Japanese Literature discussion

Starting thread for Polly Barton, translator of Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki, our July 2024 group read. More updates to come.

(Credit Wikipedia for initial profile)

Polly Barton is a writer and translator. She has written two non-fiction books, Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History. She has translated numerous titles of Japanese literature and non-fiction.Her translations have been featured in Granta, Catapult, and The White Review, and in 2019 she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for her non-fiction debut, Fifty Sounds.

Life and career
Barton grew up in west London and studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She traveled to Japan to teach English as part of the JET Program.

Bibliography
Fifty Sounds (2021)
Porn: An Oral History (2023)

As translator:
Spring Garden, Tomoka Shibasaki
There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, Kikuko Tsumura
So We Look to the Sky, Misumi Kubo
Where the Wild Ladies Are, Aoko Matsuda
Friendship for Grown-Ups, Naocola Yamazaki
Mikumari, Misumi Kubo
*Butter, Asako Yuzuki

Awards and honors
Winner of English PEN Translates award 2020, for translating There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job.
Longlisted for the 2022 Ondaatje prize for Fifty Sounds.

Selection of Polly Barton interviews:

For her work on There is No Such Thing as an Easy Job:
https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_an...

Where the Wild Ladies Are:
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog...

And from podularity.com, conversations with translators, in two parts:
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgeho...
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgeho...

In this interview, Polly Barton discusses translation from Japanese:
https://www.picciolettabarca.com/post...

Polly Barton is translating Ichikawa Saou's Hunchback avail 3/2025.

"Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka's physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: she takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“If I were to live again, I’d want to be a highclass prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor. To her surprise—and ours—her new nurse accepts the dare, unleashing a series of events that will forever change Shaka's sense of herself as a woman in the world."

A Hundred Years and a Day: 34 Stories by Tomoka Shibasaki, will be translated by Polly Barton and is coming out April 2025

Polly Barton is the English translator for Hunchback which is the j-lit June 2025 Group read.

An interview with Saou Ichikawa and Polly Barton, author and translator of Hunchback:
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booke...

FWIW, this is my ARB review of her memoir, which sort of doubles as a translation manifesto:

https://asianreviewofbooks.com/fifty-...

Her debut novel What Am I, A Deer? is due out next year. I read an ARC but found it disappointingly uneven. Interestingly it's set in Frankfurt between stints in Japan and London.

Link to my review:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...