Japan - US Business News

Gangster Fables in Translation

BARRY YOURGRAU + MOTOYUKI SHIBATA READING

@ KINOKUNIYA Bookstore on Dec. 9.2010 at 6pm.           
1073 Ave of Americas (betw. 40th & 41st)

New York writer, Barry Yourgrau and Prof. Motoyuki Shibata of the University of Tokyo, present a bilingual reading from Yourgrau’s new book of stories Gangster Fables.

Just published by Village Books in Japan with a translation by Prof. Shibata, the Japanese edition is the first publication of the book anywhere.

 Yourgrau’s work including The Sadness of Sex and Wearing Dad’s Head has an enthusiastic following in Japan, all translated by Prof. Shibata. Yourgrau is the sole American author of keitai shosetsu—the Japanese phenom of fiction for cell phones. His cell-phone stories were published in Japan as I-mode Stories.

Prof. Shibata is Japan’s foremost translator of American contemporary lit, of authors including Paul Auster, Steven Millhauser, Richard Powers, and Edward Gorey. He edits the influential literary magazine Monkey Business, where Gangster Fables was serialized.

Prof. Shibata will also be appearing in conversation with Paul Auster at the New York Asia Society on Tues. Dec. 7.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Kinokuniya Book Store is located at 1073 Avenue of the Americas (6th Avenue), near 41st Street in New York City.

The Accidental Ambassador

Guest Contributor, Donna George Storey, Ph.D, is the author of Amorous Woman, a modern reinterpretation of Ihara Saikaku’s The Life of an Amorous Woman.  She is also the author of Child of Darkness: Yoko and other Stories by Furui Yoshikichi (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies) and holds a Ph.D. in Japanese Literature from Stanford University. She is currently hard at work on her new novel.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

When I set out to write a modern remake of Ihara Saikaku’s The Life of an Amorous Woman--with an American English conversation teacher recast in the starring role--I hoped to create a story with at least some of the cultural insight and social satire of the seventeenth-century original.  I had no idea that many of my readers would instead view my work as a primer on Japanese culture.  Indeed the most common reaction by far from readers was, “I learned so much about Japan from your book!”

Since I had used quite a bit of autobiographical material from the years I’d lived in Japan in the 1980s, I was gratified that my portrait of the country was convincing.  However, I had never intended my “tale of the floating world” to take on such power to educate.  In an attempt to figure out why my novel might feel so culturally enlightening, I began to take a closer look at the ways Japan is still presented in the American media in the twenty-first century.