Christmas gift guides, New Year’s resolutions … the time for making a list and checking it twice is upon us. As we head deeper into the holiday season, The Japan Times asked translators of Japanese literature for their biggest book wish: Which Japanese work or author do you most want to see translated into English? Read on for our holiday wish list for book lovers.
Polly Barton: One of the first Japanese books I really fell in love with is Nao-Cola Yamazaki’s debut novella, “Hito no Sekkusu o Warau Na” (which translates to “Don’t laugh at other people’s sex lives”). It tells the story of a relationship between a young student and his art teacher twice his age, portraying all its clumsiness, humanity and wild, unpredictable loveliness. For me, it’s that rare thing: a love story, relatively simple in its formulation, that manages to feel both startlingly new and achingly true and personal.
Sam Bett: My pick is Atsushi Sato’s “Arechi no Kazoku” (“Family of the wasteland”). Set 10 years after the 2011 tsunami, this Akutagawa Prize-winning novel is a reckoning with disaster: what it takes away, what it leaves behind and how we struggle to make sense of it. Yuji Sakai, a single father in his 40s, funnels his pain into pruning trees in his hometown north of Fukushima, where a new seawall serves as a “monument to horror.” The descriptions of tree care have an ASMR quality, but the only thing Yuji can stop from changing is himself. It’s a view of Japan the world needs to see.