A bilingual semi-biographical work by Minae Mizumura, is written in stream of consciousness style. With Japanese phrases sneaking in, its a feeling of nearness and togetherness that the author feels natural inclination towards, and the writing slips from English to Japanese. The shift from observatory style to an almost melancholic poetic note is blatantly obvious, and shows how immensely talented the author is and how natural her writing truly is.
Early this year I did read a book by the author this year and briefly enjoyed it.

<i>Thank you to Netgalley and Columbia University Press for providing me with a free copy of this e-book in exchange for an honest review. </i>

At first, it seems as if the book is about nothing in particular.

It's snowing, and Minae looks out the window. There's nobody outside in such weather, not even the prostitutes hanging around the street, nor anyone at the „Afro-American Student Center” across the street, or at the „University Cabaret” next to it.

And as she looks out the window, she ponders on the violent nature of American streets, on what her life in Japan would be like, had she moved back, on whether a prostitute she used to know is alive and well.

Her older sister, Nanae, calls to tell her it's the 2o-year anniversary of their arrival in the US when they were 9 and 11 and their parents moved for job-related reasons.

In stream-of-consciousness style, one thing and then another spark memories, and we come to know about her life in a zigzag fashion going from present to distant past to somewhere in between in no particular order, with no great overarching story arc, but as engrossing and fascinating as a mystery nonetheless - perhaps because the people themselves and their lives were mysteries.

As the book goes on, it felt to me as if it moves away from snapshots of past and present and towards a more emotional and philosophical stance (though this may merely be an impression, and not true).

The story itself is a semi-autobiography based on Minae Mizumura's own life, though I haven't quite managed to figure out what is fiction and what is truth - perhaps that's intentional.

In very simplistic terms, it's the story of an immigrant to America, a girl taken away from her home country when she was old enough to have lived a great part of her childhood in Japan, but nowhere near old enough to make the choice to move for herself. It's a tale of the nostalgia and desire for the home country, of trying to integrate into the new one, never quite belonging. It's a story of being angry with language, and of discovering that those around her don't see her and will never see her as one of their own.

I found the historical details fascinating; the details of what the family brought along from Japan, of what they ate, of what they found in the US, but most of all, their feelings towards it all, and their perceptions. The inability of the mother to quite understand the concept of a blind date, Minae's tendency to sink into an out-of-date, book-inspired Japan that never quite existed, her sister Nanae's surface-deep imitation of American girls, tanning her skin and bleaching her hair.

It's also a story of <i>language</i>. Minae Mizumura scattered her book with English phrases and sentences. When she talks to her sister, when she speaks of things she associates with America, she turns to English. This is so deeply, <i>deeply</i> familiar. While I myself am not a migrant, I pepper my Romanian with English with my friends - I am bilingual, and most of my reading is in English. I've been this way since school, and switching is as natural as breathing.

How odd that a Japanese woman writing in the '90s seems to describe cultural conundrums that I feel deeply as a Romanian woman in 2020, that she speaks of Japanese people of her parents' generation despising their own culture and turning towards the West, while my generation does the same. That she's aware Japanese is an insular and local language and that writing a book in English would gain a worldwide audience (but she decides to write in Japanese), because English is now universal. That there's a constant back and forth: over there or home? Is home even home? To stay or to go? What would be better?

Juliet Winters Carpenter does a brilliant job with the translation (I assume; my Japanese is really nothing to write home about) and has come up with a good way to show that the novel is <i>bilingual</i>, even if the second language is English - words in English in the original have a different typography (my copy shows them as bolded), giving a good sense of when the register is changed. I wonder what it would have been like to read "An I-Novel" in my native Romanian, with the English left as English, but, alas, it hasn't been translated (yet). Would it have felt tacky? Odd? Or even more natural and relatable? I don't know. Maybe one day I'll find out.

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. I hadn't expected to love this quite as much as I did.

I'm so delighted with this novel, and for the meticulous, poetic way that Juliet Winters Carpenter has translated it. As she says in her foreword, "The original, based on the author's experiences growing up in the United States and Japan, freely mixes natural American English with Japanese." She shares her thinking and her choices about how to capture that dichotomy of language in her translation, with the goal of making the novel accessible to non-Japanese speakers. I think she's come as close to 'amazing' as you can get for such a task and I enjoyed reading this book very much. At the same time I wouldn't recommend to anyone that they read it as an e-book--I would have strongly preferred to have the "I-Novel" in my hands, with the thoughtful and meaningful formatting choices that the translator made, to delineate the languages and where they're used, more readily apparent. I also wonder if it might not have been a good idea to have the original text on the facing page.

I'm fascinated with the world of truly bilingual fiction--it's so interesting to think of an author choosing it as a way, as the only way maybe, to express her inner world. It seems particularly right as choices go for an author trying to explore the way her life was affected by immersion in two different languages, two different cultures.

My thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for this reading experience.

This is a really good novel, the story of Minae, a doctoral student with more doubts than words on her thesis, reminiscing about her actual situation, her past, her family, the change that came to her life when she moved from Japan to the United States, all done through the classical Japanese I-Novel genre, a typical genre where the life of the author is put into words in the story of the book. It is not by chance that Mizumura chooses one of Japanese literary genres par excellence to create a story that, even if simple on first sight (a person worrying about what their future will be, what happened to their youth, why are they expending so many years on a silly doctorate), has so many layers and ways to look at it that it can perfectly become a topic for a fascinating discussion on language and literature.

What is interesting to realize, when reading "An I-Novel", is that it works on two very different levels. First, the most obvious, the chance to look into the mind of the author, to see her fears, her desires, what she envisages or what she would like to change, and how her decisions have taken her to that point of her life. It is an engaging read, a, in some ways, quintessential I-novel story, with the particularity that in this case, the story is seen through the eyes of a Japanese woman that moved to the United States when she was still of young age, this change of scenery, of language, culture, friends... impacting her development and her views.

The second, and for me more fascinating, is too see how language, and in this case, English and Japanese, shape the novel, the author, her views, her feelings, how she reacts to how other see and behave towards her. The role of language in this novel cannot be understated and in that regards, of course, it is a pity not being able to read it in Japanese and English. The translation, though is really good, helping to bridge this shortcoming. This, of course, was the biggest fear I had when I started reading it: that the translation wouldn't be able to bring across the message of the role of language and the impact English has had on the whole world. The only way to maybe, just maybe, replicate the feeling of the original would have been using Spanish as the English of the original, as Spanish is widely spoken and many of its words have become common knowledge. But the decision by the translator and author works, surprisingly, really well. Even if we cannot feel the same as if reading the novel in Japanese-English while being fluent in both languages, like Mizumura, or Juliet Winters Carpenter (the translator), the way the translation has been done helps to recreate within the reader part of the feelings of alienation or loneliness that Mizumura has to deal with, not 'belonging' to anywhere anymore. It is probably, one of the most difficult translation works possible, and Winters Carpenter has done one of those astonishing feats very few translators can do: make the novel feel like a bilingual one even if read just in English.

The only thing (if we forget the not being able to read it as a bilingual work) I had some issues with, is that sometimes Mizumura (or the translator's) words feel a little bit crass, like when the author talks about her middle and high school classmates. Maybe here is where vocabulary, and different languages, express things in a way that is difficult to replicate.

One of those works that is more than just what appears on its pages, "An I-Novel" develops language and conversation in captivating ways.

It’s a snowy evening at a college town in the U.S. It’s sometime in the 1980s. Snowed in, graduate student Minae struggles to cope with ennui, loneliness, and procrastination. Her attempts to call the French department’s secretary at her prestigious college to schedule her oral exams have been futile thus far. She has been trying for a while; she wishes to move forward. Minae looks out the window, daydreams about her move to Japan after her orals, and her enthusiasm is disrupted by thoughts about her dysfunctional family and anxiety about the future.

Japanese writer Minae Mizumura’s fictionalized autobiographical work An I-Novel takes place over the course of a day–the day that marks the twentieth anniversary of, what Minae and her artist sister Nanae call, “our Exodus.” Their family’s move to America from Japan, following Japan’s defeat in WWII. The seemingly uneventful day also reveals to its narrator and protagonist Minae that she has come to a threshold.

As Minae makes the difficult decision to move forward and return to Japan in the novel, she reflects on her memories in the U.S. and in Japan, her struggle with the English language, her identity as a graduate student and as an aspiring novelist–a process of meditation instigated by her phone conversations with Nanae who, like her sister, has long grappled with a sense of belonging in two different cultures.

As the narrative moves back and forth in time, Minae tries to get to the root of her desire to move to Japan and to write in Japanese. “When did I start wanting to go back to Japan?,” she asks, “So many years has passed with me haunted by the longing to return that the wish seemed to have been there from the first.” Although like her parents, she is thrilled about the prospect of the move overseas, she remembers how, once in the Land of the Free, she feel “as trapped as a cloistered nun or a languishing exile.” Her constant struggle with the English language and failure to speak it fluently as a kid further relegates her to the periphery. She thus takes solace in Japanese novels, as well as in the idea that she will surely return home one day. She writes:

“All through my girlhood, I was consumed by thoughts of the homeland I’d left. I longed for it with an intensity that words like ‘yearning’ or ‘nostalgia’ could not convey. I felt I was someplace I should not be. Japan steadily grew near-mythic dimensions in my mind, transfigured into a place where life transcended the smallness of the everyday. Since these were the years that shaped me, I was never again to be free–not even when I finally did return for a visit.”

Later she explains that she goes to graduate school–:

“…simply as a means of prolonging my life in limbo. But I was powerless to halt the stream of time. Awareness of how much time had gone by hit me all of a sudden, as if one day, I Urashimo Tarõ, the Japanese Rip van Winkle, had opened a jeweled box and been greeted with a puff of smoke and jolted to the present. Was it because of the unfamiliar ring of the words ‘thirty years old’ ? Or the disappearance from my living room of Tono’s back hunched over his big desk? Or was it because the Colonial house in Long Island was suddenly gone and my parents became such different people from who they had been? To my astonishment, I myself was no longer a young girl, and neither was Nanae. And for the first time I realized what I had always known deep down: 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.”

She gradually realizes, however, that she wishes to return to a home that does not exist– home as defined by the Japanese novels she reads; home whose meanings she re-constructs through a combination of memories, illusions, and tales. Mizumura thus highlights the intimate link between language and identity through her narrator’s desire to write a novel in Japanese. Minae reflects on her hyphenated identity as follows:

“the gulf was not between me and America. It was something more like a gulf between myself and 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. And I was convinced that my Japanese-language self was my real self and I could only be true o it by one day going back to Japan; my English language self felt utterly beneath me, alien.”

Whenever she mentions her desire to write a novel, the first question she receives is: “Are you going to write in English or in Japanese?” One of her dissertation committee members, for instance, is amused by her aspiration. “Can you write Japanese?” he asks, “I mean, good Japanese. After all, you weren’t educated in Japan, Minae.” He then tells her: “Well, whatever you do, try not to mix up your Japanese with English. “

Even though Minae reassures him that she will “try not to,” the existence of the novel we read suggests that Minae was able to move beyond all the ideologies, illusions, and the pressure to belong. The original version of An I-Novel, which was published in 1995, mixes Japanese and English seamlessly, creating a novel that reflects its narrator’s desire to find her true self. Like the novel we hold in our hands, Minae is audacious and multifaceted, and she does not fit into a box.

Although it seems like its translator Juliet Winters Carpenter has done a wonderful job with the English version, An I-Novel is one of the books that I wish I could read in its original language. Its refreshing approach to the Japanese confessional genre is certainly admirable. But Mizumura’s reflection on what it means to feel at home, to write, and to exist in two cultures and two languages has allowed me to think about my own experiences with the English language: why, I, unlike Minae, was always drawn to the English language when I lived a quiet life thousands of miles from it.

I do believe that this novel has found me at the right time, when I’m slowly reading and writing more in Turkish.


Many thanks to Columbia University Press and Netgalley for the advanced copy!

As a graduate student who is sometimes incapacitated by homesickness and bouts of existential fear, I thought reading Mizumura’s account of a struggling Japanese doctoral student would be extremely relatable. Alas, it wasn’t. Its stream-of-consciousness style was not for me, especially as it was just a rundown of a normal, not particularly eventful life. I guess it was too close to home and the boredom I am experiencing in my own life—reading about it felt like reliving the ennui all over again.

Also, the zigzagging style of the writing was dizzying at times. Its excessive amount of detail was not necessarily alluring, and it kind of dragged on. I struggled to connect with the character, even though it should have been fairly easy for me to do so. Sadly, I also think the translation is a bit clunky. I appreciate it is a big feat to translate a bilingual text, and it seems the translator tried to evoke as similar a feeling as reading the original Japanese text, but it read like a translation, and I feel like a good translation should not show its seams.

Unfortunately, the book failed to stir any emotions in me. It was not for me.

The I-Novel is a style/genre that I wasn't familiar with before reading this one, and now I am intrigued. I was left wondering how much of this was true to Mizumura's experiences, and a quick Google search shows that there are many details that reflect reality. But more so, I wonder about the thoughts that are expressed, because they are revealed with such devastating feeling. There were parts that I could relate so much with and that put to words feelings that I've had, and seeing them on the page was brutal, yet satisfying. Although the book really takes place within a short amount of time, the back and forth between past and present makes it much longer. In a sense, this novel could have been edited a bit to be published as a series of essays on immigration, identity, loss of self, race, language, etc.

I was sold out for this on the first few pages!

As much as I love a book for being fast paced, full of dialogues and drama, I absolutely love it when they are just… therapeutically descriptive.

I learned that an I-Novel is a confessional genre in Japanese literature which Mizumura, very creatively, turns into something semi-autobiographical with a pinch of fiction. I was so excited to read this and for a lot of reasons- mainly because of how it was first published in 1995, promoted and positively perceived in Japan as the nation’s first bilingual novel.

Minae Mizumua had to come to America as a child when her father moved from Japan with her mother and older sister. Now it’s been two decades, being an expatriate graduate, the pull of her motherland and the push of America being a foreign land has always swirled Minae, but is risking to leave it all behind for Japan which has changed radically, a good decision?

I thoroughly enjoyed every word of this book. I wish I could talk about all of the trivial and abysmal details that filled the pages of this beautifully written and equally stunningly translated book.

"Did the literature not arise from the deep desire to do something wondrous with the language? In my case, it was a desire to be born once again.”

If there’s one thing that I could point out was how I deeply connected with her thoughts on the English language which has become something primeval with mother tongues we always put second to it. Being in a country like India, which I firmly believe is obsessed with everything western, English has crept slowly to a ladder where I find people being shamed for not so “fluent English” regularly. In a land of languages, someone getting looked down upon for being who they are instead of adapting to western attributes is just plain sad and pathetic, but well, that’s just India for you.

I love how it subtly hints at the prevalent prejudice and racism, not just against the Asians, but rather against all those essentially “non-white”.

The only thing that left me a bit disgruntled was how it tended to time-jump quite frequently, though I guess for being a story set in a single day in 1980s while she recounts the past and dreams wishful future, it was artistically inevitable.

This has a certain peculiarity of Asian literature, something poetic, lyrical yet raw, melancholic throughout.

Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for this eARC in exchange for an honest review!

I-novel (私小説) is a literary genre in Japanese literature used to describe a type of confessional literature where the events in the story correspond to events in the author's life. I'd read a couple of those (Dazai's and Mishima's) before I was sent Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel.

The book is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. Unlike most Japanese books I read, it takes place in the US and the main character is an expatriate.
It's a deeply poetic novel and to me, it blends something American and something Japanese together — it sounds American but it feels Japanese. The style reminded me of Yoko Tawada's but the point of view reflected that of first or second generation American authors exploring their heritage. As I'm used to reading Japanese books that are set in Japan and where characters don't really question their national identity, I found Mizumura's intersectional point of view refreshing.

It's a memoir about Japan and about the US, and about leaving them both. It's about language, and the way it becomes an expression of our identity. It's also about the desire to go back to your homeland. It's full of tiny observations about living as a young woman in a country you were not born in, but where you lived a considerable part of your life.

It made me wonder - all the feelings the narrator had are perpetually true. You become more cognizant of your national identity when you go abroad. You become your identity to a greater extent when you're surrounded by those who take their identity for granted. You try to understand why they see you a certain way - in Mizumura’s case, she was confused to find out she was considered Asian and put in the same group as Korean and Chinese people.

I really appreciated the translator's note at the beginning — I see those often in Japanese books published in Polish, but not that often in editions in English.

An I-Novel was originally published in Japanese, and is the author’s introspective look at growing up in the US after her father is transferred there when she is 12. The novel in its original form, is scattered throughout with random English words and phrases that fit in with the conversations or storyline and that the author felt her audience would easily understand, but in translated form, especially English, the translator chose to use a different font to notate these words or phrases.

The novel itself doesn’t really have a plot per se, which is interesting because the author describes the novels of Japanese authors that she read growing up the same way. It’s more of her thoughts and conversations put on paper, resulting in us getting an idea of what it was like for a young Japanese girl to arrive in New York in the 1960’s and spend the next 20 years living in America, trying to fit in but at the same time trying to maintain her Japanese-ness, and realizing that the two will never co-exist. At the same time we meet her sister Nanae, who basically did the opposite. We all go through the internal struggle of “who am I?”, but Minae had to do it in a different country and with a different language which were polar opposites of each other.

I felt a lot of empathy for Minae. As a student at Uni in Japan in the 1980’s, a lot of the same situations she described, I encountered too. There is something different about living in a foreign country for years as a resident vice just visiting. Ultimately, regardless of where you are born, or where you grow up, we all just want to be accepted for who we are and not have to fit in some box of someone else’s design.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author and translated for an ARC in return for a fair and honest review.

An I-Novel was an intriguing and captivating read. It presented a delightful character study of Minae, and I really felt like I got to know and understand her as she pondered her feelings about leaving Japan, living in America, and her desire to return to her homeland and her native language. This novel was originally written in Japanese, with a bit of English thrown in here and there throughout. That is difficult to replicate in an English translation. What the translator has done is change font for the sections that would have stood out in English in the original. This works as a marker, and it's interesting to see when they occur; however, I don't think you could ever exactly capture the feel of the original work in an English translation. I am currently learning Japanese, so I liked the occasional kanji or phrase that were included, some of which I was pleased to see I could understand. As someone who has moved country (albeit not to somewhere with a different language), I found it easy to relate to Minae and her experiences and feelings, and overall An I-Novel was a thoughtful and interesting read that I really enjoyed. I am giving it 4.5 stars. The only reason it doesn't get five is because I think that, stylistically at least, something gets lost from this work in the English translation.