WIT Life #47: The Times They Are A-Changin’
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WITLife is a periodic series written by professional Interpreter/Translator/Writer Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken, 2000-03). Recently she’s been watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese and sharing some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.
An article from this past Tuesday’s (August 4) Daily Sun newspaper caught my attention as it focused on gaijin. It described how foreigners are increasingly being recognized for the prestigious literature Akutagawa Prize. Last year Chinese writer Yang Yi became the first non-native speaker of Japanese to win, and her comment at the ceremony held at a Tokyo restaurant was, “As a foreigner I have written novels and I am thrilled to have been recognized in this way.” The 44-year-old Yang’s award-winning work titled “Toki ga nijimu asa” (A Morning When Time Blurs) is set during and after China’s democratization movement centering on the 1989 Tiananmen Incident. The book follows a Chinese man who lived through those times and later moved to Japan, still holding on to his ideals.
This year further diversity was added to the proceedings of this 141-year old award when Iranian author Shirin Nezammafi was nominated for her work “Shiroi kami” (White Paper). It depicts the romantic relationship between two students during the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988). Though it had previously won Japan’s 2009 Bungakukai Shinjinsho (New Auth
or) Prize, she was unable to take the Akutagawa. Nezammafi is 29 and moved to Japan in 1999, studying at Kobe University’s graduate school of engineering and is now working at Panasonic as a systems engineer. Even though she studied Japanese in high school in Tehran, it’s pretty impressive that she was able to write a Japanese novel after only 10 years in Japan.
Nezammafi was the third nominated writer from a country that doesn’t use kanji (it’s interesting how they break it down in this way), and the sixth foreign candidate to be nominated for the award. When asked why she opted to write in Japanese as opposed to her native tongue of Persian, Nezammafi said, “I live in Japan and Japanese has become the language that is easiest for me to write in.” The story takes place entirely outside of Japan and feature no Japanese characters yet is recognized as a “Japanese novel,” something certain critics have taken umbrage at. These dissenting voices ask whether it’s any different from translated fiction, and whether there was a need to write it in Japanese, though some insist that foreigners’ interpretation of Japanese allows a freedom with the language that didn’t exist before.
California-born and Taiwan/America/Japan educated Japanese language author Ian Hideo Levy, whose story 天安門 (Tiananmen) was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize in 1996, thinks there is great significance to Nezammafi’s work. He says, “Things have been too closed off up until this point, and more foreign authors should be welcomed. It’s not a matter of whether your writing is good or bad or what your nationality is, but what is important is the author’s consciousness of the Japanese language.”
Levy was one of the first Americans to write modern literature in the Japanese language, and is considered important in opening the doors for foreigners residing in Japan to participate in Japanese literature. Let’s hope that there are more trailblazers like him who enter the Japanese literature scene to shake things up a bit. This year’s Akutagawa Prize ended up going to Japanese author Kenichiro Isozaki for his novel “Tsui-no Sumika” (The Last Home).
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