probably would not want to express this in terms of “gratefulness” and couch it in terms of an artistic right. (You might say, a minority writer cannot *afford* to be grateful to the establishment.) The same way an alien resident might lay claim to equal recognition of political rights, the alien writer could claim equal recognition (even if it does not come) of artistic legitimacy.
I am very intrigued by the whole notion of nihonjinron, or the discourse of Japanese exceptionalism, especially coming at it from a Korean studies point of view. Can you say what you mean by “ONLY IN JAPAN”? I am not raising my eyebrows here — just more curious. I am beginning to look into comparing Japanese and Korean cinema in the 50s and the 60s, and I am finding, so far, that it is impossible to ignore the whole discourse of nihonjinron with respect to the formation of Japanese cinema (as articulated against “Western” cinema), which seems locked in a vicious loop of co-figuration between both Japanese and American scholars.
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I was sent here by Charles at KTLIT. Beautiful story, beautifully written. Thank you.
Thank you for the kind words.