Issue 45 (June 2013, Volume 8, Number 3)

This issue focuses on a selection of Japanese writers in translation, from the current poster-boy of Japanese fiction, Haruki Murakami, to the rarely translated historical novelist, Shiba Ryōtarō.

Any country’s literature is essential to a broader understanding of its character and history. The great Japan scholar and translator Louis Allen once wrote:
In order to know a nation fully you have to go beyond knowing the way it expresses itself in its laws, its military behaviour, and its political systems. You have to know the way it talks about itself unconciously and through its fiction. In other words, the fiction of a nation is as important as the facts of a nation if we want to know it properly.

Viewed in this light, the continuing translation of Japanese novels into English is vital work and this issue presents a broad cross section of translated work, including 1Q84, Murakami’s latest surrealist blockbuster novel; The Winter Sun Shines In, reflections on the life of poet Masaoka Shiki by the scholar Donald Keene; a 2013 translation of Schoolgirl by the short-lived writer Ozamu Dazai, and Clouds above the Hill, an historical epic based on the author’s experience of the Russo-Japanese War.

Introducing this array of great literary exports is an article by our editor Sean Curtin, who joined others in celebrating the very first British vessel to sail into Japanese waters, 400 years ago this June. So began a cultural exchange that continues to this day.

• Britain & Japan – 400 Years: A Voyage Through Words and Music
  
  
• 1Q84 - Book One and Book Two
  
  
• The Winter Sun Shines In, A Life of Masaoka Shiki
  
  
• Schoolgirl
  
  
• Clouds above the Hill (坂の上の雲), Volumes I and II
  
  
• Aesthetic Strategies of the Floating World, Mitate, Yatsushi and Fûryû in Early Modern Japanese Popular Culture

Contributors