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An I-Novel
Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their family’s arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude and over the phone with her sister about their life in the United States, trying to break the news that she has decided to go back to Japan and become a writer in her mother tongue.
Published in 1995, this formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. It liberally incorporated English words and phrases, and the entire text was printed horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left. In a luminous meditation on how a person becomes a writer, Mizumura transforms the “I-novel,” a Japanese confessional genre that toys with fictionalization. An I-Novel tells the story of two sisters while taking up urgent questions of identity, race, and language. Above all, it considers what it means to write in the era of the hegemony of English―and what it means to be a writer of Japanese in particular. Juliet Winters Carpenter masterfully renders a novel that once appeared untranslatable into English.
Published in 1995, this formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. It liberally incorporated English words and phrases, and the entire text was printed horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left. In a luminous meditation on how a person becomes a writer, Mizumura transforms the “I-novel,” a Japanese confessional genre that toys with fictionalization. An I-Novel tells the story of two sisters while taking up urgent questions of identity, race, and language. Above all, it considers what it means to write in the era of the hegemony of English―and what it means to be a writer of Japanese in particular. Juliet Winters Carpenter masterfully renders a novel that once appeared untranslatable into English.
344 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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2248 people want to read
About the author
Minae Mizumura
14 books148 followersMinae Mizumura (水村 美苗 Mizumura Minae, born 1951) is a novelist currently writing in the Japanese language.
Educated in the US, she wrote her first published work in the English language, a scholarly essay on the literary criticism of Paul de Man. She is often portrayed as a Japanese novelist who questions the conventional boundaries of national literature. Her novels include Light and Darkness Continued, An I-Novel, and A True Novel, which has been selected for the Japanese Literature Publishing Project, a national program to promote translations of Japanese literature. She also writes essays and literary criticism in major newspapers and journals. Many of Minae Mizumura's works have been described as highly readable and often entertaining, while, at the same time, resonating with historical significance. They are also known for their formalistic innovations, such as making use of unusual printing formats and inserting English texts and photographic illustrations. Because she returned to Japan as an adult and chose to write in the Japanese language despite her coming of age in the United States and her education in the English language, critics have often noted her particular love for Japanese language and her commitment to Japanese literature. Her analysis and observations on the demise of the Japanese language, detailed in her book of criticism called The Fall of the Japanese Language in the Age of English, gained much attention from the mainstream media as well as the Internet. In the same book, she wrote of the significance of preserving the great literary tradition established during the time of building modern Japan.
Minae Mizumura has taught at Princeton University, the University of Michigan and Stanford University. She was a resident novelist in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2003. She has won the 1991 Agency for Cultural Affairs New Artist Award, the 1996 Noma New Artist Award, and the 2003 Yomiuri Prize for Literature. Minae Mizumura now resides in Tokyo, Japan.
Source: wikipedia
Educated in the US, she wrote her first published work in the English language, a scholarly essay on the literary criticism of Paul de Man. She is often portrayed as a Japanese novelist who questions the conventional boundaries of national literature. Her novels include Light and Darkness Continued, An I-Novel, and A True Novel, which has been selected for the Japanese Literature Publishing Project, a national program to promote translations of Japanese literature. She also writes essays and literary criticism in major newspapers and journals. Many of Minae Mizumura's works have been described as highly readable and often entertaining, while, at the same time, resonating with historical significance. They are also known for their formalistic innovations, such as making use of unusual printing formats and inserting English texts and photographic illustrations. Because she returned to Japan as an adult and chose to write in the Japanese language despite her coming of age in the United States and her education in the English language, critics have often noted her particular love for Japanese language and her commitment to Japanese literature. Her analysis and observations on the demise of the Japanese language, detailed in her book of criticism called The Fall of the Japanese Language in the Age of English, gained much attention from the mainstream media as well as the Internet. In the same book, she wrote of the significance of preserving the great literary tradition established during the time of building modern Japan.
Minae Mizumura has taught at Princeton University, the University of Michigan and Stanford University. She was a resident novelist in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2003. She has won the 1991 Agency for Cultural Affairs New Artist Award, the 1996 Noma New Artist Award, and the 2003 Yomiuri Prize for Literature. Minae Mizumura now resides in Tokyo, Japan.
Source: wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 123 reviews
June 22, 2021
Minae Mizumura's novel's a variation on the Japanese confessional genre, so draws extensively on her own experiences. Just as she was entering her teens, Mizumura was uprooted from her home in Japan when her father took a job at his company’s American offices. The central character here’s also called Minae Mizumura, whose father transported his family to America in the 1960s. It’s now the 1980s and Minae’s a doctoral student at an American university, alone since her boyfriend Tono returned home to Japan, she’s in a state of limbo. She spends her days shut up in her apartment, unable to sleep or focus on her research, overwhelmed with conflicting thoughts about her future. Her only sustained contact with the outside are daily phone conversations with her sister Nanae, who’s barely making it as an artist in another city. Minae buries herself in Japanese literature, her main refuge since her school years, writes in her diary and agonises over whether to remain in America or try to create a home in Japan. Mizumura’s novel’s deceptively quiet, reliant on character and atmosphere rather than any discernible plot, instead over one, solitary day, through her character's diaries, recollections, and talks with Nanae, she slowly reveals details about Minae's life and family, exploring possible sources of Minae’s confusion about her identity and her ties to a vision of Japan that may be more fantasy than reality.
Mizumura’s unassuming, but incredibly assured, narrative uses Minae’s situation to tease out important questions around gender, identity, culture and language. Juliet Winters Carpenter’s translation’s impressive, more so because Mizumura’s book was never meant for English-language audiences. The original, published in 1995, mingled Japanese with bursts of English and a smattering of French to illustrate Mizumura’s arguments about language and identity, as well as the impact of the global spread of English on the culture and literature of countries like Japan. These ideas carried through to the text’s form through the inclusion of illustrations and a variety of visual registers suggested by the unique typographical layout of the Japanese edition. The illustrations remain but, despite attempts to replicate other textually innovative qualities, I still had difficulty getting a sense of how this array of unusual, formal features operated for Japanese readerships. But whatever the possible shortcomings of a translated version I still found this completely compelling, deeply thoughtful but accessible, and beautifully-written, it's made me really keen to track down more of Mizumura’s work.
Mizumura’s unassuming, but incredibly assured, narrative uses Minae’s situation to tease out important questions around gender, identity, culture and language. Juliet Winters Carpenter’s translation’s impressive, more so because Mizumura’s book was never meant for English-language audiences. The original, published in 1995, mingled Japanese with bursts of English and a smattering of French to illustrate Mizumura’s arguments about language and identity, as well as the impact of the global spread of English on the culture and literature of countries like Japan. These ideas carried through to the text’s form through the inclusion of illustrations and a variety of visual registers suggested by the unique typographical layout of the Japanese edition. The illustrations remain but, despite attempts to replicate other textually innovative qualities, I still had difficulty getting a sense of how this array of unusual, formal features operated for Japanese readerships. But whatever the possible shortcomings of a translated version I still found this completely compelling, deeply thoughtful but accessible, and beautifully-written, it's made me really keen to track down more of Mizumura’s work.
March 8, 2021
Small update....
I have just been reading other reviews (wish I had read them before I purchased this book) -- Many of 'other' reviews might have been helpful....
but....its 'my thought'....is that the readers who read this book 'in Japanese' enjoyed it more than the readers (like me) --read it in English.
Its a I bilingual novel... I found it awkward to read in its styling.
This semi-autobiographical.... takes place over the course of one day.
Minae was living in a run down apt. that she once shared with boyfriend, Tono. Tono asked Minae to marry her and move back to Japan ...( he was taking a new job back home), but Minae said no. She wanted to stay in New York and finish her PhD.
When the novel opens, Minae is alone - its Friday night, (Friday, the 13th), its snowing heavily outside. She looks out her window after hearing the noise of a siren.
“Must be a car accident”.
Minae got up from the computer and ran to the bay window.
She hadn’t been outdoors all day, and not only today, yesterday and the day before too.
She hadn’t set foot outside, hadn’t so much as opened a window. The sudden movement made the stagnation of the room feel heavy, thick with heat and dust. The siren kept coming closer and closer but then, instead of turning onto her street, it continued straight down the main avenue toward the center of the college town”.
Minae remained at the window”.
She saw the Afro-American Student Center, across the street next to the University Cabaret.
Two black prostitutes had been killed that summer.
If it wasn’t a heavy snow storm, that Friday night, Minae would see many prostitutes lingering in front of the steps of her apartment building, hopping into a car whenever one pulled up.
One of the regulars was friendly with Tono.
“Hey, China! I like your coat! He would answer, ‘Thank You’”.
That Friday snowy night... we could feel how lonely Minae was. She was drinking Jack Daniels and thinking about Tono.... wondering if she should’ve gone back to Japan and married him.
There were cockroaches in her apartment, and moved slowly in America.
The only person who really cared if Minae existed or not, was her sister, Nanae.
I had some trouble with this book — both technically — and experientially.
For some reason my kindle e-book, kept giving me technical difficulties. At first I thought it was my Kindle… But it was only this book.
But I persevered and eventually I was able to get the e-book working....
But this is one of those books where I appreciated it — but other than understanding and feeling how challenging life in America had to have been for Minae—
And that I ‘did’ feel....
the experimental writing style — in two languages: Japanese and English was lost on me.
I did feel appreciation for Minae. She loved the Japanese language, her first language.... and she wanted to be a Japanese writer which she ends up being... but also wanted to be able to translate her books in English yet still show the beauty of the Japanese language at the same time.
I understand the concept and there was definitely beauty in this book as there is beauty I felt for the author....
but that’s it for me. That’s about all I felt.
I’m pretty sure there is something else going on that went over my head.
It was certainly simple enough to read but I guess I wasn’t able to feel the urgency of the two languages being used together in a way I think the author wanted readers to appreciate.
This is one of those — it’s probably me - not the book.
“The connection between having Japanese blood in ones vein‘s and being Japanese was at best tenuous, more slight than a strain of spider silk”.
I liked it... saw it’s beauty...but
it’s not a book I’d rave about.
The book cover is sure gorgeous!
I have just been reading other reviews (wish I had read them before I purchased this book) -- Many of 'other' reviews might have been helpful....
but....its 'my thought'....is that the readers who read this book 'in Japanese' enjoyed it more than the readers (like me) --read it in English.
Its a I bilingual novel... I found it awkward to read in its styling.
This semi-autobiographical.... takes place over the course of one day.
Minae was living in a run down apt. that she once shared with boyfriend, Tono. Tono asked Minae to marry her and move back to Japan ...( he was taking a new job back home), but Minae said no. She wanted to stay in New York and finish her PhD.
When the novel opens, Minae is alone - its Friday night, (Friday, the 13th), its snowing heavily outside. She looks out her window after hearing the noise of a siren.
“Must be a car accident”.
Minae got up from the computer and ran to the bay window.
She hadn’t been outdoors all day, and not only today, yesterday and the day before too.
She hadn’t set foot outside, hadn’t so much as opened a window. The sudden movement made the stagnation of the room feel heavy, thick with heat and dust. The siren kept coming closer and closer but then, instead of turning onto her street, it continued straight down the main avenue toward the center of the college town”.
Minae remained at the window”.
She saw the Afro-American Student Center, across the street next to the University Cabaret.
Two black prostitutes had been killed that summer.
If it wasn’t a heavy snow storm, that Friday night, Minae would see many prostitutes lingering in front of the steps of her apartment building, hopping into a car whenever one pulled up.
One of the regulars was friendly with Tono.
“Hey, China! I like your coat! He would answer, ‘Thank You’”.
That Friday snowy night... we could feel how lonely Minae was. She was drinking Jack Daniels and thinking about Tono.... wondering if she should’ve gone back to Japan and married him.
There were cockroaches in her apartment, and moved slowly in America.
The only person who really cared if Minae existed or not, was her sister, Nanae.
I had some trouble with this book — both technically — and experientially.
For some reason my kindle e-book, kept giving me technical difficulties. At first I thought it was my Kindle… But it was only this book.
But I persevered and eventually I was able to get the e-book working....
But this is one of those books where I appreciated it — but other than understanding and feeling how challenging life in America had to have been for Minae—
And that I ‘did’ feel....
the experimental writing style — in two languages: Japanese and English was lost on me.
I did feel appreciation for Minae. She loved the Japanese language, her first language.... and she wanted to be a Japanese writer which she ends up being... but also wanted to be able to translate her books in English yet still show the beauty of the Japanese language at the same time.
I understand the concept and there was definitely beauty in this book as there is beauty I felt for the author....
but that’s it for me. That’s about all I felt.
I’m pretty sure there is something else going on that went over my head.
It was certainly simple enough to read but I guess I wasn’t able to feel the urgency of the two languages being used together in a way I think the author wanted readers to appreciate.
This is one of those — it’s probably me - not the book.
“The connection between having Japanese blood in ones vein‘s and being Japanese was at best tenuous, more slight than a strain of spider silk”.
I liked it... saw it’s beauty...but
it’s not a book I’d rave about.
The book cover is sure gorgeous!
December 20, 2020
I enjoyed reading The I-Novel not only for its story but also as a study of translation. Juliet Winters Carpenter has done a meticulous and poetic job in translating a book that is deliberately untranslatable. As she mentions in her foreword, the novel is "based on the author's experiences growing up in the United States and Japan, [and the work] freely mixes natural American English with Japanese." What a fascinating, impossible task, to translate a novel into a monolingual work when it was intended to be bilingual.
I would not recommend reading the novel in e-book format, as I did, because Carpenter's solution is to use a mix of different type faces as well as allowing for some Japanese to be interspersed within the text. I would have preferred to have the novel in my hands, to get the full effect of her choices, and I also would have loved to have had the original text on the opposite page. It would be a way for non-native speakers of Japanese to have an easy way to check on the kanji and to see the beauty of the language right there, alongside. The novel's bilingual-ness is its message; it's about a person who is trying to capture her experience of growing up in two completely different linguistic and cultural worlds. I would have liked to have the evidence of the two-language choices the author made there on the page, even if I couldn't read it.
These are things I wished for as I read, but even so, what I experienced on the page was an enjoyable reading experience, and I realize what I'm asking for wasn't the intent of this volume.
Thank you to NetGalley and to Columbia University Press for the opportunity to review this work.
I would not recommend reading the novel in e-book format, as I did, because Carpenter's solution is to use a mix of different type faces as well as allowing for some Japanese to be interspersed within the text. I would have preferred to have the novel in my hands, to get the full effect of her choices, and I also would have loved to have had the original text on the opposite page. It would be a way for non-native speakers of Japanese to have an easy way to check on the kanji and to see the beauty of the language right there, alongside. The novel's bilingual-ness is its message; it's about a person who is trying to capture her experience of growing up in two completely different linguistic and cultural worlds. I would have liked to have the evidence of the two-language choices the author made there on the page, even if I couldn't read it.
These are things I wished for as I read, but even so, what I experienced on the page was an enjoyable reading experience, and I realize what I'm asking for wasn't the intent of this volume.
Thank you to NetGalley and to Columbia University Press for the opportunity to review this work.
October 30, 2021
This is an I-Novel. An I-Novel is “ a literary genre in Japanese literature used to describe a type of confessional literature where the events in the story correspond to events in the author's life. This genre was founded based on the Japanese reception of naturalism during the Meiji period, and later influenced literature in other Asian countries as well. This genre of literature reflects greater individuality and a less constrained method of writing. From its beginnings, the I-novel has been a genre that also is meant to expose aspects of society or of the author's life”. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-novel ).
This “semi-autobiographical work takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. The month is December 13, 20 years to the day that two sisters, Minae and Nanae, arrive in America from Japan with their mother and father (actually father is already there waiting for them). And they live in the US from there on in with occasional trips back to Japan. Nanae is 34 years old and lives in a loft in Manhattan and is a sculptor, but is not well-known for that. Minae is two years younger, 32, and is a graduate student in the French department at an unnamed university (I am guessing it is Yale, because that is where Mizumura got her advanced degree from). Minae has to work up the courage to tell Nanae that she wants to move back to Japan to write a novel in the Japanese language. That is the plot of the book.
I didn’t give anything away that is not already something you can read on the back cover of the book. 😊
Although there are just two characters that interact on this one day in December, during the course of several phone calls to each other they bring up other people in their lives, mainly their mother and former boyfriends and girlfriends, and all sorts of people that have been a part of their lives. And we learn why Minae has come to her decision and why she wants to write a novel, not in the English language, but in her native tongue.
I whizzed through the first ~170 pages of the 327-pager in one sitting…something I had not planned on (I had things to do and places to go…). but it grabbed my attention. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised because I was captivated by another book of hers, A True Novel (2013) which was close to 900 pages (I shy away from such tomes usually). ‘An I-Novel’ bogged down somewhat disappointingly to me at that point. I should say it bogged down for me. Perhaps not to others. I think if I was more attuned to Japanese culture and world history, I would have appreciated a lot of what went on in the last ~160 pages more. For some part of the last half of the book, Minae and Nanae were both relating episodes in their lives in the US in which they were seen by white people as “Asian” and whether that was Japan or China or Korea it made no difference to the whites.
One point I want to make is that this is not a memoir in the classic sense. Mizumura is not telling us all the major events in her life that shaped her or influenced her. It is what happened on that particular December day in the 1980s (not too much…. she spent all day in her apartment) and what thoughts went through her head on that day. She says in one sentence she was nearly raped once in her life….and never says anything about that again. That’s because I guess that event flitted through her head on that particular day only in passing.
This book was translated nearly a quarter of a century after it was published in Japan as ‘Shishosetsu from left to right’.
Another thing I wanted to point out about this book is its formatting— interesting. Some words throughout the text are in bold, and this is related to the way Juliet Winters Carpenter translated this I-novel.
• Award-winning translator and academic Juliet Winters Carpenter, who has previously translated Mizumura’s work, came up with a creative way of handling the challenges of An I-Novel by using different typefaces. English words that appear in the Japanese text are rendered in a bold typeface in this version so readers can get a sense of the dislocation that Japanese readers might experience in attending to the Japanese text that has so much English (and some French) thrown in untranslated (from first review below).
Also, there are black-and-white photographs interspersed throughout the book. I liked that. I liked the book cover — it was a Japanese woodblock print circa 1880s.
While I am quoting other people this is also very interesting. It turns out that Minae and Nanae are in another book of Mizumura’s — Inheritance from Mother (2017). In an interview of the author, she says that the I-Novel is close to what happened in real life with the two sisters and “Inheritance from Mother” is what the author imagines could have happened to the two women had they never left Japan.
• She says in the interview: "American readers might be bewildered to see similar stories in novels with similar characters— “Couldn’t the author have used a little more imagination?”—but Japanese readers react differently. This is because we have a long tradition of enjoying what’s called “I-novels”—novels that are narrated as if they were the author’s true confessions, while allowing fiction ample play. Japanese writers and readers alike enjoy Escher-like interplay between the real and the fictional. Over the years, through variations on similar storylines and characters, readers begin to feel that they know the author, both her real life and her realm of imagination, and become attached to her."
Reviews:
I learned a helluva lot from the first review (but also from the next 2 too):
• https://chireviewofbooks.com/2021/03/...
• https://asianreviewofbooks.com/conten...
�� https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
Wonderful interview of the author: https://lithub.com/minae-mizumura-on-...
This “semi-autobiographical work takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. The month is December 13, 20 years to the day that two sisters, Minae and Nanae, arrive in America from Japan with their mother and father (actually father is already there waiting for them). And they live in the US from there on in with occasional trips back to Japan. Nanae is 34 years old and lives in a loft in Manhattan and is a sculptor, but is not well-known for that. Minae is two years younger, 32, and is a graduate student in the French department at an unnamed university (I am guessing it is Yale, because that is where Mizumura got her advanced degree from). Minae has to work up the courage to tell Nanae that she wants to move back to Japan to write a novel in the Japanese language. That is the plot of the book.
I didn’t give anything away that is not already something you can read on the back cover of the book. 😊
Although there are just two characters that interact on this one day in December, during the course of several phone calls to each other they bring up other people in their lives, mainly their mother and former boyfriends and girlfriends, and all sorts of people that have been a part of their lives. And we learn why Minae has come to her decision and why she wants to write a novel, not in the English language, but in her native tongue.
I whizzed through the first ~170 pages of the 327-pager in one sitting…something I had not planned on (I had things to do and places to go…). but it grabbed my attention. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised because I was captivated by another book of hers, A True Novel (2013) which was close to 900 pages (I shy away from such tomes usually). ‘An I-Novel’ bogged down somewhat disappointingly to me at that point. I should say it bogged down for me. Perhaps not to others. I think if I was more attuned to Japanese culture and world history, I would have appreciated a lot of what went on in the last ~160 pages more. For some part of the last half of the book, Minae and Nanae were both relating episodes in their lives in the US in which they were seen by white people as “Asian” and whether that was Japan or China or Korea it made no difference to the whites.
One point I want to make is that this is not a memoir in the classic sense. Mizumura is not telling us all the major events in her life that shaped her or influenced her. It is what happened on that particular December day in the 1980s (not too much…. she spent all day in her apartment) and what thoughts went through her head on that day. She says in one sentence she was nearly raped once in her life….and never says anything about that again. That’s because I guess that event flitted through her head on that particular day only in passing.
This book was translated nearly a quarter of a century after it was published in Japan as ‘Shishosetsu from left to right’.
Another thing I wanted to point out about this book is its formatting— interesting. Some words throughout the text are in bold, and this is related to the way Juliet Winters Carpenter translated this I-novel.
• Award-winning translator and academic Juliet Winters Carpenter, who has previously translated Mizumura’s work, came up with a creative way of handling the challenges of An I-Novel by using different typefaces. English words that appear in the Japanese text are rendered in a bold typeface in this version so readers can get a sense of the dislocation that Japanese readers might experience in attending to the Japanese text that has so much English (and some French) thrown in untranslated (from first review below).
Also, there are black-and-white photographs interspersed throughout the book. I liked that. I liked the book cover — it was a Japanese woodblock print circa 1880s.
While I am quoting other people this is also very interesting. It turns out that Minae and Nanae are in another book of Mizumura’s — Inheritance from Mother (2017). In an interview of the author, she says that the I-Novel is close to what happened in real life with the two sisters and “Inheritance from Mother” is what the author imagines could have happened to the two women had they never left Japan.
• She says in the interview: "American readers might be bewildered to see similar stories in novels with similar characters— “Couldn’t the author have used a little more imagination?”—but Japanese readers react differently. This is because we have a long tradition of enjoying what’s called “I-novels”—novels that are narrated as if they were the author’s true confessions, while allowing fiction ample play. Japanese writers and readers alike enjoy Escher-like interplay between the real and the fictional. Over the years, through variations on similar storylines and characters, readers begin to feel that they know the author, both her real life and her realm of imagination, and become attached to her."
Reviews:
I learned a helluva lot from the first review (but also from the next 2 too):
• https://chireviewofbooks.com/2021/03/...
• https://asianreviewofbooks.com/conten...
�� https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
Wonderful interview of the author: https://lithub.com/minae-mizumura-on-...
March 9, 2021
This is a very quiet contemplative meditation on the author's 20 years in USA and her yearning to go back to Japan and becoming a writer in her native language there. An I-Novel apparently is a popular genre of Japanese autofiction (Shishōsetsu).
The majority of the book is her conversation with a diametrically opposite sister Nanae interlinked with flashbacks. I think Nanae is the most complex and interesting character in the whole book. She is very codependent on her indifferent mother at the same time trying to rebel and be the most americanised of the family. Her love life is a mess. But at the same time she tries to blend in and she loves her sister dearly.
All in all, a very nice novel. Though I wished for a more substantial character exploration of the narrator.
The majority of the book is her conversation with a diametrically opposite sister Nanae interlinked with flashbacks. I think Nanae is the most complex and interesting character in the whole book. She is very codependent on her indifferent mother at the same time trying to rebel and be the most americanised of the family. Her love life is a mess. But at the same time she tries to blend in and she loves her sister dearly.
All in all, a very nice novel. Though I wished for a more substantial character exploration of the narrator.
February 10, 2025
L'he gaudit immensament.
Tota la novel·la passa en el transcurs d'un sol dia, durant la primera nevada de l'hivern, en un poble universitari de la costa est dels Estats Units. Però al llarg d'aquest dia entrem en la ment i en la vida de Minae, la narradora. Coneixem la història de com es va traslladar del Japó a Estats Units quan tenia 11 anys, va desgranant les complexitats de la seva família (la mare que els ha abandonat ja de gran, el pare amb demència, la germana gran que depèn molt d'ella) i, sobretot, reflexiona sobre ser japonesa als Estats Units i l'obsessió que acaba tenint amb el japonès confrontat amb l'anglès.
És una novel·la bilingüe en la seva forma original. La major part del text està en japonès, però hi ha fragments, sobretot parts de diàlegs, que els va escriure directament en anglès.
És una novel·la que, per tant, es qüestiona els rols de poder entre idiomes i l'hegemonia de l'anglès.
He de dir que també hi he connectat moltíssim per les descripcions que fa dels Estats Units des de la perspectiva d'algú que hi va de petita.
I passa tot durant una tempesta de neu. I en descriu el silenci mut. Meravellós.
Tota la novel·la passa en el transcurs d'un sol dia, durant la primera nevada de l'hivern, en un poble universitari de la costa est dels Estats Units. Però al llarg d'aquest dia entrem en la ment i en la vida de Minae, la narradora. Coneixem la història de com es va traslladar del Japó a Estats Units quan tenia 11 anys, va desgranant les complexitats de la seva família (la mare que els ha abandonat ja de gran, el pare amb demència, la germana gran que depèn molt d'ella) i, sobretot, reflexiona sobre ser japonesa als Estats Units i l'obsessió que acaba tenint amb el japonès confrontat amb l'anglès.
És una novel·la bilingüe en la seva forma original. La major part del text està en japonès, però hi ha fragments, sobretot parts de diàlegs, que els va escriure directament en anglès.
És una novel·la que, per tant, es qüestiona els rols de poder entre idiomes i l'hegemonia de l'anglès.
He de dir que també hi he connectat moltíssim per les descripcions que fa dels Estats Units des de la perspectiva d'algú que hi va de petita.
I passa tot durant una tempesta de neu. I en descriu el silenci mut. Meravellós.
December 23, 2020
At first, it seems as if the book is about nothing in particular.
It's snowing, and Minae looks out the window. There's nobody outside in such weather, not even the prostitutes hanging around the street, nor anyone at the „Afro-American Student Center” across the street, or at the „University Cabaret” next to it.
And as she looks out the window, she ponders on the violent nature of American streets, on what her life in Japan would be like, had she moved back, on whether a prostitute she used to know is alive and well.
Her older sister, Nanae, calls to tell her it's the 2o-year anniversary of their arrival in the US when they were 9 and 11 and their parents moved for job-related reasons.
In stream-of-consciousness style, one thing and then another spark memories, and we come to know about her life in a zigzag fashion going from present to distant past to somewhere in between in no particular order, with no great overarching story arc, but as engrossing and fascinating as a mystery nonetheless - perhaps because the people themselves and their lives were mysteries.
As the book goes on, it felt to me as if it moves away from snapshots of past and present and towards a more emotional and philosophical stance (though this may merely be an impression, and not true).
The story itself is a semi-autobiography based on Minae Mizumura's own life, though I haven't quite managed to figure out what is fiction and what is truth - perhaps that's intentional.
In very simplistic terms, it's the story of an immigrant to America, a girl taken away from her home country when she was old enough to have lived a great part of her childhood in Japan, but nowhere near old enough to make the choice to move for herself. It's a tale of the nostalgia and desire for the home country, of trying to integrate into the new one, never quite belonging. It's a story of being angry with language, and of discovering that those around her don't see her and will never see her as one of their own.
I found the historical details fascinating; the details of what the family brought along from Japan, of what they ate, of what they found in the US, but most of all, their feelings towards it all, and their perceptions. The inability of the mother to quite understand the concept of a blind date, Minae's tendency to sink into an out-of-date, book-inspired Japan that never quite existed, her sister Nanae's surface-deep imitation of American girls, tanning her skin and bleaching her hair.
It's also a story of language. Minae Mizumura scattered her book with English phrases and sentences. When she talks to her sister, when she speaks of things she associates with America, she turns to English. This is so deeply, deeply familiar. While I myself am not a migrant, I pepper my Romanian with English with my friends - I am bilingual, and most of my reading is in English. I've been this way since school, and switching is as natural as breathing.
How odd that a Japanese woman writing in the '90s seems to describe cultural conundrums that I feel deeply as a Romanian woman in 2020, that she speaks of Japanese people of her parents' generation despising their own culture and turning towards the West, while my generation does the same. That she's aware Japanese is an insular and local language and that writing a book in English would gain a worldwide audience (but she decides to write in Japanese), because English is now universal. That there's a constant back and forth: over there or home? Is home even home? To stay or to go? What would be better?
Juliet Winters Carpenter does a brilliant job with the translation (I assume; my Japanese is really nothing to write home about) and has come up with a good way to show that the novel is bilingual, even if the second language is English - words in English in the original have a different typography (my copy shows them as bolded), giving a good sense of when the register is changed. I wonder what it would have been like to read "An I-Novel" in my native Romanian, with the English left as English, but, alas, it hasn't been translated (yet). Would it have felt tacky? Odd? Or even more natural and relatable? I don't know. Maybe one day I'll find out.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
It's snowing, and Minae looks out the window. There's nobody outside in such weather, not even the prostitutes hanging around the street, nor anyone at the „Afro-American Student Center” across the street, or at the „University Cabaret” next to it.
And as she looks out the window, she ponders on the violent nature of American streets, on what her life in Japan would be like, had she moved back, on whether a prostitute she used to know is alive and well.
Her older sister, Nanae, calls to tell her it's the 2o-year anniversary of their arrival in the US when they were 9 and 11 and their parents moved for job-related reasons.
In stream-of-consciousness style, one thing and then another spark memories, and we come to know about her life in a zigzag fashion going from present to distant past to somewhere in between in no particular order, with no great overarching story arc, but as engrossing and fascinating as a mystery nonetheless - perhaps because the people themselves and their lives were mysteries.
As the book goes on, it felt to me as if it moves away from snapshots of past and present and towards a more emotional and philosophical stance (though this may merely be an impression, and not true).
The story itself is a semi-autobiography based on Minae Mizumura's own life, though I haven't quite managed to figure out what is fiction and what is truth - perhaps that's intentional.
In very simplistic terms, it's the story of an immigrant to America, a girl taken away from her home country when she was old enough to have lived a great part of her childhood in Japan, but nowhere near old enough to make the choice to move for herself. It's a tale of the nostalgia and desire for the home country, of trying to integrate into the new one, never quite belonging. It's a story of being angry with language, and of discovering that those around her don't see her and will never see her as one of their own.
I found the historical details fascinating; the details of what the family brought along from Japan, of what they ate, of what they found in the US, but most of all, their feelings towards it all, and their perceptions. The inability of the mother to quite understand the concept of a blind date, Minae's tendency to sink into an out-of-date, book-inspired Japan that never quite existed, her sister Nanae's surface-deep imitation of American girls, tanning her skin and bleaching her hair.
It's also a story of language. Minae Mizumura scattered her book with English phrases and sentences. When she talks to her sister, when she speaks of things she associates with America, she turns to English. This is so deeply, deeply familiar. While I myself am not a migrant, I pepper my Romanian with English with my friends - I am bilingual, and most of my reading is in English. I've been this way since school, and switching is as natural as breathing.
How odd that a Japanese woman writing in the '90s seems to describe cultural conundrums that I feel deeply as a Romanian woman in 2020, that she speaks of Japanese people of her parents' generation despising their own culture and turning towards the West, while my generation does the same. That she's aware Japanese is an insular and local language and that writing a book in English would gain a worldwide audience (but she decides to write in Japanese), because English is now universal. That there's a constant back and forth: over there or home? Is home even home? To stay or to go? What would be better?
Juliet Winters Carpenter does a brilliant job with the translation (I assume; my Japanese is really nothing to write home about) and has come up with a good way to show that the novel is bilingual, even if the second language is English - words in English in the original have a different typography (my copy shows them as bolded), giving a good sense of when the register is changed. I wonder what it would have been like to read "An I-Novel" in my native Romanian, with the English left as English, but, alas, it hasn't been translated (yet). Would it have felt tacky? Odd? Or even more natural and relatable? I don't know. Maybe one day I'll find out.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
December 21, 2020
'And then I knew, in a way I'd never known before, that the act of writing was itself bliss.'
We've had to wait 25 years for an English translation of this ground-breaking Japanese work from Minae Mizumura, and Juliet Winters Carpenter has bravely taken on a task that Mizumura herself once stated was impossible: to replicate the Japanese/English bilingual nature of the original work in an English translation. Indeed, it's almost impossible to imagine the contrast between us as Western readers coming to this translation, and the reaction of Japanese readers coming across the layout and structure of the original. Nothing could ever replicate that, and so we have to work with what we have the endeavour behind it.
What we do get is a beautifully layered meditation on family, language, identity (both personal and national) and, through it all, on writing and what all of these other themes bring to a writer's work. In this thinly veiled auto-fiction (the i-novel) Mizumura is forced to face huge questions as she remains in her flat over the course of one day. The snow is falling outside, and her day is punctuated by lengthy phone calls with her sister (also living in the US) and a letter from her mother. A graduate student, Mizumura has already decided to return to her native Japan and start writing in Japanese, but has yet to take the plunge and tell her sister. Conversations lead to extended musings on memories of school, childhood, failed relationships and the odd family that they have.
This is a quiet novel, but the questions it raises are important and resonant. There are echoes of Proust, Woolf, Joyce, as well as some of the treasured Japanese authors that Mizumura herself has found during her lifetime of reading. It is a song to the art of writing, and to the beauty of words. In this, I feel that the translation does indeed do justice to the original, with beautifully rendered passages which reflect the nuances of the feelings and emotions at the heart of the book.
So all in all, this is a must-read for fans of Japanese literature, but also really for anyone who likes to linger over a book that will make them reflect on their own lives.
There is the issue of the bilingual nature of the original book to address. The translation gets around this by using different type faces for the Japanese and English original text. Which is fine, and indeed it does justice to what Carpenter calls, in her introduction, 'Mizumura's concern with the visual aspect of written language'. But it is, of course, by its very nature not a bilingual book in translation into English. Also, in e-book form (in which I read this as an advance copy) the whole feel of it was clunky, with some passages being lost simply because of the issue of differing fonts. This is, if ever there was one, a book that you simply have to read in its physical paper form. I'm sorry to sound like a Luddite, but there you go. E-book, no! Bad!
Might well have been 5 stars but for the e-book issue, so a very solid 4.5 instead.
We've had to wait 25 years for an English translation of this ground-breaking Japanese work from Minae Mizumura, and Juliet Winters Carpenter has bravely taken on a task that Mizumura herself once stated was impossible: to replicate the Japanese/English bilingual nature of the original work in an English translation. Indeed, it's almost impossible to imagine the contrast between us as Western readers coming to this translation, and the reaction of Japanese readers coming across the layout and structure of the original. Nothing could ever replicate that, and so we have to work with what we have the endeavour behind it.
What we do get is a beautifully layered meditation on family, language, identity (both personal and national) and, through it all, on writing and what all of these other themes bring to a writer's work. In this thinly veiled auto-fiction (the i-novel) Mizumura is forced to face huge questions as she remains in her flat over the course of one day. The snow is falling outside, and her day is punctuated by lengthy phone calls with her sister (also living in the US) and a letter from her mother. A graduate student, Mizumura has already decided to return to her native Japan and start writing in Japanese, but has yet to take the plunge and tell her sister. Conversations lead to extended musings on memories of school, childhood, failed relationships and the odd family that they have.
This is a quiet novel, but the questions it raises are important and resonant. There are echoes of Proust, Woolf, Joyce, as well as some of the treasured Japanese authors that Mizumura herself has found during her lifetime of reading. It is a song to the art of writing, and to the beauty of words. In this, I feel that the translation does indeed do justice to the original, with beautifully rendered passages which reflect the nuances of the feelings and emotions at the heart of the book.
So all in all, this is a must-read for fans of Japanese literature, but also really for anyone who likes to linger over a book that will make them reflect on their own lives.
There is the issue of the bilingual nature of the original book to address. The translation gets around this by using different type faces for the Japanese and English original text. Which is fine, and indeed it does justice to what Carpenter calls, in her introduction, 'Mizumura's concern with the visual aspect of written language'. But it is, of course, by its very nature not a bilingual book in translation into English. Also, in e-book form (in which I read this as an advance copy) the whole feel of it was clunky, with some passages being lost simply because of the issue of differing fonts. This is, if ever there was one, a book that you simply have to read in its physical paper form. I'm sorry to sound like a Luddite, but there you go. E-book, no! Bad!
Might well have been 5 stars but for the e-book issue, so a very solid 4.5 instead.
September 1, 2021
In lieu of a review, let me add a link to Juliet Winters Carpenter's fascinating blog post about the collaborative process of translating Minae Mizumura's novels: https://www.cupblog.org/2021/08/24/qa...
October 29, 2022
Hacía tiempo que una novela no me rompía los esquemas como esta de Minae Mizumura. Gira alrededor de un día decisivo haciendo balance de 20 años de exilio: las reflexiones de la autora sobre el desarraigo, la lengua propia, las distancias culturales, el racismo multidireccional, la soledad, la creación, los lazos familiares, la idealización de las raíces... son de una honestidad desgarradora. ¿Dónde encajar cuando no te sientes de ninguna parte?
June 18, 2023
I wrote about this novel here: https://readingindie.substack.com/p/e...
April 18, 2022
Written in a mixture of English and Japanese, this book was a sensation when it first came out in Japan. The impact of a novel which uses English within the context of another language to demonstrate the cultural hegemony of English can be translated more easily into any language other than English, but Juliet Winters Carpenter, the translator, has differentiated between passages that were always in English and those that have been translated from Japanese. I don't think I, as someone who only speaks English, can fully appreciate the impact of this book, but nevertheless I found it very compelling. It takes place over one day, the anniversary of Minae, our narrator, and her sister, Nanae's, arrival in the United States twenty years before. Minae and Nanae don't feel that they have ever fully settled down in the US, but they also feel dislocated from their Japanese roots. Minae reads Japanese novels from 80 years ago, and dreams of a Japan of the past, while Nanae jumps from suitor to suitor and can't settle down to anything. During the single day, we witness moments from the past twenty years, which have added together to make the sisters lonely and lost. It's a study of the displacement of life in a city, and the loss of family connections. It's also an exploration of the ways in which English has become ubiquitous and how it feels to move between two languages when one of those languages is so dominant. There are also sections exploring the complexities of racism as experienced by Japanese migrants in the US specifically, and people of colour more generally. It's an expansive novel, seeking to ask many large questions, not just about society, but about writing itself. At times, I found some of the conversations clunky, or the text too meandering, but overall it's an enjoyable, thought-provoking read.
October 11, 2020
I was sold out for this on the first few pages!
As much as I love a book for being fast paced, full of dialogues and drama, I absolutely love it when they are just… therapeutically descriptive.
I learned that an I-Novel is a confessional genre in Japanese literature which Mizumura, very creatively, turns into something semi-autobiographical with a pinch of fiction. I was so excited to read this and for a lot of reasons- mainly because of how it was first published in 1995, promoted and positively perceived in Japan as the nation’s first bilingual novel.
Minae Mizumua had to come to America as a child when her father moved from Japan with her mother and older sister. Now it’s been two decades, being an expatriate graduate, the pull of her motherland and the push of America being a foreign land has always swirled Minae, but is risking to leave it all behind for Japan which has changed radically, a good decision?
I thoroughly enjoyed every word of this book. I wish I could talk about all of the trivial and abysmal details that filled the pages of this beautifully written and equally stunningly translated book.
"Did the literature not arise from the deep desire to do something wondrous with the language? In my case, it was a desire to be born once again.”
If there’s one thing that I could point out was how I deeply connected with her thoughts on the English language which has become something primeval with mother tongues we always put second to it. Being in a country like India, which I firmly believe is obsessed with everything western, English has crept slowly to a ladder where I find people being shamed for not so “fluent English” regularly. In a land of languages, someone getting looked down upon for being who they are instead of adapting to western attributes is just plain sad and pathetic, but well, that’s just India for you.
I love how it subtly hints at the prevalent prejudice and racism, not just against the Asians, but rather against all those essentially “non-white”.
The only thing that left me a bit disgruntled was how it tended to time-jump quite frequently, though I guess for being a story set in a single day in 1980s while she recounts the past and dreams wishful future, it was artistically inevitable.
This has a certain peculiarity of Asian literature, something poetic, lyrical yet raw, melancholic throughout.
Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for this eARC in exchange for an honest review!
As much as I love a book for being fast paced, full of dialogues and drama, I absolutely love it when they are just… therapeutically descriptive.
I learned that an I-Novel is a confessional genre in Japanese literature which Mizumura, very creatively, turns into something semi-autobiographical with a pinch of fiction. I was so excited to read this and for a lot of reasons- mainly because of how it was first published in 1995, promoted and positively perceived in Japan as the nation’s first bilingual novel.
Minae Mizumua had to come to America as a child when her father moved from Japan with her mother and older sister. Now it’s been two decades, being an expatriate graduate, the pull of her motherland and the push of America being a foreign land has always swirled Minae, but is risking to leave it all behind for Japan which has changed radically, a good decision?
I thoroughly enjoyed every word of this book. I wish I could talk about all of the trivial and abysmal details that filled the pages of this beautifully written and equally stunningly translated book.
"Did the literature not arise from the deep desire to do something wondrous with the language? In my case, it was a desire to be born once again.”
If there’s one thing that I could point out was how I deeply connected with her thoughts on the English language which has become something primeval with mother tongues we always put second to it. Being in a country like India, which I firmly believe is obsessed with everything western, English has crept slowly to a ladder where I find people being shamed for not so “fluent English” regularly. In a land of languages, someone getting looked down upon for being who they are instead of adapting to western attributes is just plain sad and pathetic, but well, that’s just India for you.
I love how it subtly hints at the prevalent prejudice and racism, not just against the Asians, but rather against all those essentially “non-white”.
The only thing that left me a bit disgruntled was how it tended to time-jump quite frequently, though I guess for being a story set in a single day in 1980s while she recounts the past and dreams wishful future, it was artistically inevitable.
This has a certain peculiarity of Asian literature, something poetic, lyrical yet raw, melancholic throughout.
Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for this eARC in exchange for an honest review!
January 29, 2025
4.5
A semi-autobiographical novel in which Minae, through conversations with her sister over the phone over the course of a single winter's day, reflects on her life, her fractured identity as a woman uprooted from her home in Japan as a child, and raised in the United States. Minae has been resentful of this fact for most of her life, craving the reality in which she was raised in Japan, constantly chasing the idea and version of herself if this had been the case.
Something that I found really effective in this book was the clash of the sisters' personalities, and the way we only see the sister's perspective through Minae's eyes. As the book progresses, Minae seems to stumble upon these moments where she realizes she has misunderstood her sister's viewpoint, her own assumptions clouding what was Nanae's truth.
This book explores culture and the lack of, or loss of, identity. It explores family, racism, women, and language, all in a very gentle, subdued, meditative way. I was just really taken by the style of this book, the almost meandering way it told a story, and I was captivated, despite it being very simple and quiet.
A semi-autobiographical novel in which Minae, through conversations with her sister over the phone over the course of a single winter's day, reflects on her life, her fractured identity as a woman uprooted from her home in Japan as a child, and raised in the United States. Minae has been resentful of this fact for most of her life, craving the reality in which she was raised in Japan, constantly chasing the idea and version of herself if this had been the case.
Something that I found really effective in this book was the clash of the sisters' personalities, and the way we only see the sister's perspective through Minae's eyes. As the book progresses, Minae seems to stumble upon these moments where she realizes she has misunderstood her sister's viewpoint, her own assumptions clouding what was Nanae's truth.
This book explores culture and the lack of, or loss of, identity. It explores family, racism, women, and language, all in a very gentle, subdued, meditative way. I was just really taken by the style of this book, the almost meandering way it told a story, and I was captivated, despite it being very simple and quiet.
September 23, 2022
Very good novel about home, family, language, loneliness, racism and, if you will, the self? Deceptively simple structure, complicated ideas and psychologies. I think it could also be read as an introduction to Japanese literature and culture, contrasted with Western concepts and aesthetics. As in A True Novel, the photography is puzzling and mesmerizing.
August 31, 2021
"All through my girlhood, I was consumed by thoughts of the homeland I'd left. I longed for it with an intensity that words like "yearning" or "nostalgia" could not convey. I felt I was some place I didn't belong, where I should not be. Japan steadily grew to near-mythic dimensions in my mind, transfigured into a place where life transcended the smallness of the everyday."
In A I-Novel, Mizumura very pointedly pushes against genre boundaries and creating a form turned even more hybrid by her unusual usage of language. Billed as a "bilingual novel", the original work mixes English with Japanese, rendered in their signature characters. It was also printed differently to accommodate an easier reading experience. In Carpenter's spectacular translation, the words originally in English are bold.rendered in a different typeface while the Japanese, barring select lines both Romanized and not, is translated.
Narrating a single day in the present even as it repeatedly jumps into the past without any chapter breaks, the text is interspersed with full-page black-and-white photographs so it further blurs the line between the actual and the fictional. Mizumura expertly explores the inner life of this uprooted writer making a home away from home whilst at the same time yearning for home. An "I-Novel" is itself an established Japanese literary genre, kind of a "confessional literature where the story corresponds to events in the author's life."
It makes for a very visually striking physical object, to say the least. Language also gets implicated through a Japanese protagonist living in the US and pursing a slowed down academic career in French Literature while at the same time wanting to write novels in Japanese even though the writer has really not lived there for an extended time period subsequent to shifting to the US during her teens. Through her scattered family and her familiar recollections, Mizumura hence tries to see what it means to straddle cultures, to struggle to find a singular place to belong.
I was particularly fascinated by the accounts of adjustments and socialization, and how she, her sister and their parents approach life in America in their own unique ways as they try to find a true and authentic mode of living while reconciling two very different worlds and backgrounds.
(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
September 16, 2020
An I-Novel was an intriguing and captivating read. It presented a delightful character study of Minae, and I really felt like I got to know and understand her as she pondered her feelings about leaving Japan, living in America, and her desire to return to her homeland and her native language. This novel was originally written in Japanese, with a bit of English thrown in here and there throughout. That is difficult to replicate in an English translation. What the translator has done is change font for the sections that would have stood out in English in the original. This works as a marker, and it's interesting to see when they occur; however, I don't think you could ever exactly capture the feel of the original work in an English translation. I am currently learning Japanese, so I liked the occasional kanji or phrase that were included, some of which I was pleased to see I could understand. As someone who has moved country (albeit not to somewhere with a different language), I found it easy to relate to Minae and her experiences and feelings, and overall An I-Novel was a thoughtful and interesting read that I really enjoyed. I am giving it 4.5 stars. The only reason it doesn't get five is because I think that, stylistically at least, something gets lost from this work in the English translation.
I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
March 20, 2021
I really enjoyed this quiet, meditative and insightful semi-autobiographical novel, an I-Novel as it is termed in Japan, a fictional account of the author’s American life and her longing for her native Japan. The book is set during a single day in the 1980s, exactly 20 years since her arrival in the United States. Her life there in academia has been successful but her desire now is to return to Japan and become a novelist – in Japanese, a language she has clung to throughout her stay. Through Minae’s reflections, thoughts and conversations with her sister Nanae we learn about their daily lives, their aspirations, their observations about American and Americans. It’s a personal and intimate account which I soon became drawn into. The experience of immigration, assimilation, the problems of acceptance and the preconceptions and assumptions that are frequently made about anyone “Asian” - all this is explored with understanding and insight, if also bewilderment at times. Like when Nanae has a blind-date arranged for her with a Korean man, as her American friends simply see them both as Asian, rather than understanding the enmity between Japan and Korea. So many little details like this make this such an interesting and illuminating account of a Japanese woman’s experience in America, and the pull of her homeland.
April 8, 2021
Have you ever picked up a book, not realizing it was exactly the book you wanted to read?
I did not know I was looking for a book like 𝒜𝓃 𝐼-𝒩𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁 by Minae Mizumura (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter) until I found this book and started reading it. Out next month, this is a bilingual book, written in Japanese and English. To preserve the interplay between the two languages, English phrases and words are printed in a different typography than the translated Japanese text.
𝒜𝓃 𝐼-𝒩𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁 is a semi-biographical work, telling the story of two sisters Nanae and Minae who moved to the USA as kids. Now in their thirties, Minae longs for the Japanese homeland and reflects on her experiences as an immigrant. Minae articulated thoughts about immigration, identity, race, language and more that I had on my mind but had not had time to reflect upon. Though I moved to Canada in my early 20s, I related to a lot of the experience that Minae shared.
I look forward to reviewing my notes and articulating a longer blog post about this amazing book for the 18th.
Many thanks to the publisher, Columbia University Press, for providing me a complimentary copy of the book for an honest review. I find that some of the most thought provoking works come from this publisher.
I did not know I was looking for a book like 𝒜𝓃 𝐼-𝒩𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁 by Minae Mizumura (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter) until I found this book and started reading it. Out next month, this is a bilingual book, written in Japanese and English. To preserve the interplay between the two languages, English phrases and words are printed in a different typography than the translated Japanese text.
𝒜𝓃 𝐼-𝒩𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁 is a semi-biographical work, telling the story of two sisters Nanae and Minae who moved to the USA as kids. Now in their thirties, Minae longs for the Japanese homeland and reflects on her experiences as an immigrant. Minae articulated thoughts about immigration, identity, race, language and more that I had on my mind but had not had time to reflect upon. Though I moved to Canada in my early 20s, I related to a lot of the experience that Minae shared.
I look forward to reviewing my notes and articulating a longer blog post about this amazing book for the 18th.
Many thanks to the publisher, Columbia University Press, for providing me a complimentary copy of the book for an honest review. I find that some of the most thought provoking works come from this publisher.
May 2, 2021
after just a few pages i knew i had to read all of her other books too
October 27, 2020
As the name suggests, An I-Novel is a semi-autobiographical novel told in the confessional manner that characterizes the Japanese literature genre of the same name. Given the author and protagonist Minae’s fascination with the Meiji period of Japan’s history, it is only fitting that the book’s title would harken back to that era.
Reminiscent of Haruki Murakami’s own allegedly semi-autobiographical novel Norwegian Wood, author Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel takes a similarly sweeping look at Minae’s childhood and early adulthood. Central to the narrative is Minae’s relationship with her sister Nanae. Though Nanae is older than Minae, the two have a relationship that is more like that of twins, with Minae assuming a nurturing role in relation to her bumbling, unpredictable sister. Though their relationship, like any sibling relationship, is composed of both affection and irritation, it is that bond that sustains each of them through the isolation of being an immigrant in America.
"Oh the loneliness."
An I-Novel is an exploration of that isolation. It is a reckoning with what it means to assimilate with a new culture—what is given up and what is gained. But as Minae eloquently observes, the isolation seems to transcend the immigrant experience and may be indicative of something deeper and darker within American culture. “Something in American society caused many to live in isolation,” she says. “Broken people, like broken buildings, were simply part of the American landscape.”
Minae’s family relocated from Tokyo to New York when she was in middle school. Though by many standards, she was young at the time of her migration, she was obstinate in her resolute rejection of English, and by association, American culture. She recognizes, in the novel’s present, that America, the prophetic “Land of Opportunity,” indeed presented her with every privilege and opportunity she could have desired. But in her struggle to hold onto her cultural heritage, she found herself blind to those opportunities until it was too late. After years of ignoring her teachers’ encouragement that she improve her English, it is only in her early thirties that she finally recognizes that value that English has not only in America but also internationally. As an aspiring novelist, she is faced with the realization that she does not have the language acquisition to write the complexities of her ideas in English—if she were to write in Japanese, would Japanese audiences resonate with her work?
In the novel's present, Minae is a French Literature graduate student at a recognized East Coast university, procrastinating her final oral exams, which are symbolic of her last logical hold in the US. As she considers what it would mean to leave her sister in New York while returning to Japan, she struggles with her own identity as someone who no longer feels truly Japanese but who also feels she has no space in America. She is a pivotal moment in her life, preparing to abandon the reluctant comfort she has developed during twenty years in the United States, to leave behind her sister, to dive into the uncertainty of a career as a novelist, and to return to a country that is simultaneously her longed for home and an unrecognizable landscape.
As an echo of Minae’s own language struggles, the translated format of the novel does take an adjustment period. As Juliet Winters Carpenter artfully discusses in the introduction to her translation, the original novel peppers in phrases in English that are recognizable to international audiences across a variety of languages, and thus, do not require translations and instead provide a fun, emphasized visual break in the novel’s text . However, a dilemma is reached when trying to translate the novel—how do you distinguish the text that was originally English from what has been translated? Winters Carpenter’s solution is using different font types. The differences in fonts are slight, and therefore take a moment to recognize, but they do accomplish the goal of signalling to the reader the intricacies of the original text. Minae’s fascination in the Japanese language similarly warrants the use of kanji, hiragana, and katakana to show the diversity and beauty of Japan’s written language.
Overall, An I-Novel was an enjoyable read that provided insight into the author's identity as a Japanese immigrant in the United States, but it failed to inspire a sense of originality or earnestness. Where I found the greatest sense of joy was in Minae’s descriptions of the translated word, which created an ethereal sense that the book was self-aware: “Could commonplace emotions and unoriginal expressions—the manifestation of a banal literary sensibility—transform into something more remarkable when rendered in a different language?”
As I have only read the English version, I cannot speak to the transformation of the book from one language to the next. I am, however, grateful that Minae Mizumura’s words, which she seemingly regretted not being able to communicate into English, have all the same found their way to English-speaking audiences.
Thank you to Columbia University Press and Above the Treeline for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Reminiscent of Haruki Murakami’s own allegedly semi-autobiographical novel Norwegian Wood, author Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel takes a similarly sweeping look at Minae’s childhood and early adulthood. Central to the narrative is Minae’s relationship with her sister Nanae. Though Nanae is older than Minae, the two have a relationship that is more like that of twins, with Minae assuming a nurturing role in relation to her bumbling, unpredictable sister. Though their relationship, like any sibling relationship, is composed of both affection and irritation, it is that bond that sustains each of them through the isolation of being an immigrant in America.
"Oh the loneliness."
An I-Novel is an exploration of that isolation. It is a reckoning with what it means to assimilate with a new culture—what is given up and what is gained. But as Minae eloquently observes, the isolation seems to transcend the immigrant experience and may be indicative of something deeper and darker within American culture. “Something in American society caused many to live in isolation,” she says. “Broken people, like broken buildings, were simply part of the American landscape.”
Minae’s family relocated from Tokyo to New York when she was in middle school. Though by many standards, she was young at the time of her migration, she was obstinate in her resolute rejection of English, and by association, American culture. She recognizes, in the novel’s present, that America, the prophetic “Land of Opportunity,” indeed presented her with every privilege and opportunity she could have desired. But in her struggle to hold onto her cultural heritage, she found herself blind to those opportunities until it was too late. After years of ignoring her teachers’ encouragement that she improve her English, it is only in her early thirties that she finally recognizes that value that English has not only in America but also internationally. As an aspiring novelist, she is faced with the realization that she does not have the language acquisition to write the complexities of her ideas in English—if she were to write in Japanese, would Japanese audiences resonate with her work?
In the novel's present, Minae is a French Literature graduate student at a recognized East Coast university, procrastinating her final oral exams, which are symbolic of her last logical hold in the US. As she considers what it would mean to leave her sister in New York while returning to Japan, she struggles with her own identity as someone who no longer feels truly Japanese but who also feels she has no space in America. She is a pivotal moment in her life, preparing to abandon the reluctant comfort she has developed during twenty years in the United States, to leave behind her sister, to dive into the uncertainty of a career as a novelist, and to return to a country that is simultaneously her longed for home and an unrecognizable landscape.
As an echo of Minae’s own language struggles, the translated format of the novel does take an adjustment period. As Juliet Winters Carpenter artfully discusses in the introduction to her translation, the original novel peppers in phrases in English that are recognizable to international audiences across a variety of languages, and thus, do not require translations and instead provide a fun, emphasized visual break in the novel’s text . However, a dilemma is reached when trying to translate the novel—how do you distinguish the text that was originally English from what has been translated? Winters Carpenter’s solution is using different font types. The differences in fonts are slight, and therefore take a moment to recognize, but they do accomplish the goal of signalling to the reader the intricacies of the original text. Minae’s fascination in the Japanese language similarly warrants the use of kanji, hiragana, and katakana to show the diversity and beauty of Japan’s written language.
Overall, An I-Novel was an enjoyable read that provided insight into the author's identity as a Japanese immigrant in the United States, but it failed to inspire a sense of originality or earnestness. Where I found the greatest sense of joy was in Minae’s descriptions of the translated word, which created an ethereal sense that the book was self-aware: “Could commonplace emotions and unoriginal expressions—the manifestation of a banal literary sensibility—transform into something more remarkable when rendered in a different language?”
As I have only read the English version, I cannot speak to the transformation of the book from one language to the next. I am, however, grateful that Minae Mizumura’s words, which she seemingly regretted not being able to communicate into English, have all the same found their way to English-speaking audiences.
Thank you to Columbia University Press and Above the Treeline for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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December 30, 2021Review originally on Curious Reader!
Minae Mizumura’s most recent book to appear in an English translation, An I-Novel, captures a single day in 1980s America from the perspective of a Japanese immigrant. Twenty years have passed since her family moved from Japan to the US, and when the book opens she has come to the decision that she will return to Japan. The book is built up of conversations between Minae (the protagonist) and her sister Nanae, the passing of her day, and flashbacks of the last twenty odd years in the country she plans to leave behind. An I-Novel is a slow, contemplative book about racial/national identities, family responsibility, and language. The latter is what made this such a delightful book to me – much like Mizumura’s nonfiction release (The Fall of Language in the Age of English) it tackles a tense bond between English and Japanese in particular. This happens within the contents of the novel, but equally in its form – as the book originally was written in both languages, a ‘bilingual’ book. To convey this attribute for an English reader, the translator and author made the decision to use different fonts to distinguish linguistic shifts (bold font for English). While I personally didn’t find this very effective, making it a rather jarring experience as I tried to remember this meaning with every bolded word, I appreciate the effort and would love to read this book in my native tongue one day to experience this duality fully, should that ever come to be true. As it is, it still makes for an interesting idea – especially because of the author’s rather strong opinions regarding Japanese writers using Japanese in their craft (see the nonfiction work mentioned before).
Language is thematically explored through its protagonist too, in the choices that shape her life in this Western context. The two sisters respond to the move from Japan in different ways – while the elder Nanae embraces American culture and the English language with little fuss, Minae tries to stay close to her (linguistic) roots. It seems almost to work as a defense mechanism; on the one hand a way to distance herself from this new place, on the other to keep her bond to the motherland strong and ensure a place for her to return to. To keep a steady grasp on Japan, she reads books and thinks in Japanese too, her romantic entanglements are always with Japanese men and she seems to almost exclusively speak in Japanese when given the choice. Her relationships in the new country are fleeting and superficial, easy to cut and give up – the only thing that ultimately binds her to America is her sister whose feet are firmly planted on the continent. The decision to move back to Japan coincides with her finishing up phD studies and no longer having an excuse to put it off. Furthermore, she plans to write a book – in Japanese. This particular point comes up in conversations with her sister and another acquaintance, as significant in itself – because both conversing partners question her ability to do so. While she has held onto Japanese in favor of English (this resulting in further distance from her peers, shortcomings in the new language, a clear sign of her otherness) she has also not had the chance to develop her Japanese beyond a theoretical/text level. She finds herself in the typical situation of the bilingual individual – to falter in both tongues. I love how Minae Mizumura explores what the decision to keep hold of her mothertongue actually means to her in a strange land and what she would’ve given up had she taken her sister’s route, what she had in fact given up to do as she did. Clearly language plays a large role in the protagonist’s life but it is also explored in the actual writing of the book – with passages ruminating on language differences, cultural significances of words, phrases, and even names. I’ll leave you with a passage that reflects the core conflict of identity the protagonist in An I-Novel is facing.
Minae Mizumura’s most recent book to appear in an English translation, An I-Novel, captures a single day in 1980s America from the perspective of a Japanese immigrant. Twenty years have passed since her family moved from Japan to the US, and when the book opens she has come to the decision that she will return to Japan. The book is built up of conversations between Minae (the protagonist) and her sister Nanae, the passing of her day, and flashbacks of the last twenty odd years in the country she plans to leave behind. An I-Novel is a slow, contemplative book about racial/national identities, family responsibility, and language. The latter is what made this such a delightful book to me – much like Mizumura’s nonfiction release (The Fall of Language in the Age of English) it tackles a tense bond between English and Japanese in particular. This happens within the contents of the novel, but equally in its form – as the book originally was written in both languages, a ‘bilingual’ book. To convey this attribute for an English reader, the translator and author made the decision to use different fonts to distinguish linguistic shifts (bold font for English). While I personally didn’t find this very effective, making it a rather jarring experience as I tried to remember this meaning with every bolded word, I appreciate the effort and would love to read this book in my native tongue one day to experience this duality fully, should that ever come to be true. As it is, it still makes for an interesting idea – especially because of the author’s rather strong opinions regarding Japanese writers using Japanese in their craft (see the nonfiction work mentioned before).
Language is thematically explored through its protagonist too, in the choices that shape her life in this Western context. The two sisters respond to the move from Japan in different ways – while the elder Nanae embraces American culture and the English language with little fuss, Minae tries to stay close to her (linguistic) roots. It seems almost to work as a defense mechanism; on the one hand a way to distance herself from this new place, on the other to keep her bond to the motherland strong and ensure a place for her to return to. To keep a steady grasp on Japan, she reads books and thinks in Japanese too, her romantic entanglements are always with Japanese men and she seems to almost exclusively speak in Japanese when given the choice. Her relationships in the new country are fleeting and superficial, easy to cut and give up – the only thing that ultimately binds her to America is her sister whose feet are firmly planted on the continent. The decision to move back to Japan coincides with her finishing up phD studies and no longer having an excuse to put it off. Furthermore, she plans to write a book – in Japanese. This particular point comes up in conversations with her sister and another acquaintance, as significant in itself – because both conversing partners question her ability to do so. While she has held onto Japanese in favor of English (this resulting in further distance from her peers, shortcomings in the new language, a clear sign of her otherness) she has also not had the chance to develop her Japanese beyond a theoretical/text level. She finds herself in the typical situation of the bilingual individual – to falter in both tongues. I love how Minae Mizumura explores what the decision to keep hold of her mothertongue actually means to her in a strange land and what she would’ve given up had she taken her sister’s route, what she had in fact given up to do as she did. Clearly language plays a large role in the protagonist’s life but it is also explored in the actual writing of the book – with passages ruminating on language differences, cultural significances of words, phrases, and even names. I’ll leave you with a passage that reflects the core conflict of identity the protagonist in An I-Novel is facing.
In time, life in America grew less strange, and little by little my fog lifted. The novelty of all things American wore off, and once I stopped being a newcomer, people no longer found me an object of curiosity. It was around then that I began to be aware of a gulf in my life, a gulf that I have continued to feel in some measure ever since. [..] It was something more like a gulf between myself and my American self, or between my Japanese self and my American self -or, to be still more precise, between my Japanese-language self and my English-language self. My Japanese self did not disappear just because I had come to America; it would continue as long as I spoke and read Japanese. And I was convinced that my Japanese-language self was my real self and I could only be true to it by one day going back to Japan; my English-language self felt utterly beneath me, alien. At some point, I no longer recognized myself.
April 30, 2021
An I-Novel is based on the author’s experiences moving from Japan to the United States with her family as a girl and deals with her/her semi-fictional persona’s desire 20 years later to finally go back to Japan and become a Japanese author after years of shunning American culture and the English language.
In the original Japanese, Mizumura mixes English throughout with a lot of code-switching to mimic the expatriate characters’ natural mix of the two languages as well as the different personalities of Minae and her sister—one using more English, the other preferring to use more Japanese. In the original, the Japanese is also printed horizontally instead of vertically to avoid making the reader crane their necks back and forth to read the two languages.
This is a book I’ve been interested in for a few years but was unsure if or how it would get translated into English, especially after reading about Mizumura’s thoughts in her nonfiction work The Fall of Language in the Age of English:
“Any writer writing in a language other than English can reasonably expect her readers to understand some, if not most, of the English words she might happen to throw in. It would therefore be possible to replicate the bilingual form of [An I-Novel] in any language in the world—be it Korean, Bengali, or French—by translating the Japanese and leaving the English parts as they are. The only language in which this wouldn’t work would be English… Indeed, the very impossibility of maintaining the bilingual form while translating the work into English, and the singularity of that impossibility, are clear testimony to the linguistic asymmetry we now face in this world.”
So in order to actually translate this book into English, the translator Juliet Winters Carpenter, who has translated Mizumura’s other books into English as well, came up with the solution (in consultation with Mizumura) to use a different typeface for the English words and sentences as well as inserting Japanese writing for certain Japanese expressions difficult to convey in English.
An I-Novel is my fourth book by Mizumura, one of my favorite authors. It's a slow, quiet novel, quite simple on the surface, the story only taking place over one day. The pages are full of Mizumura's meditations on family, language, loneliness, identity, and art in her matter-of-fact yet emotional and lyrical style. The more I read her work, the more I appreciate her and the ways she both embraces and challenges Japanese and Western literary traditions.
"All through my girlhood, I was consumed by thoughts of the homeland I’d left. I longed for it with an intensity that words like “yearning” or “nostalgia” could not convey. I felt it was someplace I didn’t belong, where I should not be. Japan steadily grew to near-mythic dimensions in my mind, transfigured into a place where life transcended the smallness of the everyday. Since these were the years that shaped me. I was never again to be free—not even when I finally did return for a visit."
"It was a desire to be born once again into my language so as to appreciate and explore it anew. As I spent ungodly amounts of time assembling futile strings of words in languages that remained foreign to me, this desire had grown inexorably, year by year, until my craving to write in Japanese now seemed intense enough to move mountains."
In the original Japanese, Mizumura mixes English throughout with a lot of code-switching to mimic the expatriate characters’ natural mix of the two languages as well as the different personalities of Minae and her sister—one using more English, the other preferring to use more Japanese. In the original, the Japanese is also printed horizontally instead of vertically to avoid making the reader crane their necks back and forth to read the two languages.
This is a book I’ve been interested in for a few years but was unsure if or how it would get translated into English, especially after reading about Mizumura’s thoughts in her nonfiction work The Fall of Language in the Age of English:
“Any writer writing in a language other than English can reasonably expect her readers to understand some, if not most, of the English words she might happen to throw in. It would therefore be possible to replicate the bilingual form of [An I-Novel] in any language in the world—be it Korean, Bengali, or French—by translating the Japanese and leaving the English parts as they are. The only language in which this wouldn’t work would be English… Indeed, the very impossibility of maintaining the bilingual form while translating the work into English, and the singularity of that impossibility, are clear testimony to the linguistic asymmetry we now face in this world.”
So in order to actually translate this book into English, the translator Juliet Winters Carpenter, who has translated Mizumura’s other books into English as well, came up with the solution (in consultation with Mizumura) to use a different typeface for the English words and sentences as well as inserting Japanese writing for certain Japanese expressions difficult to convey in English.
An I-Novel is my fourth book by Mizumura, one of my favorite authors. It's a slow, quiet novel, quite simple on the surface, the story only taking place over one day. The pages are full of Mizumura's meditations on family, language, loneliness, identity, and art in her matter-of-fact yet emotional and lyrical style. The more I read her work, the more I appreciate her and the ways she both embraces and challenges Japanese and Western literary traditions.
"All through my girlhood, I was consumed by thoughts of the homeland I’d left. I longed for it with an intensity that words like “yearning” or “nostalgia” could not convey. I felt it was someplace I didn’t belong, where I should not be. Japan steadily grew to near-mythic dimensions in my mind, transfigured into a place where life transcended the smallness of the everyday. Since these were the years that shaped me. I was never again to be free—not even when I finally did return for a visit."
"It was a desire to be born once again into my language so as to appreciate and explore it anew. As I spent ungodly amounts of time assembling futile strings of words in languages that remained foreign to me, this desire had grown inexorably, year by year, until my craving to write in Japanese now seemed intense enough to move mountains."
February 11, 2021
I received an electronic ARC of this book via NetGalley for review.
This is a lovely translation of a book that, while not entirely to my taste, was absolutely worth reading.
The statement that the novel takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s is both true and false--the "current" timeline of the novel is one snowy day in which the narrator does not leave her apartment, but the events of the novel span the previous 20 years (and a bit more). It's an interesting story, and while somewhat meandering and not particularly plot-driven, it's enjoyable and avoids becoming confusing.
More than anything else, it's a novel about identity and language. The note at the beginning discusses the challenge of translating this particular novel, which apparently in the original is a mixture of Japanese and English that uses a somewhat unusual format to facilitate this stylistic choice. It's really fascinating, and taken together with the translated text of the novel is very thought-provoking on the interplay between English and other languages and what it means for writers who do not write in English.
This is a lovely translation of a book that, while not entirely to my taste, was absolutely worth reading.
The statement that the novel takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s is both true and false--the "current" timeline of the novel is one snowy day in which the narrator does not leave her apartment, but the events of the novel span the previous 20 years (and a bit more). It's an interesting story, and while somewhat meandering and not particularly plot-driven, it's enjoyable and avoids becoming confusing.
More than anything else, it's a novel about identity and language. The note at the beginning discusses the challenge of translating this particular novel, which apparently in the original is a mixture of Japanese and English that uses a somewhat unusual format to facilitate this stylistic choice. It's really fascinating, and taken together with the translated text of the novel is very thought-provoking on the interplay between English and other languages and what it means for writers who do not write in English.
March 2, 2021
A unique contemporary novel taking inspiration from "i-novels" which gained popularity during the Meiji period and were a type of confessional, auto fiction novel, where events in the story correspond and relate to those in the author's life, An I-Novel provides plenty of food for thought on the immigrant experience (specifically Japanese American) and the links between emotional life and language - all shown through one day in the author's life in 1980. I particularly enjoyed the foreword by the translator, which discussed whether this novel was truly "untranslatable" due to the fact that the original was written partly in English and partly in Japanese.
Thank you Netgalley and Columbia University Press for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
Thank you Netgalley and Columbia University Press for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
June 9, 2021
Truly a five star. Of course my immersion in all things Japanese might prejudice my opinion but…
There are many themes but the book is overwhelming in its sadness only if you know the author’s story do you see the future happiness. But as to themes …the dominance of the English language and as an English speaker how we take for granted that we will be understood. In the future will everyone speak English and what will be lost? (The author has a whole book on this subject …might have to read that next) quote..”the vertiginous chasm that separates the Japanese language from English “
2. Loneliness. Especially in the US it is an accepted condition
3. Family responsibilities Enough said (though she described it as “a guilt inducing energy depleting burden” oh my that is such a crushing description.
Graceful hiragana ひらがな
Spartan katakana カタカナ
Dense kanji 漢字
And finally the unanswered question What became of her sister?
There are many themes but the book is overwhelming in its sadness only if you know the author’s story do you see the future happiness. But as to themes …the dominance of the English language and as an English speaker how we take for granted that we will be understood. In the future will everyone speak English and what will be lost? (The author has a whole book on this subject …might have to read that next) quote..”the vertiginous chasm that separates the Japanese language from English “
2. Loneliness. Especially in the US it is an accepted condition
3. Family responsibilities Enough said (though she described it as “a guilt inducing energy depleting burden” oh my that is such a crushing description.
Graceful hiragana ひらがな
Spartan katakana カタカナ
Dense kanji 漢字
And finally the unanswered question What became of her sister?
January 28, 2023
if you like this review, i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com
220107: this is fascinating, sustained, fertile experimental work that covers all manner of thoughts, memories, meditations of the main character (author) within the tradition of the japanese i-novel (semi-autobiographical). liked this more than her postmodern version of Wuthering Heights, which she wrote as a true-novel A True Novel(fiction), as this examines entire cross-cultural interpretations of united states by japanese, japanese by united states. think i will read up on how this work has been accepted in both cultures (well in japan)...
220107: this is fascinating, sustained, fertile experimental work that covers all manner of thoughts, memories, meditations of the main character (author) within the tradition of the japanese i-novel (semi-autobiographical). liked this more than her postmodern version of Wuthering Heights, which she wrote as a true-novel A True Novel(fiction), as this examines entire cross-cultural interpretations of united states by japanese, japanese by united states. think i will read up on how this work has been accepted in both cultures (well in japan)...
March 6, 2021
Read it in Japanese years ago--memory is that it was fascinating!!
April 2, 2022
There were moments in this novel I found irritating and yet by the end I was completely won over. I had lived a day with Minae, shared her dilemmas about language identity and family.
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