Convenor(s): Dr Jennifer L. Guest, Dr Linda Flores, and Professor Bjarke Frellesvig
Speaker(s): David Karashima, Associate Professor, School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University
These seminars will occur live and will not be recorded. Unauthorized recording is strictly prohibited.
Please click on the seminar title to register in advance and receive the meeting details.
Repackaging Japanese Authors for the Anglophone Sphere in the 21st Century: Murakami, Kawakami, Murata and Beyond
In Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami (2020), I told the story of how Haruki Murakami's work was translated/transformed/repackaged in the Anglophone sphere in the 1990s as the Japanese author was beginning to lay the foundations of his global network and reach. Here I will give a brief overview of how Japanese literature has continued to be translated and repackaged within the Anglophone literary scene since the turn of the century. In particular, I will look at how novella-length works of fiction (prominent in Japan in no small part due to the significant social/economic capital of the Akutagawa Prize) have been reshaped/repackaged in English translation, often to accommodate norms surrounding the short story and the novel in the Anglophone publishing field. Some authors I will touch upon (albeit briefly) include Haruki Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, Hiromi Kawakami, Hitomi Kanehara, Natsuo Kirino, Fuminori Nakamura, Mieko Kawakami, Sayaka Murata, and Aoko Matsuda. I draw on my own experience as a translator, editor and author working between the Japanese and Anglophone spheres.
Short bio
DAVID KARASHIMA is an author, translator and associate professor of creative writing at Waseda University in Tokyo. His book Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami was published by Soft Skull Press in fall 2020.
