Trying to analyze Itoh’s motivations, Kō finally admits that had he been given similar opportunities, he likely would have made the same decisions. As becomes clear, however, the real target of Kō’s hatred is himself. Yet, when he learns of the lengths to which Itoh has gone to deny the fact that he is Taiwanese, Kō experiences an abrupt, nearly pathological about-face. Kō initially idolizes Itoh as a Taiwanese who has successfully “remade” himself as Japanese: here is someone with like interests and experiences. It opens with Kō’s reluctant return to Taiwan after a ten-year stay in the Tokyo metropole isolated and bored, Kō is overjoyed when he meets Itoh, a Taiwanese who has likewise lived in Japan and now passes as Japanese. Hong), and the local Japanese teacher, Itoh Haruo (né Zhu Chunsheng). The work centers around the relationship between the narrator, Dr.
Ō’s tale lacks clear-cut heroes, and his characters speak in ways at times uncomfortably close to nationalistic: the narrator in particular presents an almost dissociative persona that swings back and forth between admiration for Japanese ‘spirit’ and hatred for what the system that supports it demands of its colonial subjects. 6 Although it can be read as criticizing the imperial project, it is deeply unsettling. “The Torrent” first appeared in the journal Taiwan Bungaku after Ō’s 1942 return to Taiwan, 5 and unlike the pieces typically translated into English, “The Torrent” is ideologically muddy. Ō Chōyū (Wang Changxiong, 1916-2000), a Taiwanese writer under Japanese colonial rule educated largely in Japan, was the author of several Japanese-language works that appeared in the 1930s and 1940s, including Ri’en no aki 梨園の秋 (Autumn in the Theater World, 1936), Tansuigawa no Sazanami 淡水河の漣 (Ripples on the Danshui River, 1939), and most famously the 1943 short story Honryū 奔流 (The Torrent). Thus, I call him “Ō” when discussing his Japanese writings, and “Wang,” his Chinese. For instance, should the author of Honryū 奔流 (The Torrent, 1943), 王昶雄, be referred to as Ō Chōyū (alternatively romanized as Ō Shōyū)? Wang Changxiong? Committing to either choice has a political valence and obscures the issue at the heart of “The Torrent”: the “double lives” of Taiwanese as imperial subjects. 4 Not only that, through the act of translating, these problems are exacerbated. The politics of writing in the language of the empire, after all, is a topic that can be endlessly probed without ever yielding a clear answer.
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The case of Wu Zhuoliu’s 1945 novel Orphan of Asia epitomizes this: it appears under the Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan series of titles, but the foreword explains it is a later addition due to “the amount of time needed to translate it from Japanese into English.” 3 Given the novel’s slight 247 pages, it is tempting to infer an additional factor, perhaps the problem of where Japanese-language writing belongs within the category of Chinese literature. 2 If this is the desired image of colonial writings, it is easy to suppose that one reason for the scarcity of translations is that many stories produced under varying degrees of censorship simply may not fit the model.Īt the same time, even those that have been translated hint at exclusionary typologies. 1 Such works offer normative readings wherein Japan’s imperialist expansion is condemned, and resistance to it is praised. The translation vividly renders into English the numerous subtly charged dialogues in this story, with their attendant psychic repercussions.ĭespite growing and complex work on the literature of Japan’s imperial period, relatively few Japanese-language stories by colonial subjects have been translated into English: most typical are fairly unambiguous narratives that recount the toll Japan’s imperial dreams took on its occupied territories. Brightwell’s translation is a welcome contribution to recent scholarship on Japanese-language literature produced in the era of Japan’s multi-ethnic empire. Brightwell, Assistant Professor of Premodern Japanese Literature at the University of Michigan, for her translation of “The Torrent” (奔流, Hon’ryū, 1943) by the Taiwanese writer Wang Changxiong (王昶雄, also known by his Japanese name, Ō Shōyū/Ō Chōyū), who lived from 1916 to 2000. The prize for an unpublished translator has been awarded to Erin L. The Asian Studies Department of Cornell University is proud to announce the recipients of the 2017 Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize competition, concluded on November 1.
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