It takes an act of faith on our part to believe that the Japanese we are receiving through translated literature can simulate the true nature of the Japanese experience. Everyone who reads translated literature already accepts the idea that we are merely reading an approximation of the real thing. When French or Italian literature fails for the English reader, we can simply assume that the translator isn't exceptionally skilled at her job. We already have a pretty good sense for what French or Italian people are like, even if we don't speak their language. But since most Western readers of Japan still cannot manage to cross the barrier that separates our sensibilities from the Japanese, even if the word order is right, even if the translator approximates through a brilliant literary maneuver the spirit of the original Japanese, if the translator is unable or unwilling to accept the people on their own terms, the translation will fail. The case of Edward Seidensticker's work is a good place to start to examine the question of what exactly are we reading when we read Japanese literature in translation?
Some barriers are simply impossible to cross, even if the translator of Japanese is an expert on the language and the culture. Edward Seidensticker's ability with the language, both ancient and modern, was so exceptional it is almost impossible to fathom for those of us still working at the language. To be as fluent as he was in both Japanese and American cultures, one cannot help but begin to notice a clang in between worlds. To observe the difference between our cultures, to try and cultivate it as an ideal, I constantly refer back to the opening line of Tanizaki Junichiro's novel The Makioka Sisters to meditate upon the question of where the linguistic and cultural barrier falls. Seidensticker's translation of the opening line shows the startling difference unintentionally: "Would you do this please, Koi-san?" It refers to a moment in time when one of the Makioka sisters is asking another if she wouldn't mind powdering her neck? It is a translation of the following: 「こいさん、頼むわ。―――」A mere few words where the meaning is clear, where there is no ambiguity at all. There are any number of ways to put this sister's request in English, and Seidensticker's works elegantly well.
However, when we understand that the "Koi-san" used in this request is not the name of a person but a way of referring to the youngest daughter of a family, an affectionate expression particular to the Kansai region, and when we can feel the particular pleasure (or distaste, depending on one's own orientation toward the culture) of hearing the way women will use the ending sentence marker わ for a highly feminine inflection, we can begin to see the challenges a translator faces. But more importantly the challenges we ourselves face when trying to cross the barrier of comprehension.
One thing to note right away is that the original does not contain a "please". The sister is counting on the other one to perform the favor. Judge for yourself if the "please" can adequately convey the uniqueness of the Japanese feminine style of expression. For me it does not, and I feel that there is not much a translator can do about it, even with one as skilled as Seidensticker. We get a sense for the femininity of the female voice, and what a polite request from one might sound like, but a Makioka sister's sense of humor, imperiousness, confidence, class, and playfulness—what makes these sisters a pleasure to be around for existing in a privileged world that is unusual even for a Japanese—is missing.
This is not a small matter, because if we're reading the classics of Japanese literature in English only, whether of the modern age or of the fascinating Heian court, we are receiving them almost exclusively through the translations of Edward Seidensticker. Not only Kawabata, Tanizaki, Mishima, or Kafu Nagai come to us through his translations, but we receive Murasaki and the Mother of Michitsuna (The Gossamer Years) through his work too. Whether these works of literature were written by a man or a woman, I'd say the primary focus of Snow Country, The Makioka Sisters, The Tale of Genji, or The Gossamer Years is the nature of the female experience particular to Japan. If we read these works ignorant of a Japanese woman's voice or sensibility, I'd say we're missing a large part of the story.
Seidensticker's translations work well as literature. But once we compare his English with the original Japanese, we begin to notice a few major issues. One is that of word choice. More on that in a moment, for this issue is not really a major one. The other, however, is the way a translator's ideological outlook might dictate the choices he or she will make for translation. Few of us will notice these issues if we never take the time to compare the original to the translation. And I cannot imagine there are many people who will find it necessary to do this. However, if we do and don't like the translator's wording or prose style, if we don't like the way his English translation flows, that is merely a subjective opinion, and should really be of no great concern to anyone but ourselves. But if we see that we are receiving a different kind of literature from the original, if the Genji becomes something other than what Murasaki intended, if the translator doesn't even respect the characters in the novel he or she is translating, then that blurred vision becomes a major obstacle for us as mere readers of the Genji if we hope to see the story clearly.
To accompany my watching of this year's NHK Taiga Drama HIKARU KIMI E I have been reading Seidensticker's version of The Tale of Genji along with it. I had a very difficult time at it from the start because I cannot stand such Anglicisms as substituting the word "emperor" for "Mikado." Or "Minister of the Left" for a word that possesses such strong associations as "Sadaijin." This English substitute for "Sadaijin" is not especially egregious; it is, after all, telling us exactly what the position is, "a cabinet minister of the left." But whenever I think of "minister" I can only think of the modern day version, of some bureaucrat sitting atop a vast institutional structure, with thousands of other bureaucrats depending on his dictates, with a populace unwittingly subject to them. The palace at Kyoto for the Heian Age was a fairly small, contained affair by comparison, so the word "minister" doesn't seem quite right. A minor quibble, or a pet peeve, but still.
Much more disorienting is the use of terms such as "ladies-in-waiting" for the women of the court. I find the "Lady" prefix for Murasaki especially irritating for a preciousness that the woman doesn't deserve. "Ladies-in-waiting" is a catch-all phrase for any number of positions and functions the women at the court held, and usually with the ideogram "woman" included as a part of it [see 女房, for example]. "Woman" in any one of these functionary descriptions most definitely does not imply "lady". I hear "lady" and it does not make me think of the subtle messaging the men and women of the court sent to one another through poetry but of the British Regency novels, of the British social standard with its expectations that Jane Austen's people could take for granted, but Jane Austen, light touch though she was, could not. "Lady" Murasaki of the British parlor setting? That's what the "Lady" makes me think of, since most of the early translators still held the British class system as the standard for taste. I say let's drop the good manners, please. That's what ran life in Austen's Britain but it did not at the Kyoto court.
If we take a look at Edward Seidensticker's diary Genji Days, a record of his time translating the Genji, we can see that such word choices, and the beliefs behind them, didn't come as a result of an accident. One thing that stands out is that we can see him constantly comparing Murasaki's work to Jane Austen's. This isn't just a problem for Seidensticker. Members of the British and American literary press, whenever they turn their eyes to Japanese literature, are doing this all the time. For about a hundred years now it has been practically a job requirement that Murasaki Shikibu be regarded as the Japanese Marcel Proust, because people like Virginia Woolf thought so. Collectively, these writers and critics insist on seeing Japanese literature as a subset of European, or, laughably, American literature. It doesn't seem to occur to anyone that the unconscious bias that assumes some national literatures are superior to the rest are based on a historical phenomenon that does not reflect an objective reality. I'll explain shortly how this bias influenced Seidensticker's understanding and translation of the Genji.
Using the words "Prince" and "Princess" for the characters in the Genji feels especially inauthentic. "Princess" is probably the best we can do for translating 姫様, among other terms for the women of nobility, but because princess has such strong associations with the European fairytale tradition, not to mention its feudal court system, I would rather we just leave "hime-sama" as is and add a footnote to explain why "princess" doesn't cover it for the Japanese context. I see princesses and emperors in the Genji and cannot escape the proximity these terms have to European royalty. A "bishop" for a practitioner of the localized Japanese religions? No! I see Seidensticker use the phrase "a cloistered maiden" at one point and all that comes to mind is "Romeo, Romeo, where art thou?" Genji is not Shakespeare's Hal en route to becoming King Henry IV, and the women of the Heian court aren't "cloistered" so much as bound by the strict rules of rank and function for their time and place. We can say many things about Murasaki's men and women but not that they are living under a European, Christian, social system that created such things as "monarchies", "emperors" and "damsels in distress".
But maybe my biggest complaint, not so much with Seidensticker's word choices but with the Anglo culture that cannot help but misread the Genji, is for the way the main character Hikaru Genji's name has been translated. It is by no means a major crime that the "Hikaru" of Genji is usually translated in such a way that we have come to regard the emperor Kiritsubo's son as the "Shining" Prince of the tale. "Hikaru" does imply a luminary, luminous, or illuminating quality. By why not just call Genji "brilliant"? For years after I first heard Genji referred to as the "shining" one of the tale I was baffled for why anyone would be referred to as that. Whenever I see "shining" I think of things (a forehead, a distant star, a freshly mopped floor) and not a term to describe the spiritual nature of a person. I have never heard anyone referred to as a "shining" person. But I have heard people called "brilliant," and for times too numerous to count. The narrator of The Tale of Genji certainly thinks Genji is "brilliant", as it is obvious from the start that she is quite enamored with this man whose beauty and talent she sees as exceptional. Maybe it's just me, but if any woman ever called me "shining" I'd be concerned. As soon as we stopped conversing I'd be in need a mirror to look for what part of me came off as glaringly bright. But if a woman called me "brilliant"? Well, I'd have to blushingly accept the praise while looking for an appropriate way to return the gesture.
But all that aside, Seidensticker's Genji Days should be read for the pleasure of observing a craftsman at his shop. I would almost call it a phenomenon that such a book was ever published at all. Seidensticker details his academic life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while in Tokyo his time speaking with the luminaries of literature such as Kawabata and Mishima, and his impressions while translating the Genji. None of this is especially stimulating enough for publication, and as a general rule you would think an academic's passing thoughts written down in his diary not the stuff of life the world really needs. But I am glad we have it, for it helps answer the questions I posed at the opening of this essay.
A picture begins to form of the author and translator the deeper we get into the diary. We can see the impact both his life and work had on the way the Genji was translated into English. One would think Seidensticker's thoughts regarding the student activists of the period protesting the Vietnam War, straight through to their dethronement of President Nixon for his part in the Watergate scandal, would have absolutely no bearing at all on the world of the Heian court that Seidensticker was translating. He is none too favorable regarding these activists, and there is a "well would you look at these long-haired, filthy young people" tone when he sees them lining up to vote. But that feeling doesn't entirely translate to thoughts about his own students. As someone who once led classrooms, I was most interested in the passages that show Seidensticker as teacher. He notes when students make particularly interesting points about the Genji and Japanese literature. There is a moment when we see the class discussing the merits of the various modern day Japanese translations of the Genji: Yosano Akiko's, Tanizaki Junichiro's, and Enchi Fumiko's. He notes the class had interesting things to say but, alas, he doesn't tell us what specifically.
I had a theory, prior to reading Genji Days, that Seidensticker, rather than translating directly from Murasaki's classical Japanese, had leaned heavily on Yosano Akiko's translation. There is no evidence for that in the diary so into the trash goes that theory. In fact, I got the impression that Seidensticker's abilities with classical Japanese was so remarkable that he could pick up and read Murasaki's language like you or I might pick up and read a novel of contemporary, highly familiar Japanese, ones written by Higashino Keigo, for example. We do see that he read Enchi Fumiko's version very carefully, to compare her Genji to his, and one gets the impression that he had greater respect for hers than even Arthur Waley's greatly admired one. One of the great surprises of reading Genji Days is that Seidensticker, though respectful of Waley, is highly critical of his methods. And it was definitely not a matter of professional jealousy or competitiveness that caused him to be critical (ordinarily, nothing stirs the passions of an academic more profoundly than professional rivalry). Rather, Seidensticker's criticisms of Waley are detailed, reasonable, and for that very insightful to read.
It is hard to identify what exactly were Seidensticker's politics. His disgust regarding the student activists would tell us we're reading the thoughts of a political conservative. It doesn't help that he refers to American blacks as "negroes". But the Kennedys used that term around those years too, and they did a great amount for American blacks, unless you ask one of today's political activists, and then they will tell you the Kennedys did little to nothing for them, especially for using unsightly terms like "negroes." When we think of an American conservative, does a fancy for Tokyo's sex clubs come to mind? Not really. I was amused to discover that Seidensticker and Donald Richie were visiting these as early as the turn of the 1970s. When we read Richie's journals published in 2004, we can see that thirty years later their fascination for the clubs hadn't waned in the least. Nowadays we'd think such writing of the lascivious quarters for publication no big deal, but when Seidensticker was jotting these thoughts down we were only about a decade removed from the liberalization of the censorship laws. I wouldn't say that Seidensticker was joining the flood of Woodstock-era free love expression everywhere, but it didn't look like he had any intention of allowing a scruple to bar an entry into the diary, and even all the way into publication, when it came to the erotic.
Also, though he shows contempt toward the student activists of his time, one entry shows him rushing out to the Shibuya train station in Tokyo after he saw a news report on television that described a protest taking place over public policy and transportation. Unlike the leisurely middle class venting spleen, these protestors were common working class people struggling to make ends meet, and their anger appealed to him. It caused Seidensticker to reflect on the 1960 protests in response to America creating a deal that allowed Japan to be used as a staging ground for America's incursions into the Asian economies. The student protests, that year, caused one young woman to be killed, Kanba Michiko. That Seidensticker showed a great interest in the protests of the commoner doesn't really clear up what exactly his politics were; but it does show us the depths of his engagement with Japanese culture such that Kanba Michiko, even a decade later, was a ready-at-hand part of his consciousness.
I suppose we could take Seidensticker's interest in Tokyo's sex clubs as just the admissions of a horny middle-aged man. But I prefer to see them as a sign of a major contradiction in Seidensticker's thought. At times, throughout the diaries, he has come around to Genji's motives, and can sympathize with him as a fellow man. But mainly he disapproves of his treatment of women, and in ways similar to the puritanical approach to Genji found in most Western writers' response to the story today. From that perspective, Genji as "philanderer" is not even the half of it. Genji as rapist, Genji as groomer, every fashionable mode of expressing one's highly moralizing discomfort toward the often unfathomable variety of the human sexual response is brought to bear time and time again. It's remarkable how quickly today's reader seems to forget that The Tale of Genji was written by a woman, is told through the perspective of a woman who is observing Genji pleasurably from within the same court, who interjects herself into the story now and then simply because she cannot resist commenting on how he appears the epitome of refinement and beauty and taste (even when he falters). If this book is, by today's standard, the record of a male chauvinist whose behavior needs to be deplored, why is it that the woman who wrote the book, and the woman who narrates the tale, is at such pains to document exhaustively the life of a man she perceives as exceptionally beautiful? By that standard, shouldn't Murasaki be castigated too for writing with such forgiveness for her shadow soul? One wonders who would be the greater masochist if Genji's unrelenting chauvinism were indeed at play, the woman who wrote it or those who read all 1,200 pages just to tut-tut their way through to the closing pages. I cannot make sense for why Seidensticker, a frequenter of Tokyo's sex clubs, would be on the side of the overwhelmingly noisy faction who can only read the Genji puritanically. But his moralism, as expressed in the diary, is definitely of a stripe.
I believe it is exactly for this contradiction that helps explain Seidensticker's most interesting entries in Genji Days. No matter which version of the Genji we pick up, whether in Japanese or English, one notices within a chapter or two that Murasaki's aim isn't satire or tragedy. There is great passion and emotion throughout the tale, but we never reach a Shakespearean Fifth Act where the story is made clear through a tragic flaw. This absence causes Seidensticker to wonder if every translator, struggling to understand the nuance and subtlety of Murasaki's classical Japanese, has somehow overlooked Murasaki's satirical intent? He writes, "Comes the next question: if there is sardonic humor, how am I to convey it in English, without being less than faithful to my original? (Arthur) Waley had few qualms about (marital) infidelity, and yet very little of this humor, if he was aware of it, comes across in his translation." It is a fascinating question. I have wondered it myself. I cannot imagine that a woman as intelligent as Murasaki, whose knowledge of human relations was insightful and profound, didn't find at least some of her story amusing. None of the translations of the Genji show the slightest bit of humor, though. I feel it has to be there somewhere, and that the translators, not a match for Murasaki's nuance and intelligence, have failed to bring it out.
For instance, there has to be some humor somewhere in the earlier chapters when Genji and his friend Tō no Chūjō take their turns with a big-nosed, much older, sexually voracious woman named Naishi. The humor is not there in Seidensticker's version. Judging by his diary entries, he finds Genji's behavior in scenes like these appalling. He is especially disgusted by the way Genji steals the pre-pubescent Murasaki (the character, not the author) and houses her for, he assumes, sexual favors primarily. I think anyone who views the taking in of Murasaki by Genji for such an exclusive purpose the product of a one-tracked mind. For starters, Genji was around eighteen at the time when he wished to bring Murasaki into his own quarters at Nijō. The narration shows that, in many ways, Genji isn't fully formed himself. Later chapters show that Genji seems to have a particular psychological need to house and to give a chance those women who would have otherwise been ousted by the societal ranking system. The parents of young women seem to have failed them everywhere throughout the story. This thread is most pronounced in the Akashi sequence where the woman's father's failure at court, whatever caused him to be exiled, becomes the daughter's fate. She is destined for a sad, isolated life because of it. And she seems willing to accept her fate. But Genji wishes to provide her a place in society where she will be able to develop her talents, which he believes in, which she herself believes in, but she hesitates to join him at Nijō for her own enormously complex set of psychological reasons, which is hard to understand, but it is for this reason that she makes for an interesting character.
One can definitely read into the tale that Murasaki, an outsider herself, found Genji's sensitivity to outcast women a highly admirable trait, and that at least through the first twenty chapters of the Genji she takes it to be the defining trait of his development, the primary source for his brilliance.
We should not forget that Genji's mother herself, very much like the women Genji tends to favor, was an outcast too. Full of rage and resentment that such an undeserving woman could have won over the Kiritsubo emperor's heart, the women of the court ostracized Genji's mother until she had to flee for her home far away from the court where she would eventually die with a broken spirit. For my reading of the Genji, Genji's desire to take in women like Murasaki and Akashi was rooted in his consciousness which was coextensive with his mother's experience. He would eventually have an affair with Fujitsubo who, not coincidentally, resembled his mother. It seems obvious to me that this is the case Murasaki the author is making, that Genji's relationships with women wasn't primarily sexual in nature (that it wasn't strictly about conquest for him, taking advantage of women's vulnerability, etc. etc.), but rooted psychologically in the shared experience he had with a mother he adored and never knew.
Seidensticker's ideological bias truly shows in the way he describes the story of Naishi, the large-nosed libertine, as "one of those stories that lead nowhere." By that he means the inclusion of Naishi's story has no bearing at all on the overall story Murasaki has to tell. Seidensticker is seen constantly gauging whether The Tale of Genji conforms to the expectations of the modern novel. As a literary critic, one could simply note how The Tale of Genji's form of storytelling differs from a modern novelist's like Jane Austen and leave it at that. But according to Seidensticker, these are the moments where Murasaki's "imagination has momentarily faltered." By that he is saying that since the Naishi character's story "doesn't go anywhere" it ought to have been edited out, as it would have been in a modern novel. Or in the case of Akashi, he finds her an abstract, unreal character; he cannot understand her motivations because he feels that Murasaki hasn't made them perfectly clear to us, as a modern novel would, with its explanatory apparatus and finely calibrated detail, a format and an expectation that lets us know who exactly we are observing. It is this kind of criticism that Seidensticker occasionally, but all too frequently uses as a means for evaluating Murasaki the artist. This is what I mean by the "ideology" with which he uses to translate her work. His assumption is that the modern novel is the culmination and perfection of a form of storytelling that is the standard by which all other forms of storytelling must be compared. And since Murasaki's story doesn't often conform to expectation, one is left with no other conclusion than to state she is the lesser artist than Austen or Tolstoy. A great artist, for sure, but not one that can be categorized among the supreme.
I am not persuaded. Murasaki's aesthetic form is its own genius. I am actually more warm to hers (without getting into detail here) than the artificial structure found in most, if not all, modern novels. The Tale of Genji is brilliant and uncategorizable precisely because it doesn't resemble a modern novel. I am not convinced that the arts are forever progressing into more perfect forms, mainly because I do not believe as human beings we are getting better and better by the day. In my view, The Tale of Genji was written as history, with commentary included from the author, who is writing it down in a diary, of which she intends to share with others. Whatever else we can say about Murasaki's masterpiece, it is most definitely not a product that was written for the whims of the marketplace.
Another one of Seidensticker's head-scratching readings of the Genji is that he is rather warm to the Kokiden woman who was most responsible for leading the women of the court to torment and destroy Genji's mother's nerves until she got sick, fled the court, and died in isolation out in the countryside. Seidensticker is easily offended by Genji's sexual morality, and yet for this woman who drove another woman to despair and then to an early grave he notes, rather strangely, "I like her in spite of everything."
The following comment from Seidensticker in 1973 reminded me of the literary critic Harold Bloom at his worst, and he was almost always at his worst when critiquing work outside the Western canon: "Murasaki (the character) is not being herself, not allowing her honest feelings to have their way. Which is to say, in this case, that she is being Chinese.” Adding, “The heavy rhetoric is as from a Chinese history.” That a character doesn't express herself freely is as Western a reading of the East Asian sensibility as it was all those years when a "Chinaman" was taken to be, by his habitual reserve, duplicitous. I note this not to suggest that Seidensticker was racist (a ridiculous claim at any rate considering that he dedicated his life to bridging a foreign, alien culture to his own) but only to note that his intellectual orientation came with an unexamined Western bias. The bias wasn't even in its vicious, colonial form, but it was most definitely there.
I should say here that my opinion of Seidensticker's translated works, read as literature in English regardless of the original work it is translating, is ambivalent. He had complained to Donald Richie later on in life that everyone has forgotten him, and that his work isn't valued anymore because everyone has lost a taste for elegance in prose. That second point is certainly true. But when we compare Seidensticker's prose to truly elegant writers, of just about any of those artists writing in the French classical style, even up through late 20th century French styles as divergent as François Furet and Gilles Deleuze, Seidensticker's elegance doesn't compare. Elegance, by definition, is passion leveled by rhythm. I feel that Seidensticker is missing the passion. In Genji Days I find a man who is committed to Japanese literature but one who is not exactly possessed or passionate by it. He was its great servant but he was most definitely not its saint.
Reading his translations of Snow Country and The Makioka Sisters side by side with the originals is an extremely frustrating experience. Tanizaki's many-layered and tiered prose style is probably impossible to translate accurately anyway, but because Seidensticker, no doubt by necessity, had to rearrange Tanizaki's prose so that it might fit English rhythms, one can see that we are not reading a translation so much as a transposition. Since Kawabata's sentences and paragraphs aren't as elaborate (in fact, one of the great surprises I found when I first read him in Japanese is how simple his structures are), he makes for a better study of the translations. I often found Seidensticker's solutions to the difficulty of translating Kawabata's language brilliantly solved. At other times, maddening. He leaves some parts out, combines paragraphs, condenses others, rearranges text where I see no reason for it. I am left wondering if his brilliance is therefore merely idiosyncratic, or that the lapses of judgment I see a reflection of a mind that tends to simply wander off the range.
Though I am being critical of Seidensticker, Genji Days contains plenty of interesting observations of not only the Genji but of Japanese literature in general. I would highly recommend it if you have a passion for Japanese literature with the intent of learning its secrets. Without question, the entry I found most interesting was when a reader of his translation of The Tale of Genji pre-publication told him that he feels that Arthur Waley's narrator of the Genji seems to be masculine whereas Seidensticker's is sometimes masculine, sometimes feminine. Seidensticker's response to these comments is almost tragic in nature: "I suppose he is right about Waley. And about me? Well, even if he is, the matter is much too complicated to be tended to at this late date."
And so I refer again to the opening line of The Makioka Sisters. Maybe Seidensticker got the feminine right, maybe it was beyond him, but why should we be relying on a translator anyway? Let us get to know Japanese women on their own right, and in their own language, and then decide for ourselves to take up the challenge of answering whether literature can ever really compare to the real thing.
[Photograph: Cover to an edition of The Tale of Genji in English, translated by Edward Seidensticker.]