While the bilingual aspect of the original is obviously a little lost in translation or rather overly found in translation, it's a beautiful novel in itself.

My Japanese parents moved to the US when I was only 2 years old, so the US is the only home that I have ever really known. Yet, growing up in a traditional Japanese household, I have always had a sense of "otherness" and not fully fitting into American culture. I was able to really relate to the feelings expressed by the author in "An I-Novel" as she struggles with her identity as a graduate student in the US. I enjoyed the format of the book, basically an autobiographical novel, that takes place over a day, but the reader gets a good idea of what Minae's life was like through her reminiscing and phone conversations with her sister in which they discuss their past family history.

This is definitely a subject of high personal interest to me, and I assume it will also hit a chord with anyone who feels stuck between two cultures and is trying to find a balance or what "home" means.

Since the novel which is written in Japanese has English mixed into it, something was likely lost in translation. I purchased a Japanese copy of the novel and will do a re-read.

In An I-Novel (2021, tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter. Original: 私小説, 1995), we are caught in a snowstorm of melancholy and longing. The story takes place over the course of a single day in our protagonist’s life: it’s “Friday, December 13, 198X“, the 20th anniversary of her move to the United States, together with her family, when she was a child. It’s also the day she will decide what to do with her life. It’s cold, she is lonely, and it is snowing.

Like the author, our protagonist is also called Minae Mizumura. Now, at 32, she is a graduate student in French at an ivy league university. And she is stuck: having completed her coursework, she has been putting off her oral exams for months. She does not want to pursue an academic career, and has chosen graduate school “simply as a means of prolonging my life in limbo. But I was powerless to halt the stream of time.”

She has been living in limbo long before entering academia: stuck between two languages, two countries, two cultures; stuck between the desire to return to Japan and her strong links to her older sister, Nanae, in the USA; finally, our protagonist is stuck between the longing for home, and the fear of the homelessness it might bring.

Having taken solace in Japanese literature since she was young, Minae wants to become a writer – and to write in Japanese: “the gulf was not between me and America. It was something more like a gulf between myself and my American self, or between my Japanese self and my American self – or, to be still more precise, between my Japanese-language self and my English-language self. My Japanese self did not disappear just because I had come to America; it would continue as long as I spoke and read Japanese.”

The desire for a language is indistinguishable from her longing to find a home and to assert an identity: “The problem has always been simple: to return or not to return“. Home is a place in the mind: our protagonist is struggling with the fact that the Japan of her memories and of her imagination may have never existed. “I was afraid of going back to Japan. My crazed obsession had shaped me so profoundly that – like an invalid fearful of being cured – I was terrified of losing the thing that defined me.”

Mirroring our protagonist’s inner struggle to choose a life of her own, the narrative moves back and forth between languages, between Japan and the USA, between fact and fiction, and between past and present. Minae’s musings are interspersed with her long telephone conversations with Nanae, as they reflect on their lives and on their place in the USA – particularly, with regards to race and identity: “Where we lived, being Asian never caused us any particular difficulty, but neither could we ever forget that that’s what we were. It was less an awareness than a sensation. The moment I crossed the threshold on the way out of my apartment, the sensation came over me like a clinging shadow.” Or, more pointedly: “All men are created equal. Perhaps. But all lives did not have equal value. This was true in all societies; everywhere, people were sorted into groups and were assigned greater or lesser value by various markers—the way they dressed, behaved, spoke. Yet here in America where people gathered (or had been made to gather) from around the world, race, in its most loosely defined form, was a mark that superseded all others.”

Minae’s relationship to her sister is also a highlight of the book – a source of home and homelessness to her. It’s a ground beneath her feet, but it is also something she longs to break and part with. Family ties, identity, and language are connected through one single thread from which this novel draws its emotional force. It’s there, and we will eventually be crushed by it: like under heavy snow, or an avalanche.

“Well, whatever you do, try not to mix up your Japanese with English”, advises one of her professors. Comfortable with transgressions and in-between spaces, that’s precisely the advice the author chose not to follow in this novel, which incorporates the interplay between the real and the fictional, as well as moves freely from Japanese to English, and back – and is written, in its original, from left to right, as shown in its Japanese title: Shishōsetsu from Left to Right (私小説 from left to right). This choice is both firmly rooted in a tradition (that of the Japanese “I-novels”, narrated as if they were the author’s true confessions) and also a break from this tradition through a formal innovation (which went more or less lost in English translation, for obvious reasons).

But, even in translation, we can still feel the friction between these two languages - which, in turn, seems to mirror the protagonist’s struggle to choose a way forward. “Home is not a place to return to”, her French teacher had said once. Home is a place in the mind, and our protagonist is struggling with the blank page yet to be filled. It’s cold, and the snow will eventually blanket her path outside -but it will be like a fresh page.

I'm biased, insofar as books about language and belonging are basically my catnip. But they can also be a bit formulaic, except that An I-Novel is the right opposite of that. I think when you deal with questions like homesickness, not belonging and immigration, it can be so easy to fall for the trap of nostalgia, making the prose saccharine and unrealistic. It's also entirely possible to begin looking at yourself from the outside, especially when you've been alienated for so long, and in adopting someone else's gaze, you fall into dangerous tropes.

I don't even know what I'm listing all these things when again, An I-Novel manages to sidestep them all, delivering instead a poignant story about not feeling at home anywhere, and how the intense desire for belonging, for the place you've left behind (perhaps in the guise of something akin to "cruel optimism" ) can ruin your present, squander your potential, as the ghost of the life you never had haunts you to inaction.

I don't look for relatability as such in my books, but damn if this one didn't get me.

The translation is incredibly well-done, but this book made me wish I was further along with my Japanese, so I could read it in its original. I mean, it's kind of hard to replicate the experience through font from what I saw in the sample page from the Japanese.

I find myself wishing I could read Japanese, so that I could read it twice. It is filled with beauty and simplicity.

Simply wonderful and thought-provoking for anyone who has lived between cultures, never quite feeling a part of either. The misplaced nostalgia for a country and culture that perhaps never existed outside the pages of a book or our imagination.

Minae Mizumura's fourth novel to be translated into English is probably among the most difficult to be rendered into this language in her entire oeuvre. That is because parts in the original text are written in English as a means of contrast with the Japanese-language text. Was everything translated just as it is, a lot of the linguistic depth and ambiguity of the text would've been lost. Luckily, they have been preserved in this brilliant translation through making the text that was English in the original bold.

This book is said to be semi-autobiographical. I do not know where to place the book in my listing, given this information. The lead protagonist shares the name and much of the background of the author herself. This explains the inherent acceptability of the complex emotions that swirl through the tale.
If you have ever had the feeling of being the 'other' in any social situation, the story will have a more significant impact on you. I have lived away from my home country for almost half my life now, and even before, there were differences in my home life versus the outside, which was my normal. This means that I empathize with the conflict in the lead protagonist's mind.
In the current time frame, we have two sisters who converse over the phone, and as with many multicultural families, their conversations are littered with English words. This is highlighted for us as is explained in the introduction, adding extra nuance into the reading. During the talks over a few days, the narrative moves back and forth in time and gives us a slowly unfolding picture of the past and how life in America treated both sisters. This is one book that can fuel multiple discussions in any reading group. The world is a lot closer now, with the internet and children from all countries growing up on a steady diet of similar animated series' thanks to streaming sites. However, this is based in a time gone by where it was both harder and easier to maintain your own personal brand of 'culture'. The delineation between time and days was a little blurred, it took me a while to orient myself in the narrative, but once I got into the groove, I really enjoyed the experience (I use this word despite it being a pretty heavy emotional read and not exactly happy).
The different theme and the various facets of individual people depicted here made it pretty different. I recommend giving it a shot if you like the idea of translated works and also varying viewpoints.
I received an ARC of the translated work thanks to NetGalley and the publishers but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

Highly inventive, smart, and poignant, Mizumura proves that she's on the forefront of literary innovation and artistic brilliance. This book should be in every library collection, every personal home bookshelt. Mizumura pushes the boundaries of not just Japanese fiction, but of literature as a whole, and highlights the intricacies and amazing things that language can do.

The translation really does a great job of capturing Mizumura's voice, her vision, and it's well-written and engaging overall. Fans of the I-novel genre, and fans of Japanese literature will love this.

Highly recommended.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I echo the other reviewers in saying that you must read the translator's note before you start reading the novel. It explains the meaning of "i-novel" as well as why the "first bilingual novel in Japanese and English" was called untranslatable. The translator uses different techniques to translate this untranslatable novel, such as bolding the words that were originally printed in English, and I commend the translator for her work.

An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura is an innovative, autobiographical Japanese work-in-translation that explores themes of Japanese-American identity, anti-Asian racism, her family's "exodus" from Japan to America, the ennui and pressure of graduate school, and her yearning to return to Japan and write a novel in Japanese. While reading this book, I felt like the book was a precious collection of beautiful words, like a jewelry box with words wrapped in pretty, elegant packages. The imagery in this novel is spectacular, and descriptions in the book appeal to all five senses. Here is a quote from the opening pages of the book:

"Before I knew it, I was standing in front of the tall oak bookcase on the opposite wall from the computer, looking up. On the top shelf was the set of books with vermilion bindings, untouched for a while. I reached up and pulled a volume down. I opened it, and the familiar musty smell rushed out. The past twenty years - and many more - were contained in that smell."

Interspersed between the prose sections are stunning black-and-white photos of New York City, the location where the narrator and her sister live at the beginning of the novel. I found the family dynamic between the narrator and her sister to be the most interesting part of the novel. Here is an excerpt from page 19 that explains a relationship between Minae's sister Nanae and a boyfriend named Henryk:

"In Poland, Henryk had studied philosophy and theology at a Catholic university considered subversive by the Communist regime - his former professor was now pope - but in the United States, where even immigrants qualified to teach at a university often had to drive a cab, he was at a loss. He didn't know how to drive, he had no other skills, and his English was broken. He seemed unable to hold down a steady job... Finally she let on that he had lost his temper and broken dishes that she cherished, and that once, worst of all, he had hit her in the face - "in the face, Minae, my precious face!" This was no Dostoevsky novel but a taste of a world that she and I happened to know nothing about, a world that was everywhere, once you lost your footing and slipped down the social ladder: a world of alcohol and idleness and disappointment and violence and tears."

Just reading that excerpt, you can tell that the novel is profound and worth reading. I am taking off one star though because my interest started to wane halfway through. I think that's when I realized that this book is more literary fiction than popular fiction. I typically enjoy books with more of a plot. Overall, An I-Novel is an innovative, autobiographical work by a Japanese woman that will appeal to literary fiction readers. If the excerpts above intrigue you, you won't regret reading this book!

I really enjoyed this quiet, meditative and insightful semi-autobiographical novel, an I-Novel as it is termed in Japan, a fictional account of the author’s American life and her longing for her native Japan. The book is set during a single day in the 1980s, exactly 20 years since her arrival in the United States. Her life there in academia has been successful but her desire now is to return to Japan and become a novelist – in Japanese, a language she has clung to throughout her stay. Through Minae’s reflections, thoughts and conversations with her sister Nanae we learn about their daily lives, their aspirations, their observations about American and Americans. It’s a personal and intimate account which I soon became drawn into. The experience of immigration, assimilation, the problems of acceptance and the preconceptions and assumptions that are frequently made about anyone “Asian” - all this is explored with understanding and insight, if also bewilderment at times. Like when Nanae has a blind-date arranged for her with a Korean man, as her American friends simply see them both as Asian, rather than understanding the enmity between Japan and Korea. So many little details like this make this such an interesting and illuminating account of a Japanese woman’s experience in America, and the pull of her homeland.

First, a word of advice, do NOT skip the translator’s note at the beginning. Ok, now n to the book. Am I-novel is a work of autobiographical fiction and the format that this o e takes plays with language as a stand in for culture and, ultimately, identity. A beautifully written and thought provoking novel.

A unique contemporary novel taking inspiration from "i-novels" which gained popularity during the Meiji period and were a type of confessional, auto fiction novel, where events in the story correspond and relate to those in the author's life, An I-Novel provides plenty of food for thought on the immigrant experience (specifically Japanese American) and the links between emotional life and language - all shown through one day in the author's life in 1980. I particularly enjoyed the foreword by the translator, which discussed whether this novel was truly "untranslatable" due to the fact that the original was written partly in English and partly in Japanese.

I became a fan of Minae Mizumura when I discovered "A True Novel," her haunting Japanese version of "Wuthering Heights." I also admired and enjoyed this beautiful new translation of "An I-Novel," a layered, pitch-perfect novel about a Japanese woman who feels out of time and place. Juliet Winters Carpenter, the translator, tells us that in Japan this autobiographical novel was called the “first bilingual novel”: it was written in Japanese and English to reflect Minae’s experience in Japan and the U.S.. Naturally, the translation of this lovely bildungsroman is in English for our sakes.

The characterization is deftly developed as the reader is taken back and forth in time in America and Japan. The heroine, Minae, is a sad, anxious woman at an Ivy League school who has longed for 20 years to return from the U.S. to Japan. At the age of 30, she is still a graduate student in French literature, hiding out in a cockroach-infested apartment, doing no work, realizing that she is almost past her expiration date in the world of Ph.D.’s
Minae’s only personal contact is with her older sister, Nanae, a sculptor who lives with two cats in New York. Nanae calls her long-distance almost every day. She is barely getting by: she has broken up with her boyfriend, and she and Minae are are failures by their parents’ standards, both single women who can barely support themselves.

I love the sisters’ conversations about their mother’s insistence that they must marry. It never occurred to them that they would have to work.

"Having grown up without any notion that we needed to work, this perfectly ordinary fact had not occurred to either of us until recently. But it had probably never occurred to Mother either as she brought us up. She worked because she wanted to, not because she had to."

A lovely book that we can all relate to, even though we come from different cultures

Have you ever picked up a book, not realizing it was exactly the book you wanted to read?

I did not know I was looking for a book like 𝒜𝓃 𝐼-𝒩𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁 by Minae Mizumura (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter) until I found this book and started reading it. Out next month, this is a bilingual book, written in Japanese and English. To preserve the interplay between the two languages, English phrases and words are printed in a different typography than the translated Japanese text.

𝒜𝓃 𝐼-𝒩𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁 is a semi-biographical work, telling the story of two sisters Nanae and Minae who moved to the USA as kids. Now in their thirties, Minae longs for the Japanese homeland and reflects on her experiences as an immigrant. Minae articulated thoughts about immigration, identity, race, language and more that I had on my mind but had not had time to reflect upon. Though I moved to Canada in my early 20s, I related to a lot of the experience that Minae shared. I look forward to reviewing my notes and articulating a longer blog post on Armed with A Book about this amazing book for the 18th February.

Many thanks to the publisher, Columbia University Press, for providing me a complimentary copy of the book for an honest review.

I received an electronic ARC of this book via NetGalley for review.

This is a lovely translation of a book that, while not entirely to my taste, was absolutely worth reading.

The statement that the novel takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s is both true and false--the "current" timeline of the novel is one snowy day in which the narrator does not leave her apartment, but the events of the novel span the previous 20 years (and a bit more). It's an interesting story, and while somewhat meandering and not particularly plot-driven, it's enjoyable and avoids becoming confusing.

More than anything else, it's a novel about identity and language. The note at the beginning discusses the challenge of translating this particular novel, which apparently in the original is a mixture of Japanese and English that uses a somewhat unusual format to facilitate this stylistic choice. It's really fascinating, and taken together with the translated text of the novel is very thought-provoking on the interplay between English and other languages and what it means for writers who do not write in English.

AN I-NOVEL by Minae Mizumura and translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter is an engaging novel! Translated from the Japanese this is a semi-autobiographical book with Minae being the main character. She reveals her thoughts about growing up in the United States in the 80s as a Japanese woman while talking to her sister. There’s great discussion in this book on being an immigrant, being Japanese-American, Asian vs Japanese, cultural identity and language. There were lots of points I could connect with and Minae is such a relatable character. There were photos included in this book which felt a bit out of place to me. Overall I enjoyed reading this book and it would make a great book club selection as there’s so many interesting topics brought up such as longing for a home country that you haven’t lived in for twenty years, family responsibility, how languages impact your life and how sibling relationships can change over time.
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Thank you to Columbia University Press via NetGalley for my advance review copy!

By definition, an I-novel is a fictionalized memoir. Although this story takes place on just one day while Minae is hunkered down in her apartment in a snow storm, her memories and reflections take us back to her family's layered past in both Japan and New York. The focus of the story is Minae's alienation from her family, her adopted America, her native country, and most of her relationships. Her ennui is manifest in her marginalized identity as neither Japanese nor American, as well as her insecurity with both Japanese and English languages, at the same time that she is working toward a doctorate in French Literature. We become immersed in her quandary of how to tell her sister that she has decided at long last to take her doctoral orals and move back to Japan to write a novel. While the plot is slow paced, the depth of Minae's reminiscences and introspection bring readers inside her mind so that of course we care. The translator's introduction is helpful, and I have to assume that because the writing is so fine the melding of the Japanese and English has been successful.

An I-Novel is ultimately a story about two sisters and how their relationship is shaped as they each navigate the experience of moving to and living in America as Japanese expatriates. A meditation on identity and experience, ranging from as insular as family to as broad as race and nationality.

The novel’s most unique feature is that it was written in Japanese with English used freely throughout. This is of course intriguing, but the translation into English then feels as though you are missing something. That is certainly not due to the translator, but more so just the fact that the novel is not able to be translated successfully.

Although I did enjoy the writing, the novel did feel a bit long for its contents. While some parts were insightful and engaging, the novel as a whole did not captivate me to the extent that I had hoped.

The most poignant aspect of the novel is certainly how different the sisters have become over time despite having grown up together and traversing many of the same experiences. I also particularly enjoyed the feeling Minae wrestles with of being caught between two countries, as well as her musings on both American and Japanese culture. It is reflective in a way that feels realistic and balanced.

While this novel I think could be appreciated by anyone interested in the immigrant experience, or an expat themselves, it does feel targeted to a specific audience- Japanese living in America or the reverse.

We fall into the melancholy, the quiet solitude, of an author pondering language in the opening paragraphs of An I-Novel, a semi-autobiographical novel that uplifts and transforms the traditional私小説, a confessional style of literature rooted in the Meiji period of Japanese literary history. In a first person, stream of consciousness style, Minae Mizumura recounts her experience as an immigrant, lost between two worlds as she toys with the idea of writing a novel.

Nostalgia – not just for childhood, but for Japan – colors Mizuramura’s language, rendered beautifully by Juliet Winters Carpenter in a novel previously considered untranslatable by the author due to its bilingual origins. Longing and profound loneliness cling to every word alongside meticulous, lyrical detail that is reminiscent of translations of Sōseki, a fitting comparison given Mizumura’s publication of Light and Darkness Continued, as she takes pains to describe the setting: a rundown apartment just outside a college campus on the eve of her family’s exodus: the twenty-year anniversary of their arrival in America.

Caught in the world of books and language, Mizumura finds herself caught in limbo, much like her family, who remain in America despite their insistence that it is only temporary, buoyed, alongside Nanae in the idea that they would eventually return to Japan to marry Japanese men, a facet of life considered “proper.” What unfolds instead is a nostalgia infused series of conversations on love, life and childhood, wherein Mizumura comes to terms with her identity by renouncing the American experience – an experience tinged with insensitivity, racism and otherness – facets of her childhood that she fails to recognize until adulthood: “To her, the fact that American made no distinction between Koreans and Japanese simple reflected the reality of the United States as a foreign land, but Nanae and I had to find out place in that reality.”

Through it all, Mizumura struggles with her attempt to leave, torn between her desire to write a novel in Japanese (and live in Japan) and her obligation to take care of her sister, who is rooted firmly in New York. What unfolds is instead is an exodus of self, spurred on by Mizumura’s relationship to the Japanese language, the book containing Ichiyo’s writing a balm and a new beginning, the strength required to write, to tell her story to anyone that will listen. An I-Novel is presumably that story, a work of hardship that blends the best (and worst) of both worlds, originally depicted in English and Japanese and masterfully translated in a single language demarcated by different typefaces, though they can be hard to decipher in digital formats.