I finished defending us in the eviction proceedings and then doing our taxes on April 15th. The moment I returned home from the post office, having sent the tax forms, I felt an overwhelming desire to make some kind of art.
I’d been totally enmeshed in legal and bureaucratic stuff for about 5 weeks and hadn’t really gotten a chance to work on anything that wasn’t deeply prosaic. I was still afraid, as I’d had been over those five weeks, that if I took even a day’s worth of time to make art it would end up causing us further housing trouble.
A couple days prior, on April 13th, I had been flipping through the pages of the Takahashi Rumiko compilation るーみっく・わーるど 3. I had come across the comic “マリン・ボーズ'79” randomly in that context and was extremely delighted and amused by it (I hesitate to explain anything about why lest I spoil any of the surprises).
As I was skipping around in it, I had gotten the feeling that it would be fun to do a translation of it, but put the idea of out of my mind at the time. I was still hard at work on the taxes in that period.
Right at the moment that I returned home from the post office, knowing I was free of both the taxes and the court case, I felt the desperation of not having made any art in like 5 weeks bearing down heavily on me. I resolved that even though I knew I needed to pivot to the housing search, I wanted to take just a few days to do something artistic. The possibility of attempting the translation in that amount of time immediately came to my mind.
I spoke with Lily about it and she agreed that it was all right.
I was finished with the translation four days later, on April 19th. Towards the end, Lily did start getting a bit antsy and asking if I was done yet, and I probably said “It’s almost there” continuously for the later half of the project, I sheepishly admit. It would’ve been nice if I had been able to complete the whole thing in two days, and I did have a first draft done by then, but I ending up needing to edit and revise it a lot before I was satisfied with it. Given that, I’m really pleased to have done it in only four.
I hope you enjoy this little-known Takahashi Rumiko comic from her very early period.
This isn’t the only Japanese translation project I have coming down the pipe for this fundraiser; there’s also two WIP projects that I’ll share with all of you.
One is a translation of a talk given by the Zen monk Dogen in 1238. The other is subtitles for a 1990s TV documentary about the modernist tanka poet Yosano Akiko.
You can look out for those in the coming days.
If you’re curious about my Japanese language background:
I first decided I wanted to learn Japanase when I was 13 in order to read classical poetry in the original. My middle school had a book of classic haiku and tanka in English translation that I was very taken by.
The following year, I went to high school at the local liberal arts magnet, and had the opportunity to take Japanese as my language there. At the teacher of that class’s suggestion, I skipped a year of Japanese after the first year, so my sophomore year I was studying alongside the juniors.
That same school year, I got a scholarship to go to Japan for the summer as an exchange student on homestay through the organization Youth For Understanding. My Japanese host parents helped me improve my conversation skills while I was there, both by speaking with me and taking me weekly to a conversation practice group for Japanese learners at the local rec center. I also attended high school for about a month of my stay and was exposed to the language in a lot of different contexts that way.
As it happened, I didn’t end up going back to high school for my junior year after I returned from Japan. Instead, I went immediately to college at Simon’s Rock. As part of the requirements for my B.A., I had to take one-and-a-half semesters of a language, and did two semesters of Japanese at Bard and one semester of it over the summer at UT Austin.
I graduated with my degree in 2010, at the age of 20. I’m now 36. Over that intervening time, I’ve continued to consume Japanese media daily, both written and auditory, with a certain bias towards older literature (reflecting my initial and continuing interest in poetry). I’ve also corresponded on and off with native speakers, sometimes for years at a time. The language continues to be a major part of my life and I’m always learning new things about it.