Mieko Kanai

Oh, Tama! (eBook, ePUB)

A Mejiro Novel
Übersetzer: Aoyama, Tomoko; Mccarthy, Paul

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Note, this book was released in Japan in 2014 by Kurodahan Press but never distributed to the trade outside Japan.

The Translation Market

• this book will be of interest to readers of Japanese literature in translation, especially those looking for a "new voice"; there are 103 programs offering degrees in Japanese literature in the US
• the market for translation is growing: in Y2015, 23 Japanese lit titles were published, out of 600 (up from 340 in 2010) (source Three Percent)
• Amazon is the largest single publisher of translation (having invested $10 million in development in 2015); this increases visibility and demand for works in translation

The work of a leading contemporary author. In Japan, Mieko Kanai has a large following and is respected for her acute observational skills and her fluency in poetry, fiction, and criticism. Oh, Tama! is part of her signature "Mejiro" series of novels that probe the lives of modern Japanese who seem almost inhumanly witty and are both self-absorbed and enthralled by modern theories of art, film, and photography (the author's passions).

Award-winning author. Among the author's numerous writing awards in Japan are the 1979 Izumi Kyoka Prize and-for Oh, Tama!-the 1988 Women's Literature Prize. This year, 2018, Kanai was awarded the prestigious Art Encouragement Prize by Japan's Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Such awards are not so common in the West, but in Japan are highly valued, a mark of popular acceptance, literary merit, and commercial appeal.

Life in Tokyo as it is today, or maybe isn't. Kanai's characters are decidedly quirky, and impossible coincidences bring them and their lives crashing together in unexpected ways. The book is richly humorous and whimsical, a pleasure to read, but serious themes of abandonment and disconnectedness are lurking beneath the surface.

Translations are booming. American readers are embracing foreign works as never before, and here's a great candidate to give readers a new taste that is accessible, clever, and engaging. Perfect commuter reading!

Reminds one of . . . Yumiko Kurahashi and Yoko Tawada, while the urbane scenes and good-for-nothing kind of protagonists are definitely Murakamian.

Cats! 'Nuff said. The star of the show.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stone Bridge Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 23. April 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781611729368
• Artikelnr.: 56828761

Autorenporträt

Author Mieko Kanai (b. 1947) is a prominent Japanese writer and essayist, and an admired reviewer of books and film, known for her scathing and perceptive wit.She read widely in fiction and poetry from an early age. In 1968 she received the Gendaishi Techo Prize for poetry. In 1979 she received the Izumi Kyoka Prize, and in 1998 the current work, Oh, Tama! (Tama ya), received the Women's Literature Award. She has a devoted following in Japan and has built up her own world of fiction with a sensual style.

Translator Tomoko Aoyama (BA Ochanomizu University; MA Tokyo University of Foreign Studies; PhD University of Queensland) is Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her recent publications include Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008) and Girl Reading Girl in Japan, co-edited with Barbara Hartley (Routledge, 2010). She also guest edited the special issues of Asian Studies Review vol. 32, no. 3, 2008 on "The Girl, the Body, and the Nation in Japan and the Pacific Rim", and US-Japan Women's Journal (with Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase and Satoko Kan) no. 38 2010 on "Shojo Manga: Past, Present and Future". She was awarded the Asian Studies Association of Australia's Mid-career Researcher Prize for Excellence in Asian Studies (2010) and the Inaugural Inoue Yasushi Award for Outstanding Research in Japanese Literature in Australia (2007). She has translated in collaboration with Barbara Hartley Kanai Mieko's novel Indian Summer (Cornell East Asia Series) and a number of critical essays and short stories by Mishima Yukio, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, Honda Masuko and others.

Translator Paul McCarthy, double-majored in English Literature and Japanese as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, and then took an AM and PhD in Japanese Literature at Harvard University (1975). He has taught Japanese Literature at universities in the United States, and Comparative Literature at universities in Japan and Korea for the past forty years. McCarthy has already translated another of Mieko Kanai's novels, The Word Book, and also The Moon Over the Mountain & Other Stories, by Atsushi Nakajima, both for the JLPP program. Other of his translated works are Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's memoir Childhood Years, his short stories The Gourmet Club, and his novel A Cat, a Man and Two Women, which won the US-Japan Friendship Commission Translation Prize. He has also translated Takeshi Umehara's Lotus and Other Tales of Medieval Japan, and Zenno Ishigami's Disciples of the Buddha.

Inhaltsangabe

Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Oh, Tama
2. The Gift
3. Amanda Anderson’s Photographs
4. Wandering Soul
5. Evanescence
6. Balls of Confetti
On Oh,Tama!: In Lieu of an Afterword
Afterword to the Paperback Edition
Translators’ Notes
Contributors