Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives & Beautiful Distance
By Yamazaki Nao-Cola
Translated by Polly Barton (Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives)
and Charlotte Goff (Beautiful Distance)
Daunt Books Publishing (2026)
ISBN-13: 978-1917092357 and 978-1917092623
Review by Jemma Rose
The simultaneous translations of two books by Yamazaki Nao-Cola, five-time nominee for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, introduce to English readers a daringly honest portraitist of intense emotion across the peaks and troughs of life.
Yamazaki’s debut, Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives, originally published in 2004 and newly translated by Polly Barton, explores the nature of relationships with particular attention to gender dynamics. After art student Mirume agrees to model for his enigmatic teacher Yuri (married and twenty years his senior), they embark on an intense and confusing affair. As Mirume sinks further into infatuation, making illicit visits to Yuri’s studio and home, the teacher remains elusive, as much to the reader as to Mirume. Yamazaki documents the push and pull between these two unlikeable but pitiable characters, as Mirume’s puerile disdain towards women is overridden by his fixation on the teacher. In a brisk 80 pages, the novella captures the unwieldy passion and disorientation of the affair.
While Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives offers a darker rendition of a student-teacher relationship than Kawakami Hiromi's best-selling Strange Weather in Tokyo, the authors both take a radically non-judgemental stance towards their characters, opening up their revelatory potential. Kawakami wrote of Yamazaki’s Beautiful Distance, ‘This novel moved me to tears'.
Beautiful Distance, first published a decade later in 2016, and now in translation by Charlotte Goff, strikes a very different chord, following a man caring for his wife through terminal cancer. Yamazaki’s telling pushes back on medicalised narratives of illness, and their often cold focus on life expectancies or treatment regimes. Instead, people are kept at the heart of the story, and brought to life with compassionate humanity.
Told through the husband’s eyes, the story attends to the evolving nature of their connection, in the minutiae of caring responsibilities and brushes of intimacy while washing her face, braiding her hair, or applying her moisturizer. Their deeply felt love remains grounded in an authentic sense of pragmatism throughout, never veering into cloying cliché.
The scope of the novel expands to encompass the wider community and the incalculable value of all the people in their lives. Generous space is devoted to the regular customers of the wife’s sandwich shop, for example, who visit the hospital to share the personal impact she had on them, in a moving examination of the role of work in life and identity.
The novel grapples principally with the question of how to be happy in the moment when the future is uncertain, with far-reaching resonances beyond the hospital bed. Although its focus is in extremis, Beautiful Distance provides a gentle reminder to treasure the joys of everyday life, even just enjoying a sandwich at lunchtime.
The simultaneous translation of the two books, originally published more than a decade apart, poses an elucidating contrast. Beautiful Distance is certainly the more mature and fully-realised work, offering a comprehensive meditation where Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives reads as an evocative impulsion. But each is well-served by this stylistic differentiation. The reflective mode afforded by the later novel only highlights the limited psychological resources of the teen-aged narrator of the novella in his struggle to make sense of an unresolved relationship. Together they bookend the stages of adult life, from a mystified young student to the accumulated wisdom of our final moments.
Translator Polly Barton’s own debut novel What Am I, A Deer? was also published on the same date, and touches upon the tension in literary translation between ‘trying to create an experience for its new readers at least as enjoyable and immersive as the experience of those who'd read it in the original, or rather trying to represent the cultural and linguistic specificities of the source.’
This balancing act is deftly navigated in both translations, achieving highly readable texts which also preserve the particularities of their cultural setting. In Beautiful Distance, this is evidenced by a remarkable delicacy around the social encounters which take place in the hospital, teasing out unspoken nuances and interpersonal assumptions which may be unfamiliar to English readers without ever disrupting the flow of narration.
More than twenty years after its original publication in 2004, the ambivalence in Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives around its imbalanced central relationship lands somewhat uncomfortably in a post-Me Too landscape. Yamazaki has stated that they now ‘have questions about the relationship between teaching and being taught, power in balance, [sic] and how my characters’ relationship may have been similar to grooming’ and expressed their intention to write a new novel exploring the subject. It would be a welcome return to some of the under-examined issues raised in the novella.
The author has also reflected on other changes since their debut. In a handwritten address to new English readers, Yamazaki reflected on their pen name: ‘When I was younger, I really loved cola. So Naoko plus cola makes Nao-Cola. The funny thing is … I actually don't drink cola these days. So sometimes I think about changing my pen name.’ The growing power of psychological insight and deeply compassionate characterisation in Yamazaki’s writing promises much to look forward to in their future work, whether under the name ‘Nao-Coffee, Nao-Cocoa, or even Nao-Cognac…!’