EBOOK
About
Geishas and samurai, manga and animé come to mind when Japan enters the conversation. While these traditional and modern images about the island nation have been widely disseminated in North America, most of us cannot imagine what everyday life is like in Japan. Tomoko Mitani's work addresses this gap with honest responses to the male-dominated society of Japan in a down-to-earth style that looks inward, with stories that are at once intriguing and amusing. Translator Yukari F. Meldrum finds the fine balance in translation between domestication and foreignization, letting a new vantage point emerge. This collection of short stories and a novella will interest scholars and students of Translation Studies, Japanese Studies, and Women's Studies, as well all of those who are interested in this genre. Japanese "private writer" bridges gap between traditional and pop cultures with stories of the ordinary. Tomoko Mitani's stories and sketches reflect the everyday life of Japanese people from the point of view of a middle-class married woman, exploring memory as a site of both laughter and tears. These down-to-earth, conversational stories provide readers with a woman's honest response to a male-dominated society. In her translation, Yukari F. Meldrum finds the fine balance between maintaining the cadences of the original Japanese and providing English readers with more familiar phrases and cultural references. This collection of 22 short stories and a novella will appeal to many people, from readers of short story and travellers of the mind to scholars and students of translation and Japanese culture. Tomoko Mitani was born in 1945 and grew up in Hokkaido, Japan. Married with two daughters, she worked as an instructor for Kumon, and her translator Yukari F. Meldrum was one of her students. In mid-life, while involved in various business ventures, Mitani began writing these short stories. The stories were first released in her self-published collection: Wasurenai, warai mo namida mo (2002). She lives in Sapporo, Japan. Yukari F. Meldrum enjoys bridging cultures through translation. She owns a translation company in Edmonton, Alberta. Translator's introduction, illustrations, notes "One thing that appealed to Meldrum about the stories was how they showed a side of life in Japan that rarely makes it onto North America's limited radar. We know geishas. We know Godzilla. But we don't know the emotions and routines of a married, middle-class woman in the late 20th century.... Even in Japan, Meldrum says, where these stories may be more familiar, the act of putting them down on the page is not." Michael Hingston, Edmonton Journal, January 30, 2014 [Full article at http://edmjr.nl/1fn2RdJ] "Thanks to online programs like Google Translate, it's possible to have a chunk of text translated into another language with just a click of a button. However, word-for-word translations don't capture the context and tone of the original text.... Meldrum strove to represent the original text as accurately as possible, but admits that the biggest challenge was trying to convey cultural differences." Work of Arts blog [Full post at http://bit.ly/1fi3dAT] "While Mitani uses humour in most of these stories, she never exaggerates for effect.... each [story] is a self-contained vignette that beautifully encapsulates an idea or emotion.... Her stories are thoughtful, profound and moving without dramatics, revealing without being confessional.... [Yukari F. Meldrum] proves a sensitive translator, adapting Japanese tone to elegant, simple English prose." , , September 2014 "Mitani's stories are, in effect, a kind of Japanese life writing... Stories of the kind Mitani has written here give glimpses of contemporary Japanese life that rarely see the light of day in English translation, and are a welcome addition to the small but hopefully growing Canadian body of work translated from the Japanese into English." [Full review at http://bit.ly/1tosSSC] "The maj