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Minae Mizumura's An I-Novel is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their family's arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude and over the phone with her sister about their life in the United States, trying to break the news that she has decided to go back to Japan and become a writer in her mother tongue. Published in 1995, this formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. It liberally incorporated English words and phrases, and the entire text was printed horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left. In a luminous meditation on how a person becomes a writer, Mizumura transforms the "I-novel," a Japanese confessional genre that toys with fictionalization. An I-Novel tells the story of two sisters while taking up urgent questions of identity, race, and language. Above all, it considers what it means to write in the era of the hegemony of English--and what it means to be a writer of Japanese in particular. Juliet Winters Carpenter masterfully renders a novel that once appeared untranslatable into English.… (more)
User reviews
After I finished this novel I tried to figure out what exactly made it so impactful for me. I am
I won't repeat the history of either the I-novel form in Japanese literature or the dual-language aspect of the original novel. Those things are discussed in most of the book blurbs and, if you're like me, you'll look up more information about I-novels before starting this one. Doing that extra little bit of work does help to make this an even more impressive work, but certainly isn't necessary to enjoy the book.
I don't know Japanese and so never read the original, so I can't speak to the quality of the translation beyond acknowledging that it worked for me. That alone makes it a success to some degree. My understanding from the one person I know who read the original and this translation is that it is impressive, so I will go with that.
I highly recommend this to readers who like to explore that area where the minutiae of everyday life meets the lifelong arcs of a character's, and by extension our own, life. This is not action packed, but you will definitely have made a journey once you complete this book.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.