Contemporary Authors

Kazuki Kaneshiro graduated from Keio University and made his literary debut with Revolution No. 3 in 1998, winning the Shosetsu Gendai Prize for New Writers. In 2000, Kaneshiro won the Naoki Prize for GO, which tackles issues of ethnicity and discrimination in Japanese society. The novel’s film adaptation went on to win every major award in Japan in 2002. Many of his works have been made into films or manga, and Kaneshiro has been adept at working synergistically across multiple formats and genres, writing the original concepts and scripts for the TV series SP and CRISIS.

Takami Nieda was born in New York City and has degrees in English from Stanford University and Georgetown University. She has translated and edited more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction from Japanese into English and has received numerous grants in support of her translations, including the PEN/Heim Translation Fund for the translation of Kazuki Kaneshiro’s GO. Her translations have also appeared in Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and PEN America. Nieda teaches writing and literature at Seattle Central College in Washington State.

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Go
Go
Writer
(2001)
SP: The motion picture kakumei hen
SP: The motion picture kakumei hen
Writer
(2011)
Fly, Daddy, Fly
Fly, Daddy, Fly
Writer
(2005)
Hana
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(2003)
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Okusama wa toriatsukai chûi (TV Mini-Series) (original story - 10 episodes, 2017) (teleplay - 10 episodes, 2017)
- Episode #1.10 (2017) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
- Episode #1.9 (2017) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
- Episode #1.8 (2017) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
- Episode #1.7 (2017) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
- Episode #1.6 (2017) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
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Crisis: Kôan Kidô Sôsatai Tokusô-han (TV Mini-Series) (original story - 10 episodes, 2017) (teleplay - 10 episodes, 2017)
- Episode #1.10 (2017) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
- Episode #1.9 (2017) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
- Episode #1.8 (2017) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
- Episode #1.7 (2017) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
- Episode #1.6 (2017) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
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Border: Keishichô Sôsa Ikka Satsujinhan Sôsa Dai 4-gakkari (TV Mini-Series) (original story - 9 episodes, 2014) (teleplay - 9 episodes, 2014)
- Episode #1.9 (2014) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
- Episode #1.8 (2014) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
- Episode #1.7 (2014) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
- Episode #1.6 (2014) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
- Episode #1.5 (2014) ... (original story) / (teleplay)
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2011 SP: The motion picture kakumei hen (story and screenplay)
2010 SP: The motion picture yabô hen (screenplay)
2007 SP: Keishichô keibibu keigoka dauyonkakari (TV Series) (idea) / (teleplay)
2006 Fly, Daddy, Fly (novel)
2005 Fly, Daddy, Fly (novel) / (screenplay)
2003 Hana (novel)
2001 Go (novel)
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2017 BORDER2 Shokuzai (TV Movie)

Go
Kazuki Kaneshiro, trans. from the Japanese by Takami Nieda. AmazonCrossing, $19.95 (172p) ISBN 978-1-5039-3737-6
Originally published in Japan in 2000, Kaneshiro’s intense coming-of-age story follows high school student Sugihara, who is “Zainichi,” a pejorative term for someone of Korean heritage raised in Japan. Sugihara is trained by his father, a former nationally ranked boxer, and regularly fights off bullies: “I had a 23-0 record and was known throughout the school as the reigning badass.” Violence permeates the novel: in addition to school fights, Sugihara’s father “nearly beat me to death three times,” his friend Jeong-il dies in a senseless stabbing, and the enigmatic girl he falls in love with first desires him when she sees him drop-kick the players on an opposing basketball team. Kaneshiro integrates themes of ethnic heritage, prejudice, identity, and belonging into Sugihara’s relationships with his parents, friends, and girlfriend (from whom he withholds his given name, Lee, for fear of losing her). The witty, sarcastic narrative voice conveys great poignancy, as when Sugihara confesses his true ethnicity and hears: “Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence.” A memorable, conflicted, defiant protagonist and an idiosyncratic love story drive this thought-provoking page-turner. (Mar.)

Kazuki Kaneshiro’s Go: Strength and irony in the face of prejudice
by Kris Kosaka

Contributing Writer

Feb 24, 2018
Article history

One of the most memorable characters in modern Japanese literature is not Japanese. Sugihara, the 17-year-old narrator of “Go,” by Kazuki Kaneshiro, is a third-generation Zainichi Korean in his last year of high school. Son of a North Korean ex-boxer and shrewdly adept at silencing bullies, Sugihara has “betrayed” his ancestry to enter a Japanese high school after following North Korean education at a Chongryon- (association for Zainichi in Japan) affiliated junior high.

Go: A Coming of Age Novel, by Kazuki Kaneshiro, Translated by Takami Nieda.
172 pages
AMAZONCROSSING, Fiction.

Written with poignant authenticity — the author, Kaneshiro, is an ethnic Korean, born and raised in Saitama Prefecture — Sugihara’s melded worldview on his family, his friendships, his brush with tragedy and his love for a Japanese girl became a runaway best-seller, won the 2000 Naoki Prize and was quickly adapted into an award-winning film in 2001.

On Feb. 1, “Go” was published in English by AmazonCrossing, and translator Takami Nieda is excited to introduce Sugihara to audiences outside of Asia. As Nieda explains, “Sugihara is so complex — he’s not a victim, although he faces a lot of adversity and discrimination, yet he always seems to meet prejudice head-on. It was a kind of narrative that I really wished had existed for me when I was growing up in New Jersey as a Japanese-American.”

In today’s globalized world, Sugihara’s brash strength and ironic humor against a clash of cultures is arguably what earned him so many fans in Japan, particularly in a society that doesn’t usually celebrate the nail that sticks out. “The overwhelming narratives (in Japan) seem to be about enduring and the Japanese notion of ‘gaman‘ is a prevalent theme in Japanese-American fiction.” Nieda explains, “But those narratives didn’t really speak to me when I was younger: I really wanted to find a teen whom I could relate to, one who tackled prejudices openly, like Sugihara does.”

Nieda’s first challenge was to emulate Sugihara’s voice on paper, a fast-paced teenage interior monologue written in the first-person. Nieda was surprised to find the translation came easily.

“Sugihara is at turns angry, rebellious and sarcastic, but all those attributes weren’t so hard to capture because it’s very similar to my own voice. I could probably translate in that voice all day long,” she laughs. “His vocabulary, his syntax, it just came out very naturally.”

Once she started work, Nieda appealed directly to Kaneshiro, connecting with him on Twitter to seek translation rights. “I think I convinced him by how much I personally connected to the novel and to Sugihara,” she admits.

In 2015, Nieda won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant to complete the project and, in the seven years it took her to find a publisher, she had ample time to perfect Sugihara’s voice: “He’s a fighter and a tough guy, yet he’s a bookworm that connects to his friends and love interest through classical jazz or classics of literature. He loves old films, rakugo, (the Japanese art of comedic storytelling), Bruce Lee and Bruce Springsteen … I found it deeply touching that he drew strength and wisdom from so many diverse sources outside of his own background. It seems to encapsulate the world he is trying to imagine for himself, a world that is inclusive, that can find inspiration beyond the boundaries of Japanese or Korean culture.”

She admits the challenges were in the subtext, in “capturing the underlying vulnerability hidden beneath all of his intelligence and sarcasm. There’s a hint of tears in his narrative voice, of pain that will float to the surface despite all his braggadocio.”

Nieda credits Kaneshiro who “trusted (her) to capture Sugihara’s voice” and AmazonCrossing, who has opened up a new path for literary translators by offering an open submission portal: “AmazonCrossing seems driven by a sense of personal literary taste that is rare unless you go to a boutique publisher.”

Nieda is not worried that the passage of time has diminished Sugihara’s power to connect. The cross-cultural themes are universal and, with heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula and the current emphasis on boundaries and otherness, it is a perfect time to meet the hotheaded yet vulnerable young Korean who took Japan by storm.

“I think English audiences will be drawn to the novel’s exploration of identity and discrimination where a young man is just trying to find his place in the world.” Nieda says, “When we put Sugihara’s struggles against the backdrop of what’s currently happening, it does add a relevant and important layer to the storytelling.”

Todd Shimoda 27 April 2018 Fiction, Reviews
“GO” by Kazuki Kaneshiro
From the 2001 film From the 2001 film

That there are over 800,000 ethnic Koreans living permanently in Japan, including fourth and fifth generation Korean-Japanese, is not well known outside of Asia. The historical details of how the Koreans came to live in Japan is both fascinating and tragic, mainly because of the conscript labor forced on Koreans during Japanese occupation of the peninsula beginning over 100 years ago and ending with World War II. Even less well known is the discrimination the Korean-Japanese face in their adopted, officially or not, country. Known in Japan as Zainichi (“resident of Japan”), the ethnic Koreans have been largely relegated to marginal occupations as were other minority groups in Japan. That is changing, but discrimination and hate still exist.

In this background, author Kazuki Kaneshiro, who is Zainichi, sets his novel GO. The main character, Sugihara, is a teenaged-Zainichi boy. The storyline dramatizes his plight as he tries to understand the world he was born into, a world that defines him with a blurry label. As Sugihara rants toward the end of the book:

I swear sometimes I just want to kill all you Japanese! How can you call us Zainichi without so much as a second thought? We were born in this country and raised in the country? … Calling us Zainichi is the same as saying we’re foreigners who’ll eventually leave the country.

What got him to this point? Loads of discrimination, humiliation and, most of all, violence, on the receiving and giving ends. As he struggles to do what most other teenage boys do—go to school, hang out with friends, play sports, have a girlfriend—he is frequently under attack. When he finally gets into a Japanese high school (many Zainichi go to Korean schools), the Japanese students take turns trying to beat him up. Sugihara is well up to this competition, as his father forced on him boxing and martial arts skills, as well as just plain scrapping. School administrators and teachers aren’t above humiliating him. The vice-principal of his Korean junior high school said this to him:

What make you think you can get into a Japanese high school in the first place? When you come crying back to us, we won’t admit you to the high school. Keep that in mind as you study for exams.

The bullying also comes from other Zainichi. When Sugihara gets in the Japanese high school he is called a traitor and a sellout, punctuated with punches and kicks. Even within the Korean-Japanese community there is a division between Zainichi who have declared South Korea as their ethnic heritage and those who declare North Korea. Sugihara was initially with the communistic North Korean side and had a fair amount of indoctrination against Western ideals, which raises conflicts with those from the other side of the political line. When he visits South Korea with his parents, he is instantly targeted because of the prejudice of South Koreans against the Zainichi. Not only is his outside life peppered with violence, his home life comes with an occasional slap or a punch from mother or father, of course, for his own good.

I took three punches to the face. Boom. Boom. Boom. The first punch hit me like a hunk of concrete and made my spine creak… I was going to be sick. Someone stopped the earth from tilting. My father’s voice came down from above. The earth stopped. “What idiot lets down his guard?”

Go, Kazuki Kaneshiro, Takami Nieda (trans) (AmazonCrossing, March 2018)
Go, Kazuki Kaneshiro, Takami Nieda (trans) (AmazonCrossing, March 2018)

But, after all the violence, at the heart of GO is a love story. Sugihara says as much: “First, let’s get one thing straight. The story that follows is a love story.” He meets Sakurai at a friend’s party (despite all his conflicts, yes, he does have friends). She is Japanese, and he fails to mention he is Zainichi, instinctively withholding that information. He appreciates that they can have a sustained and intelligent conversation, as well as be comfortable not saying anything:

The girl and I walked in silence, but there wasn’t any awkwardness between us. Every so often, she would peer into my eyes, which made me crack an embarrassed grin, and she’d playfully ram her shoulder against me, like a hockey player, with all her might.

Their relationship progresses like most first loves, slowly, until he can no longer hide his ethnicity. Without giving her much of a chance to absorb the truth and respond, he leaves her. After their breakup, he throws himself into working and studying, until the ethnic and racial violence reach a peak. So much of his own life and beliefs come into focus, but will he learn enough to get back together with Sakurai? Will he be able to see through the brutality of his existence and rise above it? The book is definitely worth reading to find the answers to those questions. GO is searing and poignant, a brilliant look at the extremes of being human.
Todd Shimoda is the author of Why Ghosts Appear, Subduction, Oh! A Mystery of 'Mono No Aware', The Fourth Treasure and 365 Views of Mt. Fuji.

HomeCapturing the Hurt: On Translating Kazuki Kaneshiro

Capturing the Hurt: On Translating Kazuki Kaneshiro
By: Takami Nieda October 29, 2015

Takami Nieda is the recipient of a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of GO by Kazuki Kaneshiro, a coming-of-age novel that won Japan’s Naoki Prize and depicts the life of an ethnic Korean student living in Japan. Read an excerpt of the translation here.

I first read the coming-of-age novel GO not too long after its publication in 2000, and instantly connected with its protagonist Sugihara. As the only Zainichi Korean—an ethnic Korean long-term permanent resident or citizen of Japan—in his Japanese high school, Sugihara has always had to defend himself against all kinds of bullies, and has a stellar 23‑0 fight record that would make his father, a former professional boxer, proud. His father has taught him—at times through example and other times more cryptically—to stand tall against discrimination, and that he can choose to be anything he desires. But nothing can prepare Sugihara for the heartache he feels when he falls hopelessly in love with a girl named Sakurai. With every passing day that they spend together, the pressure mounts for Sugihara to tell her that he is not Japanese, as his name might indicate.

The way Sugihara searches for and draws strength from the teachings of Malcolm X, the lyrics of Springsteen, and Hendrix’s iconoclasm is deeply touching. He is also a movie lover, often making references to The 400 Blows, The Age of Innocence, and Bruce Lee; he is a student of rakugo, the ancient Japanese art of storytelling. Sugihara’s influences are as diverse and inclusive as the society he envisions for Japan. Above all, Sugihara is never a victim. He is willing to drop-kick discrimination and face adversity head on. His is the voice—angry and unapologetically sarcastic—that I wanted to hear; his is the story I wanted to read growing up Japanese-American in a very non-Japanese-American neighborhood in New Jersey. The protagonists in the few so-called “Asian” books that I’d encountered always seemed to me so well-mannered, so restrained. Although Sugihara often confronts the world with his fists and fierce sarcasm, there is always a hint of vulnerability and heartbreak in his voice. Capturing that hurt has been the challenge of translating this novel.

In the past, Kaneshiro has resisted the category of “Zainichi writer” and insists, like many young Zainichi of his generation, that his heritage is but a small part, and not a defining mark, of his identity. And yet, issues of identity make subtle appearances in his later works, most notably in his follow-up novel Fly Daddy Fly in the character of Park, a tough-as-nails Korean teen, who trains a Japanese salaryman to fight his daughter’s harasser. Since GO’s publication, Kaneshiro has gone on to establish himself as a screen and television writer of high-concept thrillers. Whether the author returns to his earlier exploration of the Zainichi experience or not, as I sincerely hope he will, readers’ discovery of Kaneshiro’s works must begin with this breakthrough novel.

Takami Nieda has translated into English works by authors such as Asa Nonami, Sayuri Ueda, Hiroshi Yamamoto, Issui Ogawa, Hideyuki Kikuchi, and most recently “Mummy” by Banana Yoshimoto in the anthology The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction. Her translations have also appeared in Words Without Borders and Asymptote. She is an assistant professor of English and translation at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Kazuki Kaneshiro, a Japanese citizen of Korean ethnicity, made his literary debut with Revolution No. 3 in 1998, which won the Shosetsu Gendai Prize for New Writers. In 2000, Kaneshiro won the Naoki Prize for GO, announcing the emergence of a new voice daring to tackle heretofore largely unspoken issues of ethnicity and discrimination in Japanese society. The novel’s popular film adaptation in 2002 went on to win major awards in Japan. Many of his works have been made into films or manga, and Kaneshiro has been adept at working synergistically across multiple formats and genres, writing the original concept and scripts for the action thriller series SP and Border.

This piece is part of PEN’s 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Series, which features excerpts and essays from recipients of this year’s PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants.

This translation is available for publication. Publishers and editors who wish to express interest in this project are invited to contact PEN Literary Awards Coordinator Arielle Anema (arielle@pen.org) or Translation Fund Advisory Board Chair Michael F. Moore (michaelfmoore@gmail.com) for the translator’s contact information.

Takami Nieda on Translating Kazuki Kaneshiro: Love Before Trump

In Feature Articles by Porter AndersonMarch 9, 2018
Just released by AmazonCrossing, Kazuki Kaneshiro’s 18-year-old novel ‘Go’ has found a new voice in Takami Nieda’s translation. It’s a timely indictment of today’s nationalism.

Takami Nieda at AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Tampa. Image: Porter Anderson

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘There’s Always Something You Can Do’
The happy gaze she casts on a sunny terrace outside the Tampa Bay Convention Center needs no translation. “Better than Seattle,” translator Takami Nieda says with the cryptic clarity of the teenager she’s brought to life in English this month.

Her translation of Kazuki Kaneshiro’s Japanese-language novel Go and its articulate, brat-boy protagonist Sugihara was published on March 1 by AmazonCrossing, the powerhouse translation imprint of Amazon Publishing. A bestseller in Amazon’s Kindle Store, the book now is collecting thoughtful write-ups and reviews from sometimes surprised consumers—many of whom are putting their fingers on the importance of translation:

“Although this novel was a love story,” writes one reader in a review, “the theme it tackles is discrimination. It illustrates a situation familiar in the US.”
“The story of a passionate young man negotiating prejudice with personal power,” writes another.
“This first-person novel allows the American reader to feel the identity confusion and alienation that’s the result of systemic discrimination,” says a third.

“It’s definitely his voice,” Nieda says about how she’s captured the idiosyncrasies of a talkative character. An English department faculty member at Seattle Central College, she spoke to Publishing Perspectives at this week’s AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Tampa. “I could translate in that voice all day because the words that come out of my mouth come out in that voice.”

This is a clue to why she spent seven years shepherding the book to its new English rendition. Nieda spotted the book and was captured by its canny, irreverent cadences. She got the author’s permission to translate it, created samples in English, and shopped it around for a publisher with a brand name the author would approve. That publisher turned out to be AmazonCrossing.
‘Swirling Questions About Identity’

Kazuki Kaneshiro’s ‘Go’

Kaneshiro’s original novel Go was published in Japanese in 2000 by Kodansha and won the Naoki Prize. A popular film adaptation from director Isao Yukisada was released in 2001 with Yôsuke Kubozuka as Sugihara.

The Japanese Academy gave the film an enviable suite of eight wins in 2002, including best director, actor, and supporting actress for Ko Shibasaki as Sugihara’s girlfriend, Sakurai. And while Kaneshiro has gravitated more toward film and television today, Nieda says, her attachment to the work was firmly in place.

“If I’m being honest,” Nieda says, “I can’t remember now whether I saw the film or read the novel first. But they’re both wonderful. And the first thing I thought was, ‘I wish I’d read this novel when I was growing up.’ It’s the voice I wish I’d heard.

“I’m Japanese-American,” she says, “and I grew up in a very non-Japanese environment in New Jersey. I had all these swirling questions about identity, about not belonging—I didn’t know what my identity was, just that it wasn’t white.”

Reading material that had come out of the dark World War II internment of Japanese citizens in the States, she says she found the tone in those works to be self-defeatist. “All about gritting your teeth because what else can you do?”

Nieda found herself resistant to such pessimism. “Why would they think there was nothing you could do?” she asks.

And Go is about an immigration of love. “There’s always something you can do. And when I read Go, I’d found a teen who’s always thinking, ‘Of course there’s something I can do.'”
‘I’m Free To Go Anywhere’

Sugihara, the book’s soulful main character, is Zainichi—a Japanese resident of Korean origin, just like the book’s author, Kaneshiro. There’s a long, difficult history of Japan’s treatment of ethnic Korean citizens, and in a passage near the end of the book, Sugihara explodes with soaring frustration at the bullied life he’s lived, words and logic punching the reader like his father the boxer taking down an opponent:

“If you people want to call me Zainichi, go ahead! You Japanese are scared of me. Can’t feel safe unless you categorize and label it, right? But you’re wrong. You know what–I’m a lion. A lion who has no idea he’s a lion. It’s just a random name that you people gave him so you can feel like you know all about him. See what happens when you try to get closer, calling my name. I’ll pounce on your carotid artery and tear you to shreds. You understand? As long as you call me Zainichi, you’re always going to be my victim. I’m not Zainichi or South Korean or North Korean or Mongoloid. Quit forcing me into those narrow categories. I’m me! Wait, I don’t even want to be me anymore. I want to be free from having to be me. I’ll go anywhere to find whatever thing will let me forget who I am. And if that thing isn’t here, I’ll get out of this country, which is what you wanted anyway. You can’t do that, can you? No, you’ll all die, tied down by your ideas about country, land, titles, customs, tradition, and culture. Well, that’s too bad. I never had any of that stuff, so I’m free to go anywhere I please. Jealous? Stay jealous!”

American readers of that passage will know why so many consumer reviews are referencing the Trumpian crisis, the nationalistic rigidity gripping the States and other nations today. The key line in Nieda’s translation jumps right out: “As long as you call me Zainichi, you’re always going to be my victim.” The teen Sugihara has learned what many adults today need to say: the loser is the bigot, the racist, the authoritarian.

And in Kaneshiro’s story, young Sugihara may indeed lose the girl he met when he left the Korean education program and went to a Japanese school. When he confesses to her that he’s Zainichi, she has to decide whether she can cross the boundaries of discrimination that society has mapped out for her.
‘A Pugilistic Narrative’

A poster for the 2001 film by Isao Yukisada

Once she’d gotten the OK—in a Twitter exchange with Kaneshiro—to create an English translation, Nieda found that winning grants to help cover the cost of making an English sample was good for publicizing the work. At PEN America, you can find an article she wrote about the piece in 2015, when the organization had given her a PEN/Helm Translation Fund grant for her work in English on the book.

“As the only Zainichi Korean—an ethnic Korean long-term permanent resident or citizen of Japan—in his Japanese high school,” Nieda wrote, “Sugihara has always had to defend himself against all kinds of bullies, and has a stellar 23‑0 fight record that would make his father, a former professional boxer, proud.”

That aspect of the book has prompted an interesting reaction to Go at Goodreads and in other reader-review settings, she says. “Some of them talk about it being ‘so violent,'” she says. Depictions of fist-fights and unarmed combat may be less common in a gun culture, she points out, than in a society like Japan in which gun violence is rare.

“It’s a pugilistic narrative,” she says, laughing about the eclectic battery of influences with which Sugihara pounds his friends.

At PEN, she had pointed out, “The way Sugihara searches for and draws strength from the teachings of Malcolm X, the lyrics of Springsteen, and Hendrix’s iconoclasm is deeply touching. He’s also a movie lover, often making references to The 400 Blows, The Age of Innocence, and Bruce Lee; he’s a student of rakugo, the ancient Japanese art of storytelling. Sugihara’s influences are as diverse and inclusive as the society he envisions for Japan.”

There’s another level of diversity and inclusivity reflected in Nieda’s work on the novel, too: she’s a female translator working with a restless masculinity created by a male author. In David Hackston’s translation of Katja Kettu’s The Midwife, we saw the opposite–a male translator interpreting a deeply female viewpoint and narrative. And in Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ translation of Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s Rage, it’s a woman translating a staunchly male construct.

One of the things that can widen the popularity of this new English edition of Go, she agrees, is the boyish energy of the pacing cultural omnivore at its center. Sugihara’s darting commentary on his life is what makes the reader love him, and it’s what gets him into trouble. He can’t resist the takedowns of an agile young mind: “When I’m watching the Olympics,” he says, referring to Seoul’s 1988 summer games, “I can cheer on both Japanese and Korean athletes in their own language. Don’t you think that’s great?”
Translation for First-Generation College Students

Takami Nieda’s 2011 translation for Simon & Schuster of Sayuri Ueda’s ‘The Cage of Zeus’

Nieda now is working on a new translation, she says, this one by a female Japanese author. She translates only Japanese-to-English, “and only in that direction,” she clarifies with a smile.

A graduate of Stanford (BA) and Georgetown (MA), Nieda is almost 20 years into her teaching career in writing and literature.

She gets most of her translation work done in the summer months outside of the school year, but she’s begun working on developing a translation class at Seattle Central. “Community college students are immigrants,” she says. “First-generation college students with a multilingual background”—minds, perhaps, open and ready to read the literature of “the other.”

As she says, one of her favorite lines from Kaneshiro’s book is one Sugihara’s father likes to get off: “You can buy citizenship to any country you want. Which country will it be?”

More from Publishing Perspectives on translation is here. And more on AmazonCrossing is here.
About the Author
Porter Anderson
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Porter Anderson is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives. He is also co-owner and editor with Jane Friedman of The Hot Sheet, the newsletter for trade and indie authors. He formerly was Associate Editor for The FutureBook, at London's The Bookseller. Anderson has also worked with CNN International, CNN.com, CNN USA, the Village Voice, the Dallas Times Herald, and other media.

Tags: Amazon Publishing, AmazonCrossing, Japanese, PEN America, Takami Nieda, translation, translators, USA

Korean in Japan’s bestselling tale of prejudice and star-crossed lovers

Kazuki Kaneshiro’s acclaimed coming-of-age novel Go released in English translation

21 Mar 2018
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Go
by Kazuki Kaneshiro
AmazonCrossing

3.5/5 stars

Kazuki Kaneshiro’s Go was first published in Japanese in 2000. Shortly after, it won Japan’s prestigious Naoki Prize and was adapted into a successful movie. It is not that hard to see why Kaneshiro’s debut, recently released in an English translation, wowed both serious critics and seriously large audiences. His loftier ambitions are signalled by the book’s epigraph, taken from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name? / That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Min Jin Lee’s epic Pachinko takes on the complex and fraught history of Korea and Japan

The quote echoes throughout the story, most obviously in Kaneshiro’s own pair of star-crossed lovers, Sugihara and Sakurai. Names mark their climactic scene, in which Sugihara confesses a long-held secret to Sakurai. During the fallout, they reveal their full names for the first time, along with an accompanying allusion. “My given name is Tsubaki. Like Tsubaki from La Traviata,” Sakurai says. “My real name is Lee. Like Bruce Lee,” Sugihara responds. The irony, not lost on either, is such honesty has come too late, as Sugihara realises. “My name sounds so foreign that I didn’t want you to know because I was afraid of losing you – like I just did.”

Sugihara is Kaneshiro’s Romeo: a wild, pugnacious and clever teenage boy, good with his fists and his facts. Regular boxing lessons with his father have married his weight of punch to his speed of thought. As a result, Sugihara is the undefeated heavy­weight champion of his school classroom. “I had a 23-0 record and was known throughout the school as the reigning badass.”

When he is not beating up all-comers, he buries his nose in books. His range of interests is impressive: he gives lengthy perorations on everything from Bruce Springsteen to mitochon­drial DNA to human transmigration across Asia from the Ice Age to the present. This tendency occasionally makes him sound like a know-it-all. A more charitable interpretation is that Sugihara realises that knowledge, as well as violence, means power.

Sugihara is also our narrator. His voice is redolent of Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye: urgent, funny, thoughtful and, like most teenage boys, impatiently self-obsessed. Having introduced us to his parents, one can almost hear his sigh of relief when he says, “Finally I can talk about me.”

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Arguably his most important self-realisation is: “Though I was a misfit, I was also a romantic.” Enter Sakurai, Juliet to his Romeo. It is love – or something like it – at first sight.

“Her hair was short, like Jean Seberg’s in Breathless. I loved Jean Seberg in Breathless. Her eyes were round and lovely even from a distance, brimming with the same kind of intelligence as Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence. I loved Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence.”

Sugihara makes like a love-struck boy: “I fell into my usual habit and glared at her. I shot her the most vicious look I could.”

It says a lot about Sakurai that “a smile spread across her face” at this moment. We don’t discover the real reason until the novel’s ending. In between, we learn that she is also clever, impulsive, slightly flighty and, like Sugihara, in love with Western culture. Neither cares for Japanese music, film or art. Instead, they bond over Miles Davis, Tom Waits, The Godfather and Bruce Springsteen.
Eighteen years after its initial publication, Go has aged well. Its aims may be specific – to expose the mistreatment of zainichi Chosen-jin in Japan – but its general impact can be felt anywhere that prejudice still exists

As lovers, Romeo and Juliet are nothing without heartbreak. For Shakespeare, it was their warring families, the Montagues and Capulets. For Kaneshiro, the obstacle is ethnic. Sugihara wastes little time in telling us that he is zainichi Chosen-jin (a Korean resident of Japan). His father, a former professional boxer, was born on Jeju Island, off Korea’s southern tip, when the country was a Japanese colony.

For Sugihara, this exposes him to relentless racial prejudice – one reason he takes boxing lessons from his pitiless father. Sugihara is at once angry at his tormentors, and baffled by them: after all, his mother is Japanese and Japan is his birthplace.

At his calmest, he strives towards a philosophy that is more capacious than that of his oppressors. Nationality and ethnicity, Sugihara concludes, are fictions dreamed up by the “ignorant” and “pathetic”.

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The only person to suspect Sugihara’s fragile side is Sakurai. Yet his familiarity with Japan’s mistreatment of zainichi prompts him to hide his background from her. You would think this is where Romeo and Juliet come in, but curiously Sugihara reserves that allusion for a different ethnic clash, between North and South Koreans in Japan: the Chongryon and Mindan groups. “Like the feuding Montagues and Capulets,” he explains, “the two groups clash every now and then but maintain a reasonable distance from one another. You know how Romeo and Juliet ended, right?”

We do, which makes the reader fear not only for Sugihara and Sakurai, but also for Sugihara’s zainichi friends Kato and Jeong-il. If Sugihara is Romeo and Sakurai Juliet, who will be Mercutio, killed along the way?

[A painting of Romeo and Juliet’s infamous balcony scene by Viktor Mueller. Picture: Alamy] A painting of Romeo and Juliet’s infamous balcony scene by Viktor Mueller. Picture: Alamy

Go is a raw but effective addition to the coming-of-age story. In Sugihara, Kaneshiro has created a worthy anti-hero, at once admirable in his courage and integrity but also believably damaged: he treads a fine line between self-reliance and self-centredness, between deep thought and hormonal crassness.

A similar concoction is brewed by Kaneshiro’s prose, which is two parts young-adult melodrama and one part political invective. “I felt something so strong for this girl I barely knew,” Sugihara moans. “And I believed that maybe she would let me touch her.” Or, “The sound of the music died, and I could only hear Sakurai’s heartbeat.”

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Nevertheless, it is easy to forget just how much is at stake for Sugihara at such syrupy moments. The starkest reminder is offered by a short chapter that concentrates the novel as a whole into a miniature tragedy. A Japanese boy falls in love with a zainichi girl he sees every day on a train. She mistakes his awk­ward attempts to speak to her as aggression. The girl’s fear attracts the attention of a fellow zainichi – a friend of Sugihara’s – who pushes the love-struck boy, begins a fight and calamity ensues. “If I were there, I would have done the same thing,” Sugihara comments on his friend’s brave but misguided attempt to be the girl’s senpai (“mentor”), adding: “He and I were given to making such assumptions in the circumstances.”

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The unflinching, giddy melancholy of this chapter contrasts unfavourably with the actual ending, whose erotically charged optimism feels both sentimental and fetishistic. At other moments, Kaneshiro’s more hard-won idealism sounds nearly heroic, for example when Sugihara lectures a fellow zainichi: “We need to educate ourselves and make ourselves stronger and forgive them.” But just when his messianic tendencies look set to overwhelm him, Sugihara confesses: “Not that I am anywhere near that yet.”
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Eighteen years after its initial publication, Go has aged well. Its aims may be specific – to expose the mistreatment of zainichi Chosen-jin in Japan – but its general impact can be felt anywhere that prejudice still exists.

Go by Kazuki Kaneshiro – review
Shallow attempt at a bildungsroman

By Paul McInnes | Posted on March 3, 2018

Kazuki Kaneshiro’s Go, originally published in Japanese in 2000, caused a bit of a stink in the arts world due its portrayal of Zainichi Koreans living in Japan at the turn of this century. The novel won the prestigious Naoki Prize (previous winners include Keigo Higashino) and was subsequently adapted into a very well-received film starring Yosuke Kubozuka as protagonist Sugihara.

Translated into English, for the first time, by Takami Nieda, Go tells the story of Sugihara and his dysfunctional Zainichi family who have switched nationalities several times – from North Korean to South Korean and finally the contemplation of Japanese citizenship. Sugihara, trained by his ex-boxer father, is a self-confessed tough guy and regularly beats up his Japanese tormentors at a Japanese high school. The novel has a whiff of John Hughes’ 80s teen movies about it and nothing particularly rings true. Sugihara, in parts, resembles a kind of super-charged macho version of Haruki Murakami’s Toru Watanabe from Norwegian Wood. A high school thug with in-depth knowledge of biology and socio-cultural concepts adds to the novel’s overall unlikeliness. The other characters are merely caricatures.

One online reviewer points out that is reads like a “YA novel”. It’s pretty doubtful that Kaneshiro was deliberately aiming for this age group, and in places, it reads like a novel for learners of English as a foreign language. To this day Zainichi in Japan face discrimination and this can be seen, first-hand, on the streets of Okubo in Tokyo or Tsuruhashi in Osaka, and in the hate speech marches which blight several other regions of Japan on a regular basis. Kaneshiro, himself a Zainichi, does himself an injustice by writing a kind of wish-fulfillment revenge fantasy on his Japanese persecutors. Kaneshiro’s writing, rather than aiming for readers’ empathy with Sugihara and his plight, makes readers scoff at the dubious plots and simplistic writing.

The Zainichi experience in Japan has been more recently explored, with much more success, in Min Jin Lee’s superb 2017 novel Pachinko. Lee’s epic story of one family’s uprooting from Korea to Osaka in the early 20th century is simply more believable and nuanced. It captures the realities of Zainichi in western Japan in the 20th century, from racial discrimination and poverty to prosperity and entrepreneurship. Although similar themes such as hidden identities are explored in both works, Lee’s novel is panoramic in ambition and goes much deeper into the cultural and social dichotomies of Koreans living in Japan. Kaneshiro’s shallow attempt at a bildungsroman comes off as facile and there are other Japan-based writers doing this kind of storytelling better – namely Haruki Murakami, Hitomi Kanehara and even the much-hyped and overrated Hiromi Kawakami.

Go is actually a love story between Sugihara and Sakurai, a Japanese girl he meets at a club. Their relationship isn’t developed and is, in turn, consistently derailed by scenes of Sugihara’s penchant for unrealistic violence. We don’t really find out much about Sakurai and it ultimately doesn’t matter as the novel unravels into a dreary pastiche.

Go is published by AmazonCrossing.

GO by Kazuki Kaneshiro, translated by Takami Nieda [in Booklist]

Japan and Korea’s centuries-long, combative history has long made Koreans in Japan second-class citizens. Kaneshiro, who is Korean Japanese, channels his own experiences into his teenage protagonist, Sugihara, a Japan-born-and-raised ethnic Korean. Sugihara decides to transfer into a Japanese high school after attending only Korean schools. Three years later, he’s still plagued with violent rejection, and his only Japanese friend is another pariah, a yakuza’s son. And then he meets a girl, and the deeper their love, the harder it becomes to reveal his secret.

First published in Japan in 2000 and awarded the Naoki Prize, GO also found substantial celluloid success in 2001. The title is a homophone in Japanese for language, an honorific prefix, the number five, the strategic game, and more; these several meanings constitute a pointed reminder of the complexity of people, relationships, and identity.

Supported by a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, Takami Nieda provides gratifying anglophone access to Kaneshiro’s searing ruminations – heightened by Malcolm X and Bruce Lee, softened by Miles Davis and Brahms – on history, xenophobia, and, of course, love.

YA/Mature Readers: Populated by high-school students of various backgrounds, GO’s coming-of-age trials and tribulations will resonate with mature teens.

Review: “Fiction,” Booklist Online, February 21, 2018

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2000 (Japan), 2018 (United States)