Thursday, May 20, 1999
Translating Popular Fiction 2
In the preceding issue of the SWET Newsletter we published a number of responses to an article by novelist Shinoda Setsuko published in the Asahi Shimbun. Shinoda expressed her hope that more popular and best-selling fiction in Japan that reflects the realities of contemporary Japanese culture might be translated and published abroad, expanding the variety of Japanese fiction available in English and helping to address the gap in understanding between Japanese and other peoples. SWET member and publisher Peter Goodman of Stone Bridge Press, in California, posted the following additional reply on the mailing list SWET-L on March 12, 1999. We reprint it here with his permission. For this Web site re-publishing, we have added cover images of the books in the new Stone Bridge Fiction series launching in Fall 2007.
My company has been publishing Japanese fiction in translation for almost ten years. It keeps getting more difficult to do profitably (in fact, I’m not sure it is possible to do profitably). Here’s my rather hastily worded take on the whole situation, at least as far as the U.S. market is concerned.
Trade publishers in the U.S. categorize the fiction they publish roughly as follows:
- A) no-brainer (Stephen King, Danielle Steele, you know who);
- B) solid, established midlist (Joyce Carol Oates and now Haruki Murakami);
- C) gonna be big (varies each year, sucks up promotion dollars, and often makes a huge return a la Arthur Golden); and
- D) first fiction (editors’ favorites, hot topics, but basically unknown writers making a debut; publisher likely to lose enthusiasm after 3 months of slow sales).
Categories A and C get most of the energy; category A because the publisher has to make back its big advance, and category C because it believes it has a hot property. The authors in category B are disgruntled these days, but they get decent advances and their books continue to sell to a devoted readership. But pity the poor authors in category D! Publishers do like to “discover” talent, but no one has any illusions about the prospects of an unknown writer catching on in a publicity-driven culture mesmerized by all-Monica, all-the-time programming. These D books are the source of much self-congratulation, but little profit. And by the time the next book launch season comes around, they are forgotten, not yanked, merely left to wither and die.
The D category is where almost all fiction translations from Japan fall. It matters not that so-and-so is the biggest thing in Japan since sliced sashimi. American readers have never heard of him/her, so how is the publisher going to generate any interest in the work?
In the U.S.A. these days, writers of popular fiction are expected to go on tour and endure endless humiliations as they schlep from bookshop to bookshop and from interview to book signing. The unavailability of the Japanese author, or perhaps his/her inability to make a presentation in English, is a strike against the publisher even considering the work.
Then there’s the pitch itself. Plot summaries can occasionally sell a book, with a dynamite sample chapter or two. But such deals are generally made by agents who speak the vernacular of the particular publishing company and whose track record suggests that the book will deliver. With a foreign agent, an unknown Japanese author, and Japanese fiction’s “reputation” for being derivative and poorly plotted, it’s strike two.
Suppose the author has gone ahead and had the whole book translated. Unless the translator is a skilled native speaker with a flair for style, dialogue, and all the rest that makes for a good “read,” the publisher is going to read the draft and reject it out of hand. It may be a great story, but if it’s not written well enough to grab the reader in the first two pages, well, no one has the time to read on in the hope that things will get better. Strike three.
O.K., it’s not baseball, so let’s go for strike four. If there is no translation, only a fabulous proposal, how is the translation going to be paid for? Wouldn’t a book-length translation generally run around $10,000 to $15,000? Publishers aren’t going to add that onto their already dangerously high overheads, not for first fiction. If authors pay, it smells like a vanity project, and that drives away publishers too. Those venal among us are happy to accept such subsidies, however, but the question remains: Is the translation any good? And if changes need to be made, how will these be discussed, how will they be made, and by whom? It doesn’t help a U.S. publisher to receive changes in Japanese, and explaining why and how certain changes are advisable may be difficult if author and editor speak different languages. These are logistical concerns, and can be dealt with. But to someone who has a lot of questions about the feasibility of a project to begin with, they are just another complication, another strike against the deal.
It’s not like Americans have singled out the Japanese. We don’t read much French of Spanish literature in translation either. And if a book is by a French author, then I think that we expect the book to be about France or at least French-speaking people. American popular culture saturates the world and has created the archetypes that drive the global popular imagination. Would it were not so! But a reader anywhere in the world can read hardboiled L.A. flatfoot fiction or books about New York drug lords and nuclear terrorist conspirators and not feel that it’s anything more exotic than a trip to the local Bijou to see the latest Harrison Ford or Arnold Schwarzenegger flick. Japanese fiction that hinges on sarariiman nemawashi machinations, bar hostesses, quiet domestic dramas, or even decadent bosozoku gangs just kind of hangs out there in space as far as most non-Japanese readers are concerned, attached to nothing. Popular fiction derives its popularity from its closeness to home. Without that, it smells too much like education.
There just are not enough American people reading Japanese books in Japanese and getting jazzed up about them. For a while, back in the 1980s, we thought that maybe that was going to change. But the level of interest in Japan has sunk to a new low, and there is no indication 
that will change any time soon. The Internet is making English the global language more than ever before (that’s my perception, at least), and as long as Americans can find people who speak English they will never feel compelled to learn anything else. Scholars of Japan in the U.S.A. could make a difference, but for professional reasons cannot, or choose not to. Without a critical mass of competent, interested readers, we are stalled.
The Japanese government and foundations, along with the corporate sector, could generate overseas interest in popular fiction by running a concerted, coordinated campaign. Hire an ad agency, make several million dollars available to fund translation and publication, work closely with U.S. scholars, writers, editors, and publishers to develop strategic programs over half a dozen years, with advertising, interpreting, author tours, the whole bit. Call it national PR. I believe it could work, and could even be done with such flair as to allay concerns about excessive commercialization.
Smaller-scale publishing schemes have been pitched to me several times over the past few years. But they’ve always come to nothing. The government wants to promote highbrow stuff that most Japanese and Americans really don’t care about. They form a committee that makes predictable selections of “important” books that no foreign company wants to publish. Corporations don’t want to take the risk of subsidizing anything controversial, which prevents support for more recent books that deal with the “difficult” themes that are really the lifeblood of a lot of U.S. fiction lists these days.
Probably the best candidates for creating an interesting publishing program of popular Japanese fiction would be the fashion and entertainment industries. But the printed word is not exactly their stock in trade. Nevertheless, “fiction from the edge, brought to you by Rei Kawakubo” suggests an intriguing confluence of popular trends and styles. Hey, it’s not as weird or farfetched as you think!
Peter Goodman
Stone Bridge Press
Publishers of Books about Japan
P.O. Box 8208, Berkeley CA 94707
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
From Newsletter No. 85 (May 1999)