Translator Interview: Professor Kerim Yasar

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Professor Yasar's Latest Look At Japan

Translator Interview: Professor Kerim Yasar

Twitter: @nihonkyo

Professor Kerim Yasar

                        

Last year I had the pleasure to read Naoko, a really amazingly unique book by Keigo Higashino and translated by Kerim Yasar. A few months ago I was given a chance to send Professor Yasar a few questions, some about Naoko and a few about his other books and connections to Japan. For me, this was a great chance to learn a bit about someone involved in things I love and learn a bit about things connected to Japan that I don't know anything about.

So, here is our interview:

First, I’ll be a fanboy and ask for your opinion on Naoko’s plot. Within our reading group (goodread.com Japan Literature Group) the biggest question after finishing was how much we could trust the characters to be honest. In your opinion, can the ending of Naoko be read in a straightforward way, or are there more secrets hiding between the lines at the end?

To be honest, I translated the book almost sixteen years ago, so my recollection of many of the details is fuzzy. But my sense of how I thought about it then was that Higashino wanted to leave the central question—“Is she, or isn’t she?”—unresolved. In that sense, I think the novel falls neatly into a category that the great structuralist literary critic Tsvetan Todorov called “the fantastic”—as distinguished from “the marvelous,” in which supernatural events are taken for granted as a part of the fictional universe, and “the uncanny,” in which the seemingly supernatural events are ultimately resolved with a rational or scientific explanation. I think that ambiguity is there by design. 

How did you find yourself in the position of translating Keigo Higashino, who was enormous in Japan, but unknown really in English at that time?

I was a graduate student at Columbia University at the time, and I was approached by the editorial director of Vertical, Inc., Ioannis Mentzas—who had himself formerly been a graduate student in Columbia’s English and Comparative Literature program—about translating the book. He was in search of translators for their growing catalog, and it made sense for him to ask around his old stomping grounds, especially since Vertical was also located in New York. He was happy with the work I did, and later offered me a job as an editor there, something I did for two years before returning to grad school and finishing my dissertation for the Ph.D. It was basically a commission and I wasn’t that familiar with Higashino’s work then, but I read and liked the book, and signed on to translate it. By the way, it’s worth mentioning that Higashino is now the best-selling foreign author in China, having outsold even J.K. Rowling. Makes me wish I’d been the first one to translate him into Chinese, rather than English!

Your background started in music, how did you make the switch to focus more on Japan/Japanese and do you or how do you think your two backgrounds influence your work?

I had a casual interest in Japan from childhood, starting with the anime series Star Blazers (Uchū senkan Yamato), followed by buying a Japanese language audio course after realizing that my beloved Olympus video camera (this was in the days of VHS) was made in Japan. The language course languished in my closet for about a decade, and I didn’t really start studying Japanese until I graduated from college. As a sophomore at Wesleyan University, I discovered Royall Tyler’s translations of Noh plays and got the eccentric idea to write a modern opera based on one, though that never materialized. 

During my senior year, I had a housemate named Ian Boyden (now a highly regarded artist, curator, poet, and translator) who was studying Chinese art history at the time. Through him and other friends I got more interested in East Asian cultures, and then my other housemate Michael Carrasco (now a scholar of Mayan art history) and I decided to apply for the JET Program, to which we were both accepted. That started me down my current path, but my background in musicology and electronic/experimental music played a big role in what I chose to research for my first book. Your newest book Electrified Voices (out on paperback recently) looks at the way sound technology shaped effected modern Japan. How was this special compared to any other place?

I think every country has its own interesting histories about how technologies are adopted, thought about, and used. There tends to be a Eurocentric view that new technologies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the types of modernity they brought in their wake, began in Europe and America and radiated outward in a way that was unidirectional, uniform, and determined by the source rather than by the recipient. But each nation has its own cultural and technological matrix that receives, reworks, and invents and reinvents new technologies in slightly different ways. 

The Japanese case is special for a lot of reasons—largely because Japan was the first East Asian nation to industrialize to the point where it posed a legitimate threat to Western imperial powers—but I think all of those national stories deserve telling. 

I start the book with an anecdote about how a group of Japanese exchange students studying in the Boston area visited Alexander Graham Bell’s laboratory in 1876 and tried out his prototype telephone. Many people don’t know this, but because of that visit, Japanese was the second language, after English, to travel across a telephone wire.

Last thing, please let us know about any work that's coming up and how people can look you up.

My second book project is about performance and representations of the body in Japanese cinema. I’ve translated over a hundred films for the Criterion Collection, including many classics by directors like Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Ōshima, Itami Jūzō, and continue occasionally to translate new ones. I’m also working on articles and other translation projects. Anyone interested can follow what I’m up to @nihonkyo.

As a final note from myself, I'd like to thank Professor Yasar again, and encourage everyone to check out his work, whether you like in-depth studies, mystifying mysteries, or Japanese Cinema, he is certainly a writer/translator with something for everyone.

The always readable Higashino. Check out this odd mystery.