Japanese to english translation
Dan spent several years teaching English in north-eastern Japan and worked as a commercial and literary translator for almost a decade.
mambo by hitomi kanehara
The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction (Comma Press)
At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them.
But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time…
The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company.
As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’
dead in venice by masahiko shimada
GRANTA, Essays & Memoir
A Japanese novelist reflects on death, wanderlust and his lifelong obsession with the ‘Floating City’.
‘Before long, I would have to come up with an answer to the question: if I wasn’t a fish spawned in the Brenta river, why was I so compelled to keep returning?’
