The Curious Case of the Translating Mystery Writer

The Curious Case of the Translating Mystery Writer

I’m a translator. I turn Japanese women’s tales of romance, resistance, and even some of their gory murder mysteries into English prose. Funny, I don’t remember when exactly I decided to write a mystery novel of my own. What surprised me most about the process was its uncanny similarity to translating.

Who knows though? Perhaps that had been my plan all along, back when I was a girl in North Carolina reading Trixie Belden by flashlight or snooping through abandoned houses like Nancy Drew. If you can see it you can dream it, they say. And I dreamed it. Just like my favorite Japanese mystery authors did.

The dream grew a bit clearer after my older sister introduced me to Sujata Massey’s mystery series set in Japan. Both my sister and I had been born in Japan and gravitated to anything that celebrated our background. Massey’s main character was a Japanese American antiques dealer and amateur sleuth whose curios always seemed to entice murder. As an academic, I was attracted to the way Massey spun her stories against the backdrop of Tokyo, chasing killers even as she subtly educated her readers about Japanese culture.

Confident that I could at least give writing my own mystery a try, I packed up my car, my dog, and some books and headed to our family’s rugged log cabin in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. If I was ever going to write a novel, this was the summer to start.

I had brought a heavy Japanese-English dictionary along with me to aid in the translation projects I was also planning to tackle. As I sat at the table, staring at that thick tome, it never occurred to me that in many ways translating and creative writing were not much different. Both require moving one system of thought into another. Rather than translating words from one language to another, writers transform ideas, emotions, experiences from an inchoate chamber in their imagination onto a printed page.  

Gradually I came to see that translation and mystery fiction are connected in other ways as well. The translator is a kind of detective, trying to plumb the depths of a text, pulling back layers of meaning to grasp what is at the heart, the wick, the core, the secret meaning. And in some ways, the fiction writer is like a translator, trying to find the right words, the design, the tropes to translate ideas into text.

As a translator, you’re never quite sure where the author is headed. You have to follow their words. Sometimes the author ventures into flights of fancy, beautiful reveries, or terrifying terrain that you had not anticipated. You can’t control what the author has written. In some ways, I found my own writing careening down surprising paths, too. I’d be planning to take my story in one direction, when all of suddenly, my character would veer off down a completely unexpected path. I had little choice but to follow.

Once she has a draft, the translator digs in deeper, seeking hidden streams of connection between scenes or images missed in the first reading. The translator looks for resonances among the author’s work and works by others. It’s important to appreciate the timbre of the piece, the echo, and the unspoken. On the other hand, a creative writer dips from a reservoir of memories, experiences, and fond associations almost always unawares. They bubble up into her work unbidden.

Initially, when I had set out to write, I had seen myself in my conscious dreams imitating Sujata Massey. I would get gritty like Patricia Cornwell, whose Kay Scarpetta digs into cadavers seeking clues.  I would write beautifully and longingly of a lost world, like Kazuo Ishiguro. To my surprise, none of these models stood beside me as I wrote. It was the authors I had translated earlier who began whispering in my ear. Their words slipped through the keyboard, their wily characters nodded at mine, their favorite tropes filled my pages.

Inspiration is curious and willful. It refuses to be controlled. The inspiration I thought I had sought eluded me. Instead, it was the voices of all those writers who had traveled with me over my long career as a Japanese literature professor and translator who came to me as I struggled with my novel, making suggestions, directing the plot. 

Hey, this character reminds me of Uno Chiyo, I realized. 

Uno Chiyo was the subject of my dissertation. She was a sassy, irrepressible woman, whose self-referential fiction sparks with sensual delights. No surprise, then, that she would refuse to sit quietly in Japan.  Though long-dead, she managed to defy the boundaries of death to visit me in my Tennessee cabin, inserting herself in my writing.  

And so I wrote. Calling on my childlike self who snooped with Nancy Drew, my translator self that communed with Uno Chiyo, and my determined, hopeful self that sat at a lopsided wooden table in eastern Tennessee.  When I was lucky, the prose flowed, all my selves cheering on the work.  We translated each other.  A mystery indeed.

—

Rebecca Copeland is a writer of fiction and literary criticism and a translator of Japanese literature. Her stories travel between Japan and the American South and touch on questions of identity, belonging, and self-discovery. The Kimono Tattoo, her debut work, takes readers on a journey into Kyoto’s intricate world of kimono design, and into a mystery that interweaves family dynamics, loss, and reconciliation.

Her academic writings have focused almost exclusively on modern Japanese women writers, their battles against conservative literary expectations, and their wonderful, at times subversive creativity. She has translated the works of writer Uno Chiyo and novelist Kirino Natsuo. Her translation of Kirino’s The Goddess Chronicle won the PEN Translates Award, English PEN in 2013 and The Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, 2014-2015.

Copeland was born the fourth daughter to missionary parents in a Japan still recovering from the aftermath of war.  Shortly after her birth, the family relocated to Wake Forest, North Carolina, where she spent glorious childhood days running carefree through the quiet town and listening to her older sisters relay their stories about Japan.  As a junior in college, Copeland had the opportunity to spend a year in Japan, where she studied traditional dance, learned to wear a kimono, and traveled, making ridiculous mistakes in the Japanese language. Afterwards she earned a PhD in Japanese literature at Columbia University, and she is now a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

THE KIMONO TATTOO

“The Kimono Tattoo is an intelligent escape-into the past, into the mind, into a fascinating culture. Finely crafted and perfectly paced, this literary thriller remains engrossing long after the last sentence, opening a world that lingers in the imagination.”

-Jeannette Cooperman, St. Louis Media Hall of Fame journalist, essayist, and author of A Circumstance of Blood

Fictional dangers become real to American translator, Ruth Bennett, in this high-octane multicultural thriller.

Recently returned to her childhood home in Kyoto, after losing her job in the United States-and her marriage-Ruth was hoping her new job would offer a quiet diversion, perhaps even boost her flagging confidence. But she soon finds the storyline in the mysterious novel she’s translating is leaking into her everyday life. Fictional characters turn out to be real, and the past catches up with the present in a menacing way. Using her skills as a translator and her intimate knowledge of both kimono and Kyoto, Ruth is forced to confront a vicious killer along with her own painful family secrets.

“In a tale as intricately patterned as a Jacquard-weave obi, Rebecca Copeland’s American heroine finds herself entangled in the delicate threads of Kyoto’s kimono industry as well as the darker skeins of yakuza, tattoo parlors, and rebellious youth. The reader is quickly drawn in to the dangerous twists and turns while Copeland’s detailed knowledge of Kyoto comes through on every page-a treat for all who love this city, and a great read.”

-Liza Dalby, anthropologist, artist, and author of the best seller, Geisha; Kimono: Fashioning Culture; and the novels The Tale of Murasaki and Hidden Buddhas: A Novel of Karma and Chaos

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Category: On Writing