Interview with the Translator: Twelve Kingdoms, Introduction Plus Book Titles

Eugene Woodbury is currently translating the most recent of Fuyumi Ono's Twelve Kingdoms' novels, Hills of Silver Ruins, a Pitch Black Moon. 

The interview covers all currently translated books and short stories. It goes in roughly chronological order, starting with Poseidon of the East, Vast Blue Seas of the West.

The interview questions mostly focus on the mythology of the books with additional questions about contemporary Japan and occasional questions about a specific book. 

Here we go! 

* * * 

Kate: What interested you in The Twelve Kingdoms?

Eugene: In the late 1990s, I discovered JWPce and online tools like Eijirou. And Honto. Unlike Amazon, Honto offers SAL shipping, which makes ordering books much more affordable. Then Windows 2000 and Window XP debuted with full Unicode support.

I used to peruse the manga section at bookstores to try and pick out titles and authors that I might want to read in Japanese. I started translating manga just for the heck of it and a couple of light novels. A girl at work asked me to do a chapter of Fruits Basket for a scanlation site she contributed to.

And then I saw the NHK anime series, and that turned out to be a deep well to draw from. (At the time, the books hadn't been licensed.) It certainly helped that the books turned out to be even better than the anime.

The entire Microsoft customer support team I was working on was getting transferred to India, so we were getting paid to sit around for hours without anything to do. So that's when I started emailing myself scans of the novels to give myself something to do at work.

And since I was translating them already, and was teaching myself HTML and website hosting, I decided to post them online. And I actually got feedback on the material I was posted. So I kept on going.

Kate: The series is influenced by Chinese mythology. Are the Japanese interested in Chinese mythology the way us Americans are continually drawn to British folktales and art?

Eugene: Given China's long history, you could say that as Rome was to the rest of Europe, China was to the rest of Asia. More specifically, as medieval Europe was to England, China was to Japan.

Christianity arrived in England around the same time that Buddhism arrived in Japan via China and Korea. Both religions were from the start entwined with political rule. One difference here is that the native religion of Japan (Shinto) persisted as a folk religion and thanks to the patronage of the imperial family.

During the Edo period, the shogunate commissioned Buddhist temples to handle the census and placed Shinto shrines under Buddhist control. The equivalent of the English Reformation took place when the imperial family assumed power in 1868 with the Meiji Restoration and Shinto again rose to prominence.

Confucianism from China played a prominent role in organizing both society and government. Many calendrical festivals such as Tanabata and O'Bon originated in China. Japan imported science and architecture from China. And, of course, its kanji orthography. As Latin (the Romance languages) is to English, Chinese is to Japanese.

The same way English, a Germanic language, is littered with Latin, Japanese, in a completely different family of languages, is suffused with Chinese cognates that can be read based on the on'yomi (Chinese pronunciation) or kun'yomi (Japanese pronunciation), and depending on the part of speech and when the kanji was adopted.

Thus a character that is pronounced only one way in Chinese can be read a dozen different ways in Japanese. Another metaphor for how culture mutates when it travels. This was certainly true of the classic novels Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West, which had a profound influence on literary traditions in Japan.

Those influences can show up in unexpected places, like the gleefully trashy Ikki Tousen.

On a higher brow note, post-war historical novelist Eiji Yoshikawa credited The Tale of the Heike, Tale of Genji, Water Margin, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms as major inspirations. The former two are Japanese classics, the latter two are Chinese. As with Shakespeare, these are deep wells of story material that promise to never run dry.

Kate: I’ve noted how often the text will skip between the current action and past events/explanations. In Poseidon, the emperor’s back story is delivered in parts with no warning.

Western literature makes a huge deal out of flashbacks, even when done (or especially when done) in a literary way. Since manga will often skip back in time with no warning, I’m assuming that this quilt of past and present is a function of Japanese literature, rather than specific to the author. Yes? No?

Eugene: What you call the "quilt of past and present" is indeed a function of Japanese discourse in general. The mix of the past tense and the "historical present" or "non-past" tense has long intrigued linguists. The following post (and related links) and the thesis abstract explain what is going on grammatically.

Historical Present Tense

Tense in Oral Narratives

Kate: Why did you choose Poseidon--a Greek reference--for the title of the first book (chronologically)? What goes into creating a title?

Eugene: Much of what goes into a title comes down to prosody and poetics. You do want to keep the literal meaning in mind, but not at the expense of comprehension and aesthetics and marketing. This is especially true with the titles of light novels and anime, which have grown much longer over time (don't ask me why).

So "A Corpse is Buried Under Sakurako's Feet" is titled Beautiful Bones in English, taking advantage of the main character's similarities to Temperance "Bones" Brennan in Bones. On the other hand, I think the original Twelve Kingdoms TokyoPop titles truncated too much and ended up sounding clunky (though I understand wanting to wedge in a series title).

Here are a few more examples.

I explain the title of A Thousand Leagues of Wind in the Introduction and wrote a post for Hills of Silver Ruins on the subject. There are good ideas in the comments too. I used "Poseidon" instead of the generic "sea god" because I thought "Poseidon" better portrayed the idea of a larger-than-life guy like Shouryuu embarking on a Homeric adventure.

Overall, I think I've managed to stay pretty close to the original meanings.

Kate: Speaking of long titles (which often seem very nineteenth-century in vibe--I'm currently reading the manga The Seven Princes in the Thousand-Year Labyrinth)--

Are titles like I Want to Eat Your Pancreas deliberately using dark humor? That is, is the title humorous in Japanese? Am I missing something? Is it not as tongue-in-cheek as I think it is? Or more so?

Eugene: In Natsuyuki Rendezvous(published before I Want to Eat Your Pancreas), Rokka says to husband Shimao (dying of an incurable disease), "I wish I could eat all of your bad cells." I don't know how common an expression this is.

With the amount of light novel, manga, and anime material being acquired, especially when a sub-genre like isekai blows up in popularity, a challenge for the writer is coming up with a title that sets that work apart from the rest. As TV Tropes explains

in order to stand out from the deluge of new titles being published every day, authors entice fickle readers by explaining exactly what the gimmick of their series is at the earliest opportunity.

In other words, the title is the book blurb. Japanese publishers probably don't worry about it much when it comes to fiction because fans regularly condense long titles to acronyms, initialisms, and portmanteaus anyway.

Now that I think about it, non-fiction books have long taken this approach. The top new release on Amazon is Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch by David Mamet. Edward Seidensticker's omnibus edition of High City, Low City and Tokyo Rising gets two colons: A History of Tokyo 1867-1989: From Edo to Showa: The Emergence of the World's Greatest City.

More to follow!