From The Millions:
This year Japanese popular literature superstar Tomihiko Morimi was translated into English for the first time—and the second time! Yen Press released Penguin Highway on April 23 and The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl on August 13. Translations were handled by Andrew Cunningham and Emily Balistrieri respectively.
Penguin Highway is the story of a boy, Aoyama, who takes “the most notes of any fourth grader in Japan. Maybe in the world.” He researches his first crush and his environment, and when penguins start appearing around the suburb where he lives, he and his friends investigate.
The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl is set in Kyoto, as many Morimi works are, where a college student struggles to find romance on a road paved with fantasy and angst. After spending nearly a year trying to get the girl of his dreams to notice him, can he finally get a date?
Translators Balistrieri and Cunningham got together to discuss their experiences translating Morimi and their impressions of his work.
Emily Balistrieri: One thing, I think, is interesting is that, so these are the first two novels of his to be translated, but in terms of style, they’re about as far apart as you can get. Penguin Highway in Japanese has always been my go-to recommendation for Japanese learners, since the fourth-grade protagonist makes it easier to read, while the first time I read Night Is Short in Japanese a few years ago, I really struggled. Despite the novels’ differences, though, I think it’s still clear that Aoyama is a Morimi guy, from the way he thinks and, well, loves. Is there anything you paid attention to specifically when crafting his voice?
Andrew Cunningham: I certainly did an unusual number of drafts on the first couple of pages. Aoyama is a bit of a snot, but you don’t want him to be unlikable. I tinkered a bunch until I found the right balance. The wrong tone on the first page of a book can really set readers on the wrong path, so I always spend extra time on them. Generally, though, this is a case where Morimi’s own voicing is so distinctive that I found I was instinctively locking into the right way to translate things. Like, I realized after a while that Aoyama was only using one word as a strengthener, and combed back through the translation to make sure they were all the same…and I’d translated taihen as “extremely” every time without even noticing the pattern. It just felt right.
The Night Is Short has that exact same delicate balance of tone, only twice, for two very different voices. How did you approach that?
EB: The style of Night Is Short is pretty much peak Morimi in the sense that the style in this (and Tatami Galaxy, which hasn’t been translated yet but has a fantastic anime adaptation, as well as Taiyō no tō, Koibumi no gijutsu) is what people usually think of when they think of him. Not that every work of his fits into this scheme, obviously, but broadly he has this mode and then his spooky spirited away/supernatural mode, which you can see in titles like Kitsune no hanashi, Yoiyama mangekyō, and Yakō.
So this mode features these “rotten” university students, with what I feel are hearts of gold, and their various attempts at trying to get the girl. They tend to think in this sort of complicated or at least over-the-top way, which was once called “fuguing” by a mentor at a translation workshop I attended. I liked that term, so I sort of latched on to that idea, but the less roundabout answer is that lots of Morimi protagonists have this sort of voice, and I’ve been doing samples and tinkering with it for years now, so my main task is to just push it and get it to the point that it’s as fun to read in English as it is in Japanese.
Then for the girl’s voice in Night Is Short, she was actually sort of too similar to him in some ways (in the ways that would have been easy to render in English), but different enough in other ways that I tried to simply compare her to him to take away or add things as necessary. And I tried to make her sound a little more proper, I guess you could say, since she does speak more politely.
AC: She has a kind of giddy enthusiasm that always comes through, while he has a somewhat world-weary cynicism. It’s pretty telegraphed when the narrators change, but I think you could open your translation to any given page and know very quickly who was speaking.
Link to the rest at The Millions
The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl