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.

Just published in 2021, the newest English rendition of Minae Mizumura’s work is named for a cherished literary genre in Japan. It 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. Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter in collaboration with the author. New York: Columbia University Press. The original novel, titled Shishōsetsu from left to right, won the 1996 Noma New Author Award.

“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 helps influential readers discover and recommend new books to their audiences. If you are a reviewer, blogger, librarian, bookseller, educator, journalist or other member of the media, you can use NetGalley for free to request, read, and recommend books before they are published.” https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/book/203009 Publication Date: March 2, 2021. Archive Date: June 9, 2021.

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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

Excerpt

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.

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

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Tokyo 160-0022 Japan
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