Recent Translations
Prawdziwa powieść
Polish translation of Honkaku shōsetsu. Translated by Anna Zielińska-Elliott. Warsaw, Poland: Tajfuny, 2023.
어머니의 유산
Korean translation of Haha no isan—Shinbun shōsetsu. Translated by Tae Wook Song. Seoul: Bokbokseoga, 2023.
Taro nje roman i vertete
Albanian translation of Honkaku shōsetsu. Translated by Nonda Varfi. Tirana, Albania: Ombra GVG Publishing House, 2023.
An I-Novel
English translation of Shishōsetsu from left to right. Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter in collaboration with the author. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.
Yo, una novela
Spanish translation of Shishōsetsu from left to right. Translated by Luisa Borovsky. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2022.
An I-Novel
“Well, whatever you do, try not to mix up your Japanese with English.” So told by her professor, the graduate student later ends up writing the first horizontally printed, bilingual novel in the history of Japanese literature.
This fictionalized autobiography takes place in the course of a single day across the street from the campus of a venerable American university. Minae reflects in solitude and in long telephone conversations with her sister about the two decades of their life in the United States and tries to break the news that she has decided to go back to Japan to become a writer in her mother tongue, though this will mean leaving her sister on her own.
Named for a cherished literary genre in Japan, the novel humorously and candidly portrays the author’s early life as an expatriate girl growing up in the United States while immersed in reading Japanese novels.
The original novel, titled Shishōsetsu from left to right, won the 1996 Noma New Author Award.
Appraisal of An I-Novel
In an age of so many books about identity, An I-Novel stands out for the tough questions it poses. It’s not difficult to read, since Mizumura is a fluent and entertaining writer. . . . Mizumura’s books reclaim the particularity, the untranslatability, of her own language. And they do so without the slightest whiff of nationalism. . . . What’s difficult about her work is the questions it raises. How to be national without being chauvinistic? How to be local without being provincial? How to use identity as the beginning of the discussion rather than — as it is so often today — the final word? In Mizumura’s works, the question is always open.
—Benjamin Moser, New York Times[Mizumura] is an intellectual powerhouse, and Carpenter's chatty, fluid translation more than keeps up with her thinking. For readers intrigued by questions of globalization, literary politics, or translation An I-Novel is a complete must-read, but, no matter what your interests, this is not a book to be missed. —NPR Books
A genre-defying meditation on emigration, language, and race. . . . As she alternates between the mundanities of her day—what to eat, when to make a phone call—and more philosophical reflections on racism, xenophobia, and linguistic alienation, Mizumura’s narrator (and her author) produces a brilliant document that seems, if anything, more relevant today than upon its original publication. . . . Mizumura’s work is deeply insightful and painstaking but never precious. —Kirkus, starred review
An I-Novel is a vivid portrait of immigrant displacement and the ironies of our global cultural ecosystem. —Boston Reviews
No translator could have done a better job than Carpenter in face of such a challenging text. Thanks to the translation, Mizumura’s struggle in the English dominating world can now be made known to wider audiences. —Cha Review
A thoughtful meditation on belonging, language, and identity politics, An I-Novel is a must-read. —Reading under the Olive Tree
An I-Novel is an intriguing, nuanced portrait of a family in flux, and of a young woman finding her creative center between two worlds. —Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews
[An I-Novel's] yearning for equality and belonging should universally resonate with readers. —Japan Times
Minae Mizumura masterfully transforms the conventions of the traditional I-novel in a nuanced confessional exploring race, identity and nationality. —Paperback Paris
A tour de force by translator Juliet Winters Carpenter of one of Japan’s most exciting writers. —Chicago Review of Books
A fascinating literary experiment, but also a fascinating exploration of identity, place, language, and self . . . An I-Novel is a very fine novel of the experience of growing up between (more so than in) two cultures—cultures which were, on top of it, much more markedly different at that time—and of trying to find one's place, in every respect. —Complete Review
A thoughtful reflection on language and culture . . . Mizumura’s distinction between her 'Japanese-language self' (her 'real self') and her 'English-language self' isn’t a comfortable one. Her dual identity makes her a keen critic of two very different cultures that are, in some ways, inseparable. —Asian Review of Books
This [is a] beautiful new translation of An I-Novel, a layered, pitch-perfect novel about a Japanese woman who feels out of time and place. —Thornfield Hall Blog
You can read An I-Novel as a great example of the Japanese I-Novel trend in literature. You can read it as a feminist literary landmark, or to inspire a conversation on language and its role in bridging the differences that distance forces upon people who love each other. Or you can just read it for the gorgeous prose, and it would be more than enough. —New York Journal of Books
It has been gratifying, moving even, to read a work by a writer of such maturity and sensitivity. Mizumura creates memorable characters who have real depth. Juliet Carpenter’s translation conveys the novel’s qualities with graceful power. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed—and marveled at—a novel so richly insightful and a translation so elegant and readable. —Van C. Gessel, translator of Endō Shūsaku
At its heart, An I-Novel is a deep meditation on the writer’s internal life, on straddling cultures and wanting to be at once authentic and original. Exploding the conventions of a long-established literary form, Minae Mizumura’s novel is a landmark in contemporary Japanese literature, finally brought to English-language readers by Juliet Winters Carpenter’s titanic feat of translation. —Tash Aw, author of We, the Survivors
In Minae Mizumura’s autobiographical novel, multiple languages and literatures mediate an expatriate girlhood’s dislocations of nationality, race, class, and gender. In the process, the work upends the assumptions of the I-novel, a genre thought to provide unmediated access to its male, Japanese author. The resulting observations are unsparing, sharply ironic and often very funny. —Ken Itō, author of An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Novel
It is to Juliet Winters Carpenter’s credit that this wholly English incarnation—where the ‘original’ English interjections are instead presented in bold typeface—maintains a remarkable consistency of tone throughout; seamless to the point of perfection. —The Japan Society Review
An I-Novel stands out as a beautifully written book. It’s wonderfully structured, the story dipping in and out of memory and the cold day in the apartment, and the many black-and-white photos of buildings, trees and snow only enhance the effect. It all seems effortless, yet it’s obviously anything but, and the reading experience is very similar to that of A True Novel, making this a book it would be very easy to binge on . . . An I-Novel is an excellent, ambitious piece of autofiction. —Tony's Reading List
Excerpts
On the top shelf was the set of books with vermilion bindings, untouched for a while. I reached up and pulled a volume down. I opened it, and the familiar musty smell rushed out. The past twenty years—and many more—were contained in that smell.
“I Confess: An excerpt from Japan’s first bilingual, semiautobiographical novel.” Bookforum. New York, January 21, 2021.
Excerpt. White Review. London, January 2015.
“Net Galley.”
Bookstores
Amazon.com: Books by Minae Mizumura
Barnes and Noble: Books by Minae Mizumura
Bookshop: Books by Minae Mizumura
Indiebound: Books by Minae Mizumura
Kinokuniya: Books by Minae Mizumura
Contact
Ms. Yurika Yokota Yoshida
Japan Foreign-Rights Centre
yurika@jfc-tokyo.co.jp
Room 201, Sun Mall No. 3
1-19-10 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku
Tokyo 160-0022 Japan
Telephone +81-3-3226-2711
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