Novelist as a Vocation(55)

This is just my personal impression, and I’d be hard pressed to give any proof or examples to back it up, but I get the feeling that if you compare sales of my books with a historical timeline there’s a tendency worldwide for my books to start being read widely after there is a major shake-up (or transformation) in the social foundations of a country. My books started selling rapidly in Russia and Eastern Europe after the seismic shift when communism collapsed. The heretofore seemingly solid, unshakable communist system collapsed overnight to be followed by a steadily surging soft chaos, a mix of hope and anxiety. In the midst of that shift in values, the stories I presented suddenly seemed tinged with a new, natural reality.

The wall separating East and West Berlin dramatically came down, and from around the time of German reunification, it seems like my books gradually started to be read more in Germany. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. But it seems to me that a huge transformation in the foundations and structure of a society has a profound influence on people’s everyday sense of reality, and the desire for transformation is only to be expected. The reality of actual society and the reality of stories are inevitably connected at a fundamental level in people’s souls (or in their unconscious). In any age, when something major occurs and there’s a shift in social reality, there’s a related yearning for a shift in the reality of stories as well.

Stories can exist as metaphors for reality, and people need to internalize new stories (and new systems of metaphor) in order to cope with an unfolding new reality. By successfully connecting these two systems, the system of actual society and the metaphoric system—by, to put it another way, allowing movement between the objective world and the subjective world so they mutually modify each other—people are able to accept an uncertain reality and maintain their sanity. I get the sense that the reality in the stories I provide in my fiction just happens to function globally as a kind of cogwheel that makes that adjustment possible. Naturally, this is, to repeat myself, just my own individual sense of things. But I don’t think it’s entirely off the mark.

In that sense, Japanese society may have—at an earlier stage and as something more self-evidently understood—observed that overall landslide in a more natural, less dramatic fashion. It follows that my novels were more enthusiastically accepted in Japan—at least among ordinary readers—than in the West. The same thing might be said about the neighboring countries in East Asia—China, Korea, and Taiwan. Readers in these countries started enthusiastically appreciating my works before they were accepted in America and Europe.

It’s possible that this societal landslide had a reality for people in these East Asian countries before it did for people in Europe and the US. And this wasn’t the sort of sudden social transformation that occurred because of some particular events, but a softer landslide over time. In other words, in the Asian countries that went through rapid economic growth the social landslide wasn’t some sudden occurrence but, rather, a constant, sustained situation taking place over the last quarter of a century.

I know it’s a bit forced to make a simple assertion like this, since there are all sorts of other causes involved. But certainly there is a perceptible discrepancy in the reactions of readers to my novels in various Asian countries and the reactions of readers in Europe and the US. And I think in great part this comes down to differences in the way they perceived and coped with this landslide. For that matter, I get the sense that in Japan and Asian countries the “modern” that necessarily precedes the “postmodern” did not, in a precise sense, exist. The split between the subjective and the objective was never as logically clear there as in the West. But this takes us off in divergent directions, so I’ll leave that discussion to another time.



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One other important reason I was able to make a breakthrough in the West was that I was blessed with several outstanding translators. Around the middle of the 1980s a shy young American named Alfred Birnbaum came to see me, saying he’d loved my work and was translating a few of my short stories, and asked whether it was okay that he do so. “Sure,” I replied. “Please go right ahead.” He translated even more stories over time, and eventually this led to me being published in The New Yorker. Alfred went on to translate A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Dance Dance Dance for Kodansha International. Alfred is an extremely talented, enthusiastic translator. If he hadn’t come to me with that request, I don’t think I would have even thought at that point of having my works translated into English. I didn’t think my works had reached that level yet.

Later on, I was invited to Princeton and started living in the US, and at this point I met Jay Rubin. He was a professor at the University of Washington then, and later taught at Harvard. An outstanding researcher in Japanese literature, he was known for his translations of several works by Natsume Sōseki. He was interested in my work, too, and asked me to contact him if I ever needed any of my works translated. “To start off with,” I asked him, “would you mind translating a few of my short stories that you like?” He selected a few and translated them, and his translations were outstanding. What I found most interesting was that he and Alfred chose completely different stories. It was amazing how they didn’t overlap in their choices. I keenly felt then how important it is to have several translators working on your fiction.