Tag: Translated

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The Professor and Root

Excerpt from The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa

Photo by Benjamin Lizardo on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.

WE CALLED HIM the Professor. And he called my son Root, because, he said, the flat top of his head reminded him of the square root sign.

“There’s a fine brain in there,” the Professor said, mussing my son’s hair. Root, who wore a cap to avoid being teased by his friends, gave a wary shrug. “With this one little sign we can come to know an infinite range of numbers, even those we can’t see.” He traced the symbol in the thick layer of dust on his desk.

Of all the countless things my son and I learned from the Professor, the meaning of the square root was among the most important. No doubt he would have been bothered by my use of the word countless—too sloppy, for he believed that the very origins of the universe could be explained in the exact language of numbers—but I don’t know how else to put it. He taught us about enormous prime numbers with more than a hundred thousand places, and the largest number of all, which was used in mathematical proofs and was in the Guinness Book of Records, and about the idea of something beyond infinity. As interesting as all this was, it could never match the experience of simply spending time with the Professor. I remember when he taught us about the spell cast by placing numbers under this square root sign. It was a rainy evening in early April. My son’s schoolbag lay abandoned on the rug. The light in the Professor’s study was dim. Outside the window, the blossoms on the apricot tree were heavy with rain.

The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the “correct miscalculation,” for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers. This gave us confidence even when our best efforts came to nothing.

“Then what happens if you take the square root of negative one?” he asked.

“So you’d need to get – 1 by multiplying a number by itself?” Root asked. He had just learned fractions at school, and it had taken a half-hour lecture from the Professor to convince him that numbers less than zero even existed, so this was quite a leap. We tried picturing the square root of negative one in our heads: . The square root of 100 is 10; the square root of 16 is 4; the square root of 1 is 1. So the square root of – 1 is …

He didn’t press us. On the contrary, he fondly studied our expressions as we mulled over the problem.

“There is no such number,” I said at last, sounding rather tentative.

“Yes, there is,” he said, pointing at his chest. “It’s in here. It’s the most discreet sort of number, so it never comes out where it can be seen. But it’s here.” We fell silent for a moment, trying to picture the square root of minus one in some distant, unknown place. The only sound was the rain falling outside the window. My son ran his hand over his head, as if to confirm the shape of the square root symbol.

But the Professor didn’t always insist on being the teacher. He had enormous respect for matters about which he had no knowledge, and he was as humble in such cases as the square root of negative one itself. Whenever he needed my help, he would interrupt me in the most polite way. Even the simplest request—that I help him set the timer on the toaster, for example—always began with “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but …” Once I’d set the dial, he would sit peering in as the toast browned. He was as fascinated by the toast as he was by the mathematical proofs we did together, as if the truth of the toaster were no different from that of the Pythagorean theorem.

The Housekeeper and the Professor – Summary

Here is the book summary:

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem–ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.

She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.

Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities–like the Housekeeper’s shoe size–and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

Copyright © 2003 by Yōko Ogawa.

Translated by: Stephen Snyder

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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A thing in motion

This is a quote from the book Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft.

Quote by Olga Tokarczuk, “Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that—in spite of all the risks involved—a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

Flights – Summary

Here is the book summary:

From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.

Copyright © 2007 by Olga Tokarczuk.

Translated by: Jennifer Croft

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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The world in your head

Excerpt from Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft.

The first trip I ever took was across the fields, on foot. It took them a long time to notice I was gone, which meant I was able to make it quite some distance. I covered the whole park and even — going down dirt roads, through the corn and the damp meadows teeming with cowslip flowers, sectioned into squares by ditches — reached the river. Though of course the river was ubiquitous in that valley, soaking up under the ground cover and lapping at the fields.

Clambering up onto the embankment, I could see and undulating ribbon, a road that kept flowing outside of the frame, outside of the world, IF you were lucky, you might catch sight of a boat there, one of those great flat boats gliding over the river in either direction, oblivious to the shores, to the trees, to the people who stand on the embankment, unreliable landmarks, perhaps, not worth remarking, just an audience to the boats own motion, so full of grace. I dreamed of working on a boat like that when I grew up—or even better, of becoming one of those boats.

It wasn’t a big river, only the Oder, but I, too, was little then. It had its place in the hierarchy of rivers, which I later checked on the maps—a minor one, but present, nonetheless, a kind of country viscountess at the court of the Amazon queen. But it was more than enough for me. It seemed enormous. It flowed as it liked, essentially unimpeded, prone to flooding, unpredictable.

Occasionally along the banks it would catch on some underwater obstacle, and eddies would develop. But the river flowed on, parading, concerned only with its hidden aims beyond the horizon, somewhere far off the the north. Your eyes couldn’t keep focused on the water, which pulled your gaze along up past the horizon, so that you’d lose your balance.

To me, of course, the river paid no attention, caring only for itself, those changing, roving waters into which—as I later learned—you can never step twice.

Every year it charged a steep price to bear the weight of those boats—because every year someone drowned in the river, whether a child taking a dip on a hot summer’s day or some drunk who somehow wound up on the bridge and, in spite of the railing, still fell into the water. The search for the drowned always took place with great pomp and circumstance, with everyone in the vicinity waiting with bated breath. THey’d bring in divers and army boats. According to adults’ accounts we overheard, the recovered bodies were swollen and pale—the water had rinsed all the life out of them, blurring their facial features to such an extent that their loved ones would have a hard time identifying their corpses.

Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that—in spite of all the risks involved—a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity. From then on, the river was like a needle inserted into my formerly safe and stable surroundings, the landscape composed of the park, the greenhouses with their vegetables that grew in sad little rows, and the sidewalk with its concrete slabs where we would go to play hopscotch. This needle went all the way through, marking a vertical third dimension; so pierced, the landscape of my childhood world turned out to be nothing more than a toy made of rubber from which all the air was escaping, with a hiss.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Flights – Summary

Here is the book summary:

From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.

Copyright © 2007 by Olga Tokarczuk.

Translated by: Jennifer Croft

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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Like a bird escaping

Excerpt from Human Acts by Han Kang

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book Human Acts by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith.

‘Hasn’t enough blood been shed? How can all that blood be simply covered up? The souls of the departed are watching us. Their eyes are wide open.’

The voice of the man conducting the ceremony cracks at the end. The repetition of that word, ‘blood’, gives you a tightening feeling in your chest, so you open your mouth wide and suck in another deep breath.

A soul doesn’t have a body, so how can it be watching us?

You recall your maternal grandmother’s death last winter. What started out as a mild cold soon turned into pneumonia and she was admitted to hospital. She’d been there around a fortnight when you and your mother went to visit her, one Saturday afternoon when you were basking in the relief of having got through the end-of-term exams. But then, without warning, your grandmother’s condition deteriorated. Your mother contacted her brother and told him to come as quickly as possible, but he was still stuck in traffic when the old woman breathed her last.

Your childhood visits to her home inevitably included a quiet ‘follow me’ as the elderly woman, her back bent into the shape of the letter ㄱ, led the way to the dark room that was used as a pantry. Then, you knew she would open the larder door and bring out the cakes that were stored there to use as ceremonial offerings on the anniversary of a relative’s death: pastries made from oil and honey, and block-shaped cakes of pounded glutinous rice. You would take an oil-and-honey pastry with a conspiratorial grin, and your grandmother would smile back at you, her eyes creasing into slits. Her death was every bit as quiet and understated as she herself had been. Something seemed to flutter up from her face, like a bird escaping from her shuttered eyes above the oxygen mask. You stood there gaping at her wrinkled face, suddenly that of a corpse, and wondered where that fluttering, winged thing had disappeared to.

What about those who are now in the gym hall — have their souls also escaped their bodies, flying away like birds? Where could they possibly be going? It surely wasn’t some alien place like heaven or hell, which you’d heard about the one time you ever went to Sunday school, when you and your friends were lured there by the prospect of chocolate Easter eggs. You’d never been convinced by the historical dramas on TV, where the spirits of the dead were supposed to be scary figures, dressed all in white and wandering around in an eerie fog, their dishevelled hair the sign of an unquiet rest.

You feel drops of rain pattering down on your head. As you look up, the raindrops splash against your cheeks and forehead. Seemingly in an instant, the individual drops meld and blur into thick streaks, pouring down with ferocious speed.

The man with the microphone shouts out, ‘Please sit own, all of you. The memorial service hasn’t finished yet. This rain is tears shed by the souls of the departed.’

The chilly rainwater, which has crept inside the collar of your uniform, soaks our vest as it trickles down your back. The tears of the souls are cold, all right. Goosebumps rise on your forearms, on your back, as you hurry to shelter under the eaves projecting over the main door. The trees in front of the Provincial Office are being lashed by the rain. Squatting down on the highest step, the one closest to the door, you think back to your biology lessons. Studying the respiration of plants during fifth period, when the sunlight was always on the wane, seems like something hat took place in another world, now. Trees, you were told, survive on a single breath per day. When the sun rises, they drink in a long, luxurious draught of its rays, and when it sets they exhale a great stream of carbon dioxide. Those trees over there, who hold those long breaths within themselves with such unwavering patience, are bending under the onslaught of the rain.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Human Acts – Summary

Here is the book summary:

Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend’s corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma.

Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense importance.

Copyright © 2014 by Han Kang.

Translated by: Deborah Smith

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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Deliciously sad

This is a quote from the book The Emissary by Yōko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani.

Quote by Yōko Tawada, “Wallowing in self-pity had felt sweet, warm, and deliciously sad.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

The Emissary – Summary

Here is the book summary:

Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient—frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism. Yoshiro concentrates on nourishing Mumei, a strangely wonderful boy who offers “the beauty of the time that is yet to come.”

A delightful, irrepressibly funny book, The Emissary is filled with light. Yoko Tawada, deftly turning inside-out “the curse,” defies gravity and creates a playful joyous novel out of a dystopian one, with a legerdemain uniquely her own.

Copyright © 2014 by Yōko Tawada.

Translated by: Margaret Mitsutani

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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Women in Translation: 5 books from Southeast Asian women

This month, August, is a chance to celebrate women in translation, specifically women authors who’s works have been translated. There’s so much good translated literature out there. For this month, I’ll be sharing some inspiration for women authors from around the world who have had their work translated into English.

I know a lot of people read works translated from English into their own language, and there’s so many languages that works need to be translated into. But since I only read in English, I’m going to be highlighting works that have been translated into English.

This week we’ll be visiting Southeast Asia, which usually consists of countries including: Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Indonesia.

I find that these countries are less likely to be included in lists of translated literature, which makes me feel like it’s even more important to highlight books from this region.

When it is difficult to find women authors from specific countries, it makes me wonder how much we are missing out on. Every country has talented authors, with incredible stories to tell. And it breaks my heart that certain countries are just seen as not a priority for the publishing world.

But the more that people take time to notice and show interest in these countries, the more likely that publishing world will also pay attention. After all, publishing is still a market, so where there is demand, there will be a supply. So let’s create the demand.

Five books from Southeast Asian women

Here’s a list of five books with women authors from Southeast Asia.

  1. Vietnam: Paradise of the Blind by Dương Thu Hương (1988)
  2. Malaysia: The Age of Goodbyes by Li Zi Shu (2010)
  3. Thailand: The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth by วีรพร นิติประภา (Veeraporn Nitiprapha) (2013)
  4. Vietnam: Mãn by Kim Thúy (2013)
    Vietnam
  5. Indonesia: Apple & Knife by Intan Paramaditha (2018)

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve ordered them based on the year they were published in their original language (not the year of the English translation).

Paradise of the Blind (1988)

by Dương Thu Hương Translated by Nina McPherson & Phan Huy Đường

  • Year Published: 1988
    English version in 2002
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, historical, emotional, reflective, slow-paced
  • Language: Vietnamese
  • Country: Vietnam
  • Currently banned in Vietnam

Paradise of the Blind is an exquisite portrait of three Vietnamese women struggling to survive in a society where subservience to men is expected and Communist corruption crushes every dream. Through the eyes of Hang, a young woman in her twenties who has grown up amidst the slums and intermittent beauty of Hanoi, we come to know the tragedy of her family as land reform rips apart their village. When her uncle Chinh‘s political loyalties replace family devotion, Hang is torn between her mother‘s appalling self–sacrifice and the bitterness of her aunt who can avenge but not forgive. Only by freeing herself from the past will Hang be able to find dignity –– and a future.

Links:

The Age of Goodbyes (2010)

by Li Zi Shu, translated from Chinese by Y.Z. Chin

  • Year Published: 2010
    English version in 2022
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, literary, emotional, mysterious, reflective, medium-paced
  • Language: Chinese
  • Country: Malaysia

By one of Southeast Asia’s most exciting writers, The Age of Goodbyes is a wildly inventive account of family history, political turmoil, and the redemptive grace of storytelling.

In the summer of 1969, in the wake of Malaysia’s deadliest race riots, a woman named Du Li An secures her place in society by marrying a gangster. In a parallel narrative, a critic known only as The Third Person explores the work of a writer also named Du Li An. And a third storyline is in the second person; “you” are reading a novel titled The Age of Goodbyes. Floundering in the wake of “your” mother’s death, “you” are trying to unpack the secrets surrounding “your” lineage.

The Age of Goodbyes—which begins on page 513, a reference to the riots of May 13, 1969—is the acclaimed debut by Li Zi Shu. The winner of multiple awards and a Taiwanese bestseller, this dazzling novel is a profound exploration of what happens to personal memory when official accounts of history distort and render it taboo.

Links:

The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth (2013)

by วีรพร นิติประภา (Veeraporn Nitiprapha), translated by: Kong Rithdee

  • Year Published: 2013
    English version in 2018
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, literary, magical realism, emotional, slow-paced
  • Language: Thai
  • Country: Thailand
  • Won the prestigious South East Asian Writers (“S.E.A. Write”) Award for fiction and a best-seller in Thailand

On the day Chareeya is born, her mother discovers her father having an affair with a traditional Thai dancer. From then on, Chareey’s life is fated to carry the weight of her parents’ disappointments. She and her sister grow up in a lush riverside town near the Thai capital, Bangkok, captivated by trashy romance novels, classical music and games of make-believe. When the laconic orphan, Pran, enters their world, he unwittingly lures the sisters into a labyrinth of their own making as they each try to escape their intertwined fates.

The original Thai language edition of The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth won the prestigious South East Asian Writers (“S.E.A. Write”) Award for fiction and was best-seller in Thailand. It is translated into English by Thai film critic and recipient of France’s Chevalier dans I’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Kong Rithdee.

Attuned to the addictive rhythms of a Thai soap opera and written with the consuming intensity of a fever dream, this novel opens an insightful and truly compelling window onto the Thai heart.

Links:

Mãn (2013)

by Kim Thúy, translated from French by Sheila Fischman

  • Year Published: 2013
    English version in 2014
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, literary, emotional, reflective, slow-paced
  • Language: French
  • Country: Vietnam & Canada
  • Kim Thuy is a Vietnamese-born Canadian writer, whose debut novel Ru won the Governor General’s Award for French-language fiction at the 2010 Governor General’s Awards

Mãn has three mothers: the one who gives birth to her in wartime, the nun who plucks her from a vegetable garden, and her beloved Maman, who becomes a spy to survive. Seeking security for her grown daughter, Maman finds Mãn a husband – a lonely Vietnamese restaurateur who lives in Montreal.

Thrown into a new world, Mãn discovers her natural talent as a chef. Gracefully she practices her art, with food as her medium. She creates dishes that are much more than sustenance for the body: they evoke memory and emotion, time and place, and even bring her customers to tears.

Mãn is a mystery – her name means ‘perfect fulfillment’, yet she and her husband seem to drift along, respectfully and dutifully. But when she encounters a married chef in Paris, everything changes in the instant of a fleeting touch, and Mãn discovers the all-encompassing obsession and ever-present dangers of a love affair.

Full of indelible images of beauty, delicacy and quiet power, Mãn is a novel that begs to be savoured for its language, its sensuousness and its love of life.

Links:

Apple & Knife (2018)

by Intan Paramaditha, translated by Stephen J. Epstein

  • Year Published: 2018
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, horror, short stories, dark, medium-paced
  • Language: Bahasa Indonesia
  • Country: Indonesia
  • You may want to check content warnings before reading

Inspired by horror fiction, myths and fairy tales, Apple and Knife is an unsettling ride that swerves into the supernatural to explore the dangers and power of occupying a female body in today’s world.

These short fictions set in the Indonesian everyday—in corporate boardrooms, in shanty towns, on dangdut stages—reveal a soupy otherworld stewing just beneath the surface. Sometimes wacky and always engrossing, this is subversive feminist horror at its best, where men and women alike are arbiters of fear, and where revenge is sometimes sweetest when delivered from the grave.

Mara finds herself brainstorming an ad campaign for Free Maxi Pads, with a little help from the menstruation-eating hag of her childhood. Jamal falls in love with the rich and powerful Bambang, but it is the era of the smiling general and, if he’s not careful, he may find himself recruited to Bambang’s brutal cause. Solihin would give anything to make dangdut singer Salimah his wife – anything at all.

In the globally connected and fast-developing Indonesia of Apple and Knife, taboos, inversions, sex and death all come together in a heady, intoxicating mix full of pointed critiques and bloody mutilations. Women carve a place for themselves in this world, finding ways to subvert norms or enacting brutalities on themselves and each other.

Links:

Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of books written by Southeast Asian authors.

I’m always looking for more suggestions of books to read. If you have a favourite book written by a Southeast Asian author, please feel free to share it in a comment below!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of the book?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

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Acceptance was a treasure

Excerpt from The Emissary by Yōko Tawada

Photo by Manuel Cosentino on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book The Emissary by Yōko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani.

“Mumei, are you all right? Does it hurt? Can you breathe?” Yoshiro would say, his eyes filling with tears as he patted the boy lightly on the back or held his head in his arms, pressing it to his chest. Yet despite the appearance of suffering, Mumei himself would be strangely calm. As if resigning himself to a storm at sea, he’d simply wait for the coughing fit to pass.

When the coughing stopped, Mumei would go back to drinking his juice as if nothing had happened. Looking up at Yoshiro, he wold ask in surprise, “Great-grandpa, are you all right?” He didn’t seem to know what “suffering” meant; he simply coughed when food wouldn’t go down, or vomited it back up. Of course he felt pain, but it was pure pain unaccompanied by any “Why am I the only one who has to suffer like this?” sort of lamentation that Yoshiro knew so well. Perhaps this acceptance was a treasure given to the youngest generation. Mumei didn’t know how to feel sorry for himself.

When Yoshiro was a child, his mother babied him whenever he caught cold or ran a fever. Wallowing in self-pity had felt sweet, warm, and deliciously sad. As an adult he knew that, although he had to go to work no matter how much he hated it, illness would give him a bona fide excuse for staying at home, spending the whole day in bed reading or just thinking. It was easy to catch the flu. All he had to do was make sure he didn’t get enough sleep. And even after he recovered, he always managed to get sick again a few months later. Finally, he realized that his true purpose was not to come down with some illness, but to quit his job.

Fortunately, Mumei had never seen adults clinging to illness in this unseemly way. And if he kept on in this way, he would be free until he died, never feeling sorry for himself or using his weakness to ingratiate himself with the people around him.

For about ninety percent of children these days fever was a constant companion. Mumei was always slightly feverish. As checking the thermometer daily only made the adults nervous, a flier came from school instructing them not to. If told they had a fever, kids would start to feel dull and lethargic. And if they were kept home every time their temperature was above normal, some would hardly go to school at all. Besides, since every school had a qualified doctor on duty, it was really best for them to com to school when they were sick. “Because the purpose of fever is to kill germs, children shouldn’t be given medicine to bring down a fever” had been standard medical advice for ages, bu t only recently had doctors begun to tell parents “Never take your child’s temperature.”

Yoshiro and Mumei buried their thermometer at the Thingamabob Cemetery, a public graveyard where anyone could pay their last respects to something they wanted to part with. Some of the buried objects, still longing for the world above, were apparently trying to return to it; from the earth, disturbed by the rain that day, part of a white headband with a red Rising Sun in the center peeked out, fluttering in the wind. Yoshiro imagined its former owner as either a high school student who was done with his university entrance exams, or a youth who had graduated from some right-wing gang. The leg of an upside-down teddy bear stuck out of the ground. The bear probably wanted to get out, too. Mumei imagined all the various things buried here: broken garden shears, split into two tadpoles; worn-out shoes with paper thin soles; a toy drum with a broken head; the wedding ring of a couple now divorce; a fountain pen with a bent tip; a map of the world. Yoshiro had once buried the manuscript of a novel he was working on here. He’d thought of burning it in the garden but submitting it to the flames had seemed so cruel he couldn’t bring himself to strike a match. Everyone has reasons for burning some bits of trash but not others. Ken-to-shi, Emissary to China, he’d called it, his first and only historical novel: he was already well into it when he realized he’d included the names of far too many foreign countries. Place names spread throughout the novel like blood vessels, dividing into ever smaller branches then setting down roots, making it impossible to eliminate them from the text. he’d had to get rid of the manuscript for his own protection, and since burning it was too painful, he had buried it.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

The Emissary – Summary

Here is the book summary:

Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient—frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism. Yoshiro concentrates on nourishing Mumei, a strangely wonderful boy who offers “the beauty of the time that is yet to come.”

A delightful, irrepressibly funny book, The Emissary is filled with light. Yoko Tawada, deftly turning inside-out “the curse,” defies gravity and creates a playful joyous novel out of a dystopian one, with a legerdemain uniquely her own.

Copyright © 2014 by Yōko Tawada.

Translated by: Margaret Mitsutani

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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A strange melancholy

This is a quote from the book Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, translated by Irene Ash.

Quote by Françoise Sagan, “A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness. In the past the idea of sadness always appealed to me, now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I had known boredom, regret, and at times remorse, but never sadness. To-day something envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, which isolates me.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

Bonjour Tristesse – Summary

Here is the book summary:

Set against the translucent beauty of France in summer, Bonjour Tristesse is a bittersweet tale narrated by Cecile, a seventeen-year-old girl on the brink of womanhood, whose meddling in her father’s love life leads to tragic consequences.

Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cécile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—a handsome, still-young widower with a wandering eye—for a carefree, two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress. Cécile cherishes the free-spirited moments she and her father share, while plotting her own sexual adventures with a “tall and almost beautiful” law student. But the arrival of her late mother’s best friend intrudes upon a young girl’s pleasures. And when a relationship begins to develop between the adults, Cécile and her lover set in motion a plan to keep them apart…with tragic, unexpected consequences.

The internationally beloved story of a precocious teenager’s attempts to understand and control the world around her, Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse is a beautifully composed, wonderfully ambiguous celebration of sexual liberation, at once sympathetic and powerfully unsparing.

Copyright © 1955 by Françoise Sagan

Translated by: Irene Ash

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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Women in Translation: 5 books to read from North/East Asia

This month, August, is a chance to celebrate women in translation, specifically women authors who’s works have been translated. There’s so much good translated literature out there. For this month, I’ll be sharing some inspiration for women authors from around the world who have had their work translated into English.

I know a lot of people read works translated from English into their own language, and there’s so many languages that works need to be translated into. But since I only read in English, I’m going to be highlighting works that have been translated into English.

This week we’ll be visiting North/East Asia. Depending on the source, it may call the region either North or East Asia. This area typically includes countries like China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Mongolia.

Countries like Japan and South Korea are very prominent in translated literature because their governments actively support translation efforts. Their governments have prioritized translating their national literature as a way of cultural preservation and enabling their local talent to gain international recognition. I think this is amazing, and I would love to see more countries supporting their local talent in this way.

Due to this additional support, you’ll often see a lot of books recommended from these countries, especially when talking about books in translation. I’ve included a few books from Japan and South Korea, but I’ve also included a few others to diversify the list.

Photo by Uchral Sanjaadorj on Unsplash

Five books from North/East Asia

Here’s a list of five books of translated literature with women authors from North/East Asia.

  1. Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang (China)
  2. Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin (Taiwan)
  3. The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa (Japan)
  4. Human Acts by Han Kang (Korea)
  5. Earthlings by Sayaka Murata (Japan)

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve listed them in order of when they were published in their original language.

Love in a Fallen City (1946) – China

by Eileen Chang
Translated by Karen S. Kingsbury

  • Year Published: 1946
    (English version in 2006)
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, classics, short stories, emotional, mysterious, reflective, slow-paced

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang’s achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

Links:

Notes of a Crocodile (1994) – Taiwan

by Qiu Miaojin
Translated by Bonnie Huie

  • Year Published: 1994
    (English version in 2017)
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, classics, lgbtqia+, literary, dark, emotional, reflective, medium-paced
  • Qiu Miaojin was posthumously awarded the China Times Literature Award in 1995 for this book

Set in the post-martial-law era of late 1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin’s cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon.

Links:

The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003) – Japan

by Yōko Ogawa
Translated by Stephen Snyder

  • Year Published: 2003
    (English version in 2009)
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, contemporary, literary, emotional, reflective, medium-paced
  • It received the Hon’ya Taisho award and a film adaptation was released in January 2006

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem–ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.

She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities–like the Housekeeper’s shoe size–and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

Links:

Human Acts (2014) – South Korea

by Han Kang
Translated by Deborah Smith

  • Year Published: 2014
    (English version in 2016)
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, historical, literary, dark, emotional, sad, medium-paced
  • It won Korea’s Manhae Prize for Literature and Italy’s Malaparte Prize

Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend’s corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma.

Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense importance.

Links:

Earthlings (2018) – Japan

by Sayaka Murata
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

  • Year Published: 2018
    (English version in 2020)
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, horror, literary, magical realism, challenging, dark, medium-paced
  • Note, this novel deals with many difficult themes, I would recommend checking content warnings before reading if there are any subjects you want to avoid.

Natsuki isn’t like the other girls. She has a wand and a transformation mirror. She might be a witch, or an alien from another planet. Together with her cousin Yuu, Natsuki spends her summers in the wild mountains of Nagano, dreaming of other worlds. When a terrible sequence of events threatens to part the two children forever, they make a promise: survive, no matter what.

Now Natsuki is grown. She lives a quiet life with her asexual husband, surviving as best she can by pretending to be normal. But the demands of Natsuki’s family are increasing, her friends wonder why she’s still not pregnant, and dark shadows from Natsuki’s childhood are pursuing her. Fleeing the suburbs for the mountains of her childhood, Natsuki prepares herself with a reunion with Yuu. Will he still remember their promise? And will he help her keep it?

Links:

Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of books written by North/East Asian authors.

I’m always looking for more suggestions of books to read. If you have a favourite book written by a North/East Asian author, please feel free to share it in a comment below!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of the book?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

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Beautiful name of sadness

Excerpt from Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

Photo by Antoine Rakotozafy on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, translated by Irene Ash.

A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness. In the past the idea of sadness always appealed to me, now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I had known boredom, regret, and at times remorse, but never sadness. To-day something envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, which isolates me.

That summer I was seventeen and perfectly happy. I lived with my father, and there was also Elsa, who for the time being was his mistress. I must explain this situation at once, or it might give a false impression. My father was forty, and had been a widower for fifteen years. He was young for his age, full of vitality and possibilities, and when I left school two years before, I soon noticed that he lived with a women. It took me rather longer to realise that it was a different one every six months. But gradually his charm, my new easy life, and my own disposition led me to accept it. He was a frivolous man, clever at business, always curious, quickly bored, and attractive to women. it was easy to love him, for he was kind, generous, gay, and full of affection for me. I cannot imagine a better or a more amusing friend. At the beginning of the summer he even went so far as to ask me whether I would object to Elsa’s company during the holidays. She was a tall red-haired girl, sensual and worldly, gentle, rather simple, and unpretentious; one might have come across her any day in the studios and bars of the Champs-Elysées. I encouraged him to invite her. He needed women around him, and I knew that Elsa would not get in our way. In any case my father and I were so delighted at the prospect of going away together that we were in no mood to cavil at anything. He had rented a large white villa on the Mediterranean, for which we had been longing since the spring. It was remote and beautiful, and stood on a promontory dominating the sea, hidden from the road by a pine wood; a mule path led down to a tiny creek where the sea lapped against the rust-coloured rocks.

The first days were dazzling. We spent hours on the beach overwhelmed by the heat and gradually assuming a healthy golden tan; except Elsa, whose skin reddened and peeled, causing her atrocious suffering. My father performed all sorts of complicated leg exercises to reduce a rounding stomach unsuitable for a Don Juan. From dawn onwards I was in the water. It was cold and transparent, and I plunged wildly about in my efforts to wash away the shadows and dust of the city. I lay full length on the sand, took up a handful and let it run through my fingers in soft yellow streams. I told myself that it ran out like time. It was an idle thought, and it was pleasant to have idle thoughts for it was summer.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Bonjour Tristesse – Summary

Here is the book summary:

Set against the translucent beauty of France in summer, Bonjour Tristesse is a bittersweet tale narrated by Cecile, a seventeen-year-old girl on the brink of womanhood, whose meddling in her father’s love life leads to tragic consequences.

Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cécile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—a handsome, still-young widower with a wandering eye—for a carefree, two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress. Cécile cherishes the free-spirited moments she and her father share, while plotting her own sexual adventures with a “tall and almost beautiful” law student. But the arrival of her late mother’s best friend intrudes upon a young girl’s pleasures. And when a relationship begins to develop between the adults, Cécile and her lover set in motion a plan to keep them apart…with tragic, unexpected consequences.

The internationally beloved story of a precocious teenager’s attempts to understand and control the world around her, Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse is a beautifully composed, wonderfully ambiguous celebration of sexual liberation, at once sympathetic and powerfully unsparing.

Copyright © 1955 by Françoise Sagan

Translated by: Irene Ash

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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