Japan:

Translation from Russian in the Melting Pot of Japanese Literature

Hiroko Cockerill

Introduction

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Japanese literary language underwent radical transformation under the influence of translations from the literatures of European countries. Translations from Russian literature occupied a significant place among these. When translating from Russian to Japanese, nineteenth-century Japanese translators had to grapple with linguistic elements that did not exist in their own language. Japanese did not commonly use past tense verb endings or male and female third-person pronouns,1 both of which are common in Russian literature and the literatures of other European languages. Komori Yōichi notes that Roland Barthes has identified the passé simple and third-person pronouns as markers of fiction in modern prose works.2 However, when Barthes identifies the “preterite” (passé simple) and the “third-person” as markers of fiction in modern prose works, he limits this assertion to the Western novel.3 If Barthes’ assertion is correct, the question arises: how then could Japanese writers create modern prose works without the preterite or the third person? And how did translations from European literatures influence the creation of the modern Japanese novel? One of the most significant translators to influence the development of the Japanese literary language was Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909),4 who was both a pioneering translator from Russian literature and the creator of the modern Japanese novel.5 His novel The Drifting Cloud (Ukigumo) was published serially from 1887 to 1889. In 1888, he published translations of two of Ivan Turgenev’s short stories under the titles ‘The Tryst’ (‘Aibiki’) and ‘A Chance Encounter’ (‘Meguriai’), implying that his work on these translations overlapped with the composition of his novel.6 A major innovation of Futabatei’s translation style was the use of -ta verbal endings (also known as -ta auxiliary verbs) to convey the meaning of the past tense. It was left to a later translator from Russian, Nakamura Hakuyō (1890–1974), to establish the use of the male and female pronouns kare (he) and kanojo (she), two and a half decades later. Futabatei’s use of -ta verbal endings as the past tense marker and Nakamura’s use of Japanese male and female pronouns kare and kanojo were the result of their application of methods which, today, we would associate with Lawrence Venuti’s concept of foreignisation. This chapter will examine how Japanese translators of Russian literature responded to the challenges of translating past tense verbs and third-person pronouns, and what impact this had on subsequent Japanese writers of fiction.

Creating Past Tense Forms (-ta Endings):
Futabatei’s Debut Translations, ‘The Tryst’ and
‘A Chance Encounter’

Translations from Western literature began appearing in Japan after the nation opened its doors to the world in 1868. People were eager to learn about the West, and translators acted as mediators of Western culture. By 1888, when Futabatei published his versions of ‘The Tryst’ and ‘A Chance Encounter’, many European literary works by prominent authors had already been translated into Japanese, such as A Marvellous Affair in Europe: A Springtime Tale of Blossoms and Willows (Ōshū Kiji: Karyū shunwa, 1878), which was extracted from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers and Alice (1837–38), and A New Story: A Tour of the World in Eighty Days (Shinsetsu: Hachijū nichikan Sekai isshū, 1878), from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, 1872). Futabatei’s two maiden translations differed markedly from the works of earlier translators. First, while the literary works translated prior to Futabatei’s debut were often politically inflected or adventure narratives, Futabatei chose two love stories. Secondly, while earlier translations were often abbreviated or adapted, Futabatei’s debut works were painstakingly literal, word-for-word translations. Finally, the narratives of the two translations were written in the colloquial genbun-itchi style for the first time in Japanese translation history. Genbun-itchi literally means ‘unification of the spoken and written language’ and refers to the use of a style derived from spoken language in a written narrative. Prior to Futabatei’s two translations, most literary translations employed the kanbun kundoku style, invented when Japanese monks tried to read Chinese Buddhist scriptures in the late eighth century. They converted Chinese sentences directly into Japanese sentences, retaining all the Chinese characters. They indicated word order by adding numbers to the original Chinese text, as the Chinese language typically observes a subject-verb-object sentence structure, while the sentence structure of the Japanese language is normally subject-object-verb. The Chinese characters were retained, unchanged, for nouns, verb stems, adjectives, and adverbs, while Japanese particles, Japanese verb and adjectival conjugations, Japanese adverbial endings, and Japanese auxiliary verbs were added to the original Chinese characters in the form of katakana (one of the two phonetic syllabaries used in modern Japanese, the other being hiragana). In this way, Japanese people were able to read Chinese sentences without knowing how Chinese characters were deciphered. This style was referred to as the male writing style and it continued to develop and be widely used until the Meiji era (1868–1912). Official documents and many scientific and technical texts were written or translated using this style during the early Meiji period. While previous translations of European literary works had usually been written with Chinese characters and katakana, Futabatei’s debut translations were written with Chinese characters and hiragana.7 The story translated by Futabatei as ‘The Tryst’ is taken from Turgenev’s early work A Sportsman’s Sketches (1847–52). The sportsman (who is out hunting) by chance witnesses a rendez-vous in a birch grove between an unfortunate peasant girl and an arrogant servant. The girl is heartlessly abandoned by the servant, who regards their liaison as only a casual affair. Futabatei’s translation begins as follows:

(A) In autumn around the middle of September, there was a day when I sat in a birch grove. From morning a fine rain had been falling, but from time to time there were intervals of warm sunshine; [it was] very unsettled weather. One moment fluffy white clouds spread in layers across the sky, and the next the sky suddenly cleared in parts, and from behind the clouds which had been parted, a bright and cheerful azure patch, like a beautiful and intelligent eye, was seen. (B) I sat, looked around and listened. The leaves rustled slightly above my head, and I knew the season just by listening.8

In his translation, Futabatei noted every text-based feature of the original. Later in 1908 he recollected how he worked on his early translations in a talk entitled ‘Yo ga hon’yaku no hyōjun (‘My Translation Norm’)’.

If you think solely of the meaning when translating a foreign language and attach excessive importance to it, you will take the risk of harming the original. I have always believed that you must saturate yourself with the rhythm of the original for some time, then transfer it to your own work. In my attempt to use Russian rhythms in my translations, I did not omit a single comma or full stop. If the original contained three commas and one full stop, the translation also had three commas and one full stop.9 [my italics]

It is interesting to learn that Futabatei prioritised the rhythm of the original before meaning. His scrupulous efforts to reproduce the original style led him to create an unprecedented colloquial genbun-itchi style in his narrative. Although Futabatei could not completely adhere to the number of commas in the original, the number of full stops was meticulously reproduced. As a result, the five sentences in the passage quoted earlier match the five sentences in the original. Turgenev wrote his story as a first-person narrative. The narrator-sportsman recollects the rendez-vous he witnessed and the retrospective narrative point of view is fixed by consistent use of past tense verbs. Futabatei attempts to loyally convey the meaning of the past tense verbs in Turgenev’s original by using -ta auxiliary verbs. Because in the Japanese language verbs usually come at the end of the sentence, four of the five sentences quoted above end with -ta. The two underlined sentences in the passage quoted above clearly show the narrator’s retrospective point of view:

(A) Aki kugatsu chūjun to iu koro, hitohi jibun ga saru kaba no hayashi no naka ni zashite ita koto ga atta. […] Jibun wa zashite shikoshite, soshite mimi o katamukete ita.
(In autumn, around the middle of September, there was a day when I sat in a birch grove. […] (B) I sat, looked around and listened.)

By using the first-person pronoun jibun (I) and the -ta endings: atta (was) and mimi o katamukete ita (listened), Futabatei successfully reproduces Turgenev’s retrospective narrative point of view. Futabatei’s innovation is evident when we compare the colloquial genbun-itchi narrative style he created with the kanbun kundoku narrative style found in a translation made only five years earlier in 1883, A Mysterious Story in Russia: The Story of a Flowery Heart Written by a Butterfly (Rokoku kibun: Kashin chōshi roku). One would never guess from the title that this was a translation of Aleksandr Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (Kapitanskaia dochka, 1836) and also the very first Japanese translation of a work of Russian literature. The translator, Takasu Jisuke (1859–1909), studied Russian at the same college as Futabatei.10 However, Takasu changed the original first-person narrative into a third-person narrative. He also changed the main characters’ names into English names, and his translation style contains a high degree of embellishment, identified by Antoine Berman as a deforming force causing inaccuracy in the translated text.11

The mountains are winding endlessly like a flying dragon, and trees and plants grow thick to reach the valley. Although there are some wastelands covered with weeds, thorns grow everywhere and only a few paths are seen for the woodcutters. These are places for foxes and badgers to live, and for wild dogs and wolves to howl. Here we find a small village in the northern part of Russia called Siberia, and it is the most remote and poor place.12

Takasu sets the story deep in the mountains, though no such mountains appear in Pushkin’s original. He adds a stereotypical description of the place where the protagonist lives to produce an adaptation. His description has a grandeur reminiscent of Chinese scenery. Futabatei, on the other hand, painstakingly reproduced Turgenev’s description of a Russian birch grove. The most obvious difference in the two descriptions of scenery is the choice of verb forms employed in each of them. The sentences in Takasu’s kanbun kundoku style often end with the dictionary forms of verbs and auxiliary verbs, which are non-specific in regard to tense. In Futabatei’s genbun-itchi style most sentences end with -ta. The emergence of -ta as a past tense marker creates a massive shift in narrative style. The Japanese grammarian Ōno Susumu explains it as follows:

The modern Japanese auxiliary verb -ta [referred to in this chapter as the -ta ending] is nowadays used to express the meanings of both the past and the perfective, though it originally derived from the classic auxiliary verb -tari, which was used to express the perfective. This classic auxiliary verb -tari took the place of the other two auxiliary verbs -ki and -keri, and it has incorporated their meanings. Whereas -ki was used when one had a clear memory of the past, -keri was used when one became aware of things that had belonged to an unknown past. Thus -keri was often used in folklore as a marker for fiction.13

While the classic auxiliary verbs tari and ri, expressing the meaning of the perfective aspect, are often employed in the kanbun kundoku style, the classic auxiliary verbs ki and keri, expressing the meaning of the past tense, are hardly ever used. A story written in kanbun kundoku style is related as an incident unfolding before the readers’ eyes, but Turgenev’s story is related by a narrator-protagonist with a firm retrospective point of view and this viewpoint is reinforced by the consistent use of the past tense verbs. To reproduce these past tense Russian verbs, Futabatei consistently employed -ta auxiliary verbs, which were originally used to express the perfective aspect. The Japanese Slavist Kimura Shōichi praised Futabatei’s debut translations ‘The Tryst’ and ‘A Chance Encounter’ for their loyal rendition of Turgenev’s originals. He praised Futabatei’s consistent use of -ta auxiliary verbs, writing that “Futabatei bravely used past tense form verbs consistently, despite the risk of creating monotony in the narrative”.14 However, when Futabatei produced these translations, there was no past tense verb form in the colloquial Japanese language, so Futabatei’s use of -ta auxiliary verbs as a past tense marker was a significant innovation occasioned by the act of translation. This is what can happen when a translator uses a foreignising translation method.

In The Translator’s Invisibility (1955), Lawrence Venuti advocated for a foreignising translation method to overcome the Anglo-American translators’ invisibility. Venuti cites the German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher’s argument that only two translation methods exist. Either the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him. Venuti explains Schleiermacher’s definition of these two opposing translation methods as follows:

Schleiermacher allowed the translator to choose between a domesticating method, an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-cultural values, bringing the author back home, and a foreignizing method, an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad.15

Futabatei’s ‘The Tryst’ thus employed a foreignising strategy: he left Turgenev in peace and moved the Japanese reader towards him. As a result, the reader encountered an unprecedented colloquial narrative style that registered the linguistic difference of the Russian text through the novel use of -ta endings. However, the new translation style created by Futabatei in ‘The Tryst’ challenged his readers’ relative ignorance. When ‘The Tryst’ was published, literary critics could not appreciate the new colloquial genbun-ichi narrative style; they criticised it as verbose, when it was, in fact, a loyal rendition of Turgenev’s original. Some critics ridiculed the way that so many of his sentences ended in -ta. Bewildered by the readers’ ignorant response, Futabatei suspended his literary activity for nearly eight years. Then, in 1896, he published revised versions of ‘The Tryst’ and ‘A Chance Encounter’ to break his literary silence. The most significant change in his revised versions was a reduction in the number of -ta endings. To break the monotony caused by the consistent use of -ta endings in the first versions, Futabatei changed some -ta endings to non-ta (mostly -(r)u) endings. Most -ta endings used to translate past tense imperfective verbs in the originals were changed to -(r)u endings, while -ta endings employed to translate past tense perfective verbs in the originals were left as they were. As a result, most -ta endings that remained in the revised versions conveyed a perfective aspect.16 Futabatei continued to apply this method when translating Russian verbs until the end of his translation career, and the use of -ta endings for all past tense verbs in the first version of ‘The Tryst’ was buried and forgotten until younger writers of the naturalist school rediscovered it soon after the publication of the second version of ‘The Tryst’.

The Emergence of the Third-person Pronouns kare (he) and kanojo (she) in Japanese Literary Works, In Spite of Futabatei’s Apparent Aversion to Them

Considering all the effort Futabatei put into ‘The Tryst’ to create a new colloquial genbun-itchi narrative style, and how meticulous he was in translating Turgenev’s original, it is rather puzzling that Futabatei did not directly translate any of the third-person pronouns found in the original. Although Futabatei translated the first-person pronoun ‘I’ (ia) used by the sportsman narrator, using the Japanese first-person pronoun jibun (I), the third-person pronouns ‘he’ (on) and ‘she’ (ona) referring to the arrogant servant and the hapless peasant girl are generally substituted either with their names (Viktor and Akulina become Bikutoru and Akūrina) or with the nouns otoko (a man) and musume (a girl). In the first version, Futabatei mostly relied on the personal names Bikutoru and Akūrina, while in the second version he primarily used the nouns otoko and musume. As a result, there is a greater emotional distance from the characters in the second version of ‘The Tryst’, as the personal names are mostly eliminated. We should note that in both versions Futabatei often consciously omitted to translate first- and third-person pronouns, especially when they are possessive pronouns. Futabatei adopted the same approach to the translation of third-person pronouns in ‘A Chance Encounter’ as he had already applied in ‘The Tryst’. Turgenev’s ‘Three Meetings’ (‘Tri vstrechi’), the source for this text, is also written as a first-person narrative in which a sportsman recalls an inexplicable experience. By a strange twist of fate, he witnesses three encounters between a beautiful stranger (neznakomka) and a handsome man: one encounter in Italy and two in Russia. Finally, the narrator meets the mysterious woman at a masquerade and learns that she has been betrayed and abandoned by the handsome man. In ‘A Chance Encounter’ Futabatei again frequently employs the first-person pronoun ‘jibun’ (‘I’) to translate the first-person pronoun ‘I’ (‘ia’) referring to the narrator; but he does not directly translate the third-person pronouns ‘she’ (‘ona’) and ‘he’ (‘on’) referring to the beautiful stranger and her lover. These third-person pronouns are rendered by employing the nouns ‘fujin’ (‘a lady’) and ‘otoko’ (‘a man’) in the first version, and by ‘onna’ (‘a woman’) and ‘otoko’ (‘a man’) in the second version. In the original story, the couple whose encounters are witnessed by the narrator are presented as strangers, and the beautiful woman is indicated by the third-person pronoun ‘she’ (‘ona’) throughout the story. Futabatei could not have failed to notice the use of third-person pronouns in Turgenev’s original, especially the regular use of the female third-person pronoun ‘she’ (‘ona’). Futabatei was thus confronted by a pressing need to find Japanese third-person pronouns equivalent to the Russian third-person pronouns, particularly ‘she’ (‘ona’).

By the time Futabatei first translated ‘A Chance Encounter’ in 1888, many Japanese writers, including Futabatei himself, would already have been familiar with the male and female Japanese third-person pronouns kare (‘he’) and kanojo (‘she’), through various grammar books describing Western foreign languages.17 Another third-person pronoun widely employed in literary works at that time was the neutral kare, which could denote both male and female persons. Chongbo Li has charted the emergence of the Japanese third-person pronoun kare. He explains that kare, which is widely employed today as a male third-person pronoun, used to be a demonstrative pronoun. The first use of kare as a third-person pronoun was found in Esopo no fables, the Japanese translation of Aesop’s Fables, in 1593. During the Edo period kare was frequently found in yomihon (books for reading) or tsūzokumono (popular books) which were translations or adaptations of colloquial Chinese novels. In the early Meiji period, kare was used as the third-person pronoun in rakugo (Japanese traditional comic storytelling) but these instances were rather rare.18 Kare also continued to be used as a third-person pronoun in translations made in the kanbun kundoku style during the early Meiji period. For example, in A Mysterious Story in Russia: The Story of a Flowery Heart Written by a Butterfly, the translation of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter quoted earlier, Takasu uses kare quite frequently. Another translator who often employed kare was Morita Shiken (1861–97), who created a meticulous kanbun kundoku translation style known as the shūmitsu (exhaustive) or word-for-word translation style. Yanagida Izumi, who made a comprehensive study of Japanese translation history during the Meiji era, considers that this shūmitsu kanbun kundoku style was the basis for Futabatei’s colloquial genbun-ichi translation style found in ‘The Tryst’ and ‘A Chance Encounter’, pointing out that Futabatei was a keen reader of Morita’s translations.19 However, the fact that kare was used in the kanbun kundoku style may be the very reason that Futabatei did not use it himself. In a talk entitled ‘Yo ga genbun itchi no yurai’ (‘The Origin of my Genbun-itchi Style’), Futabatei famously declared that he excluded any Chinese word that had not fully entered Japanese lexis from his colloquial genbun-itchi style.20 When Futabatei made his debut translations, the third-person pronoun kare was a word used mainly in the kanbun kundoku style and was not fully recognised as Japanese. More than one Chinese character was used to denote kare. As well as 彼, which is widely used today, 渠 and 他 could denote male and female characters in the translations of Chinese literary works. While Takasu used 彼 and 他 in A Mysterious Story in Russia: The Story of a Flowery Heart Written by a Butterfly, Morita used 渠 in his translations. A careful reading of the two versions of ‘A Chance Encounter’ reveals that Futabatei uses kare only once, to denote the emancipated serf Luk’ianich, during a passage of dialogue. He used the Chinese character 彼 once in both versions, but the original Russian word is not ‘he’ (on) but ‘that’ (eto) and the reading Futabatei gives for it is not kare (he) but are (that). In this way, he avoided using the third-person pronoun kare in both versions of ‘A Chance Encounter’. As for the female third-person pronoun kanojo (she), Futabatei did not use it at all in the first version of ‘A Chance Encounter’, and in the second version he uses the Chinese characters 彼女 (which today are read as kanojo) just once to denote the beautiful stranger, but the reading he gives them is ano onna (that woman). In this way, Futabatei completely avoided using third-person pronouns in his debut translations, even when it appeared that he could not escape using the third-person pronoun kanojo (she) if he was to translate the story accurately. So, who did initiate the use of the female third-person pronoun kanojo (she) in Japan, if not Futabatei? Surprisingly, the first instances of the Japanese third-person pronoun kanojo, as presented in various grammar books, were found not in translations but in literary works. The very first instance was detected in The Character of Modern Students (Tōsei shosei katagi, 1885–1886) written by Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), who was Futabatei’s mentor in the late 1880s, when the latter was writing his novel The Drifting Cloud. Tsubouchi was a literary theorist who studied English literature and advocated realism in Japanese writing. The Character of Modern Students implemented Tsubouchi’s own theory, and was published two years before Part One of The Drifting Cloud came out, in 1885. Subsequently Saganoya Omuro (1863–1947), who was Futabatei’s friend and studied Russian in the same class, used kanojo in his novel A Chrysanthemum at the End of a Field (Nozue no kiku, 1889). However, neither Tsubouchi nor Saganoya made extensive use of the innovative word kanojo, with only one instance of the word in each work, and when Tsubouchi used it, he was hinting that the person in question was a prostitute. Okumura Tsuneya, who conducted thorough research into the establishment of the third-person pronouns kare, kanojo and karera (‘they’) during the early Meiji period, concluded that Saganoya introduced the use of kanojo into the works written in the genbun-itchi style but could not sustain its use.21 During the period when Futabatei had suspended his literary activities (1889 to 1896), a new literary group emerged called Ken’yūsha (‘Friends of the Ink Stone’), led by Ozaki Kōyō (1867–1903). They opposed the genbun-itchi movement and insisted on employing a classical style in narrative prose. Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939), a prominent member of this group, often selected mysterious and supernatural subjects for his stories. Izumi admired Morita’s translations, and his classic style resembled Morita’s kanbun kundoku shūmitsu style. He frequently employed kare in his stories (denoted by the Chinese character 渠) to refer to both male and female characters. In 1896, when Izumi was at his most popular, his former teacher Ozaki, who had stubbornly opposed the genbun-ichi movement, unexpectedly published his colloquial genbun-itchi novel Tears and Regrets (Tajō takon). Ozaki wrote the novel after being deeply impressed by a reading of The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, written in the early eleventh century by Murasaki Shikibu, who served as a lady-in-waiting to Empress Shōshi). Genji depicts a man grieving over the death of his beloved wife in a style close to a third-person narrative. In his own novel, Ozaki employed both the third-person pronoun kare and -ta endings, implying past tense, to express the omniscient narrator’s voice. Ozaki also changed the Chinese character for kare from 渠 to 彼. Although the use of -ta endings was not as consistent as it needed to be, and the third-person pronoun kare referred not only to the heartbroken protagonist but also to other central male and female characters, Ozaki initiated a third-person narrative using the third-person pronoun kare together with a limited number of -ta endings carrying the meaning of the past tense. In the same year that Ozaki published his genbun-itchi novel Tears and Regrets, Futabatei added to his revised versions of ‘The Tryst’ and ‘A Chance Encounter’ the short novel One-sided Love (Katakoi), a translation of Turgenev’s Asya (Asia, 1858). Young poets and Japanese naturalist writers such as Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908), Tayama Katai (1871–1930), and Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943) were greatly impressed by Futabatei’s translations of Turgenev’s works. ‘The Tryst’ made such a strong impression on young writers that many of them referenced sentences from it, some quoting directly, and others writing similar sentences in their works.22 Kunikida, in his early work Musashino (published in 1898, only two years after the publication of the revised versions of ‘The Tryst’ and ‘A Chance Encounter’),23 wrote the following sentence: “Hayashi no oku ni zashite shikoshi, keichōshi, teishishi, mokusōsu” (“I sit in the grove, look around, listen, cast my eyes down, and contemplate”). Kunikida was imitating the following sentence in ‘The Tryst’: “Jibun wa zashite shikoshite, soshite mimi o katamukete ita” (“I sat, looked around and listened”). What is surprising here is that the sentence imitated by Kunikida is taken not from the second version, just published, but from the first version, published ten years earlier. What is more, not only Kunikida, but all the other young naturalist writers described the strong impression that the first version of ‘The Tryst’ had made upon them. They felt the first-person narrator’s voice more acutely in the first version.24 Tayama and Shimazaki were the most enthusiastic readers of Futabatei’s translations of Turgenev’s works. They went on to read other translations Futabatei had made from Turgenev’s originals. Then they too began writing original prose. The works by which they are remembered, including Shimazaki’s Spring (Haru, 1908)25 and Tayama’s The Quilt (Futon, 1907) were written in near perfect third-person narrative with frequent use of the third-person pronouns kare and kanojo and consistent use of -ta endings.26 Although the percentage of -ta endings found in their narratives did not exceed ninety percent, as in Futabatei’s first version of ‘The Tryst’, almost seventy percent of their sentences ended with -ta. The third-person pronouns kare and kanojo were used to indicate all male and female characters respectively. Whereas Shimazaki used the relatively innovative Chinese character 彼 for kare, following Ozaki, Tayama used the rather old-fashioned Chinese character 渠. Both writers employed 彼女 for kanojo. The only deviation from the usual third-person narrative in The Quilt was that Tayama introduced the protagonist of the story using the third-person pronoun kare. Tayama initiated a distinctive use of the third-person pronoun kare to indicate a specific character, differing from the usage of third-person pronouns in Western novels.

Establishing a Distinctive Japanese Translation Style: Nakamura’s Translation of Crime and Punishment

Futabatei ended his career as a translator when he departed for Russia as a foreign correspondent for the Asahi Shinbun newspaper in June 1908. Unfortunately, he fell seriously ill with pneumonia in St Petersburg and died on his return voyage to Japan in the following year. Although Futabatei had introduced works by major Russian writers such as Nikolai Gogol, Turgenev, and Lev Tolstoy into Japanese, he never translated anything by Dostoevsky.27 The first Japanese person to translate Dostoevsky directly from Russian was the pioneering female translator Senuma Kayō (1875–1915).28 She translated the diary of the female protagonist Varvara from Dostoevsky’s debut novel Poor Folk (Bednye liudi, 1846), published in 1904 as a short story entitled ‘A Poor Girl’ (‘Mazushiki shōjo’). Her translation style attempts to reproduce Dostoevsky’s original accurately, but it occasionally deviates from this, especially when she translates the climactic scene, in which Varvara’s first love, Pokrovskii, is dying. Her style is excessively emotional and verbose, almost pseudo-classical. Senuma was a disciple of Ozaki Kōyō, who had initially opposed the genbun-itchi movement before creating a third-person narrative form that incorporated the third person-pronoun kare and -ta endings indicating the past tense. Although Senuma did not pay much attention to the verb forms in the Russian original, she closely monitored the use of the third-person pronouns. She used the Chinese character 彼 to translate he (on), and the Chinese characters 彼女 to translate she (ona) with both彼 and 彼女 being read as kare. This use of third-person pronouns gave her translation a new style. Senuma next focused intensely on translating works by Anton Chekhov. At the same time, Nobori Shomu (1878–1958) began publishing his translations of works by old and new Russian writers such as Pushkin, Turgenev, Konstantin Bal’mont, Boris Zaitsev, Aleksandr Kuprin, Fedor Sologub, and Leonid Andreev. He produced three translation anthologies in 1908, 1910, and 1912 successively.29 His translations were received enthusiastically by emerging Japanese writers, who regarded him as having ushered in a ‘Shomu period’ in the history of Japanese literary translation. Why did his translation style make such an impression on young writers? Nobori’s predominant use of non-ta sentence endings was similar to Futabatei’s usage following the 1896 revision of the debut translations, so that was not really an innovation. What probably most impressed young writers about Nobori’s translations was this use of the third-person pronouns kare and kanojo. Nobori was the very first literary translator from Russian to Japanese to employ kare and kanojo in the same way as they are used in the present day. In his translations kare was used to translate he (on) and kanojo was used to translate she (ona), and the Chinese characters used for them were 彼 and 彼女 respectively. (Senuma had used the same Chinese characters, but imposed the same reading, kare, on both male and female characters.) In 1914, three Japanese translations of novels by Dostoevsky were published by the Shinchōsha publishing house as part of their paperback series (Shinchō bunko, ‘the Shinchō paperback’), following the precedent of the German Reclam editions with their famous yellow Universal-Bibliothek paperbacks, launched in 1867. By selling the books in paperback form for the first time, Shinchōsha was able to provide Japanese readers with a wide range of foreign books translated directly from the original. Perhaps one of the reasons Futabatei did not translate Dostoevsky may have been the sheer length of the latter’s novels. Futabatei and his publishers may have considered that long translations would not be accommodated by the book market at that time. One of the three 1914 translations of Dostoevsky’s works for this paperback series was The Humiliated and Insulted (Unizhennye i oskorblennye, 1861) translated by Shomu under the title The Humiliated People (Shiitagerareshi hitobito). The other two translations were of Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866) and The Idiot (Idiot, 1868–69). The former was translated by Nakamura under the title Crime and Punishment (Tsumi to Batsu), and the latter was translated by Yonekawa Masao (1891–1965) under the title Idiot (Hakuchi). Both translators had graduated from the Tokyo School of Foreign Studies, where Futabatei had both studied and taught Russian. As new graduates, they worked hard on their translations and Nakamura even made a preliminary translation of The Humiliated and Insulted for Nobori, who was pressed for time.30 Nakamura and Yonekawa both became prominent Russian translators and enjoyed long careers. Nakamura produced translations of Tolstoy’s complete works, while Yonekawa translated Dostoevsky’s complete works. After establishing himself as a renowned Russian translator, Nakamura commented on his translation method as follows:

When we engage in literary translation, we must pay more attention to the style of the work than to its content. That is, it is more significant to pay attention to the way we translate than to what we translate. […] We should not allow ourselves to freely change expressions in the original according to our own interpretation or understanding. For example, Dostoevsky is often criticized for his verbose and lengthy sentences. Is it right for a translator to cut short Dostoevsky’s long sentences, or to cut them out completely, following his own judgement? I find great value in Dostoevsky’s seemingly verbose long sentences. Without his lengthy and verbose style, Dostoevsky would not have achieved his artistic goal.31

Nakamura’s translation method was almost identical with that of Futabatei. Both placed the original’s style ahead of conveying its meaning, and both tried to reproduce the ‘foreignness’ of the text. In the opening two paragraphs of Crime and Punishment, Nakamura employed the same number of full stops (six out of six full stops are reproduced) and almost the same number of commas as Dostoevsky (seventeen out of eighteen commas are reproduced, though used in slightly different places). The punctuation marks mirrored the use in the original even more closely than in Futabatei’s first version of ‘The Tryst’. Nakamura meticulously reproduced the past tense form verbs in Dostoevsky’s original employing -ta endings, just as Futabatei did in his debut translation. What is more, Nakamura carefully rendered the third-person pronouns found in the original using the third-person pronouns kare (彼) and kanojo (彼女). The number of such pronouns used in the two opening paragraphs of Nakamura’s translation even exceeded those found in the original by one. Nakamura might have wanted to emphasise the third-person narrative form of the original, which Dostoevsky initially wrote as a first-person narrative. As a result, the third-person narrative in Dostoevsky’s original was successfully conveyed in Nakamura’s translation by the latter’s consistent use of -ta endings indicating the past tense and the frequent use of third-person pronouns kare and kanojo. This was what Nakamura’s foreignising method achieved.32 By the time Nakamura had established this translation style, Japanese writers had already started using kare and kanojo at their own discretion. Nakamura, however, played a crucial role in paving the way for a distinctive Japanese translation style that made consistent use of -ta endings and the third-person pronouns kare and kanojo.

A Distinctive Translation Style in the Melting Pot of Japanese Literature

While the style developed by Nakamura became standard for Japanese translations, many Japanese writers kept experimenting with various narrative styles. When Futabatei produced two alternative versions of Turgenev’s short stories, he unintentionally showed Japanese writers two narrative possibilities: one with the consistent use of -ta past tense endings and the other with mixed -ta and non-ta endings. Futabatei had also demonstrated that it is possible for Japanese writers not to employ third-person pronouns in their narratives, and thus it became optional for Japanese writers to do so. As a result, Japanese writers developed various narrative styles both with and without third-person pronouns, and with and without consistent -ta past tense endings. Perhaps we may divide Japanese writers into two groups: those who are/were conscious of the use of -ta endings and the third-person pronouns in their narratives and those who are/were not conscious of these things. I shall examine four representative Japanese writers who were highly aware of the effect brought by the frequent use of -ta endings and the third-person pronouns in their narratives: Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), Ōe Kenzaburō (1935–2023), and Murakami Haruki (b. 1949).

Natsume was a contemporary of Futabatei’s. They both worked for the Asahi Shinbun newspaper, where their work was meant to be serially published (in turn). Due to Futabatei’s sudden death, this plan was realised only once. When Natsume heard of Futabatei’s death, he famously commented that Futabatei had a clear idea of what he needed to do next in his literary activities.33 By saying “a clear idea” Natsume may have hinted that Futabatei wished to write an authentic third-person narrative story in Japanese, and that Natsume would inherit his colleague’s legacy. In fact, Natsume did not use any third-person pronouns in his early works, and the narratives of these early works were written in a mixture of -ta and non-ta endings, with non-ta endings predominating. It was in his novel And Then (Sorekara, 1909) that he began frequently using the third-person pronoun kare, together with predominant -ta endings.34 He made regular and effective use of the third-person pronoun kare in his first-person narrative novel The Heart (Kokoro, 1914), the most widely-read modern Japanese novel in Japan. Here, Natsume examines the darkness within a man’s heart. The protagonist confesses that he had betrayed his friend’s trust, and caused his suicide, by marrying the girl whom the friend loved. Natsume uses the third-person pronoun kare mostly to refer to the protagonist’s friend, called simply ‘K’. In the protagonist’s testament, the third-person pronoun kare serves to objectify his friend, allowing him to analyse his irreparable deed. Around this time, Natsume had begun reading Dostoevsky’s novels, recommended to him by his mentee and future biographer, the novelist and translator Morita Sōhei (1881–1949).35 Morita published translations of Demons (Besy, 1871–72) and The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1879–80), made via English, in 1915. (The 1914 Dostoevsky translations by Nakamura and Yonekawa for Shinchō, mentioned above, were made directly from Russian.)

Natsume later wrote a fictionalised memoir, Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa, 1915). He openly revealed that he was analysing his own experience, while thoroughly objectifying that experience by employing kare to refer to himself, and by consistently using -ta endings which constituted the vast majority of all sentence endings in the book. In his final novel Light and Darkness (Meian, 1916), Natsume perfected the third-person narrative novel by employing the third-person pronouns kare and kanojo in reference to all characters without discrimination, and through his extremely consistent use of -ta endings (now the overwhelmingly dominant form). As a scholar of English literature, Natsume’s literary theory was informed by his studies in England (he studied Shakespeare at UCL for two years). In his later novels, it is likely that he adopted the essential features of the Western third-person narrative form. However, it is also highly possible that the translations made by Nakamura and Yonekawa influenced Natusme’s decision to make such extensive use of third-person pronouns and -ta endings in his final novel.

One writer who inherited Natsume’s literary legacy was Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, the former’s most prominent disciple. Although Futabatei’s name had gradually faded from young Japanese writers’ memories, the translations made by Nobori were extremely popular among them, as I mentioned earlier. Akutagawa was one of those young writers who devotedly read Nobori’s translations of various contemporary Russian writers. Acknowledging that he lacked an individual writing style, he may have tried to assimilate the many styles developed in Nobori’s translations. Akutagawa’s forte was the short story. He wrote short fiction with all sentences ending in -ta, and others with mixed -ta and non-ta sentence endings. Examples of the former are ‘Princess Rokunomiya’ (‘Rokunomiya no himegimi’, 1922) and ‘Zenkaku sanbo’ (‘Zenkaku Sanbō’, 1927). Akutagawa also wrote some short stories with no third-person pronouns. Such stories include ‘The Nose’ (‘Hana’, 1916), ‘Hell Screen’ (‘Jigoku hen’, 1918), ‘The Death of a Disciple’ (‘Hōkyōnin no shi’, 1918), ‘Magic’ (‘Majutsu’, 1919), and ‘In a Bamboo Grove’ (‘Yabu no naka’, 1922). Of these, ‘The Nose’ is the only story written from a third-person narrative point of view, though it has no third-person pronouns and uses a mix of -ta and non -ta sentence endings. Due to the obvious resemblance of the title and the theme of disappearance and reappearance of an unusually long nose, many critics have determinedly attempted to identify the influence of Gogol’s ‘The Nose’ (‘Nos’) over the creation of Akutagawa’s ‘The Nose’. Wada Yoshihide has discovered that Akutagawa only read Gogol’s work after completing his own short story. Akutagawa was thus more likely to have been influenced by Nobori’s other translations.36 Indeed, Akutagawa ingeniously exercised the four possible styles unconsciously suggested by Futabatei’s works. It is no surprise that the literary prize named after Akutagawa Ryūnosuke later became the most prestigious literary prize in Japan for fiction by new writers.

Dostoevsky’s influence upon Japanese writers became conspicuous during the Shōwa period (1926–89). Ōe Kenzaburō discussed the significance of Dostoevsky’s works in twenty-first century Japan in his In the Twenty-First Century, Dostoevsky is Coming (Nijūisseiki Dosutoefusukii ga yatte kuru, 2007). Ōe, who considered Dostoevsky the most influential writer in the world, himself gained global status with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. He often wrote about political issues, structuring his narratives based on his childhood wartime experiences. His writing always uses third-person pronouns; having studied French literature at Tokyo University, Ōe was highly familiar with Western literary style. He employed the Japanese third-person pronouns kare and kanojo just as third-person pronouns are used in Western literary works. In Ōe’s works kare and kanojo never precede their antecedents, which are precisely articulated. Moreover, in his early story ‘Unexpected Muteness’ (‘Fui no oshi’, 1958), which describes the mysterious death of a Japanese interpreter working for the occupying American soldiers, Ōe replaced the Chinese character 彼 (kare) with the hiragana letters かれ (kare). Though Ōe retained the Chinese characters 彼女 for the female third-person pronoun kanojo, he consistently wrote kare (he) in hiragana. For Ōe the hiragana word かれ (kare/he) was no longer a foreign borrowing. For Ōe, his writing style emerged by itself as a requirement of his work and he did not have to invent a new style each time he initiated a new work.

Murakami Haruki may be the most frequently translated Japanese writer of all time. He has also translated many works by American writers into Japanese. Murakami has singled out three foreign novels which impressed him: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1953), and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Murakami has translated both American novels into Japanese, and he arguably adapts the detective element in The Brothers Karamazov in his own works. While many Japanese writers have admired Dostoevsky as a writer who portrays the deep mental struggles experienced by human beings, Murakami seems to be fascinated by the detective story aspect of Dostoevsky’s fiction. Many of Murakami’s stories involve elements from this genre, especially the need to solve a riddle. These are mostly first-person narratives, in which the narrator is denoted by the male first-person pronoun boku (I), and the other characters observed by the first-person narrator are usually signified by the third-person pronouns kare or kanojo. Murakami uses kanojo in his early works, where female characters are generally nameless and designated solely by that pronoun. As a writer and translator, Murakami does not arbitrarily deploy Japanese third-person pronouns. His use of the third-person pronoun kanojo to emphasise the anonymity and objectification of his female characters is intentional. This treatment of female characters changes when female anonymity becomes a focus in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Nejimakidori kuronikuru, 1994–95), his most successful detective story. Here, Murakami uses the third-person female pronoun kanojo masterfully in his opening, to refer to an enigmatic female stranger who phones the narrator protagonist, and who reappears throughout the novel. In the end, the protagonist realises that this woman is, in fact, his missing wife. Here the anonymity indicated by the third-person pronoun kanojo suddenly signifies the alienation that can exist in a close relationship. Murakami also experimented extensively in his novels with various sentence endings.

In retrospect, there was no standard literary style governing the use of third-person pronouns and -ta past tense endings through the course of the twentieth century. Third-person pronouns have been used more sparingly in original literary works than in translations. For the most part, Japanese writers employ a mixture of -ta and non-ta sentence endings in their narratives. As shown above, when Japanese writers do consistently use -ta past tense endings and combine this with frequent use of the third-person pronouns kare and kanojo, their narrative takes on a distinctive flavour, giving the text a ‘foreign’ feel, that is, achieving Schleiermacherian foreignisation.

Conclusion

Futabatei is mentioned in Hon’yaku wa ikani su beki ka (How Translation Should Be Done, 2000) by the renowned English-to-Japanese translator Yanase Naoki (1943–2016). In this work, Yanase quotes not only both versions of ‘The Tryst’, but also Futabatei’s original work The Mediocrity (Heibon, 1907), noting the complete absence of third-person pronouns in all three. Yanase asserts that translators should refrain from the overt use of the third-person pronouns kare and kanojo in their works. He praises Futabatei’s courage in deleting some -ta forms from the first version of ‘The Tryst’, and appears to advocate a domesticating strategy in Japanese translations.37 Yanase’s mentee Kōnosu Yukiko (b. 1963) practices the former’s new translation norms of refrained use of third-person pronouns and mixed use of -ta and non-ta sentence endings in her translation of Andrew Miller’s 1997 Ingenious Pain (Kiyō na itami, 2000).

A similar decline in the use of the third-person pronouns may be observed in new translations made from Russian. My own research reveals a gradual decline in the use of the third-person pronouns kare and kanojo in translations of Dostoevsky’s The Humiliated and Insulted, Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot during the twentieth century, following Nakamura’s establishment of a distinctive translation style.38 Another feature of Nakamura’s translation style—the frequent use of -ta past tense endings—proved remarkably stable during the latter half of the twentieth century. During the past two decades, translations of new Western literary works have struggled to gain popularity among Japanese readers. Many translations now sold in Japan are new translations of classic works. The Kōbunsha publishing house launched a new paperback series called Koten shin’yaku bunko (‘New Translations of the Classics’) in 2006, aiming to provide easy and readable translations of classics to young readers. When Kameyama Ikuo (b. 1949) published his new translation of The Brothers Karamazov as part of this series from 2006 to 2007, his five-volume translation sold more than a million copies in total. The publisher’s strategy of placing readability above loyalty to the original appealed to young Japanese readers, drawing them back to Dostoevsky’s forgotten classic. Kameyama made his translation more palatable by dividing long paragraphs and sentences into shorter ones, by increasing the font size, and, most importantly, by omitting many third-person pronouns. The translation norm has swung towards domestication in this regard. Though he retained the predominant use of -ta past tense endings, the number of third-person pronouns were cut to one-half or even one-third of those used in the original.

In summary, the narrative styles born of literary translations from Russian into Japanese have intertwined with mainstream Japanese literary styles over the course of the twentieth century. The predominant use of -ta endings invented by Futabatei to express the past tense has survived and become an established translation style, tending to foreignise the Japanese text. The third-person pronouns kare and kanojo, which Futabatei avoided, are growing less popular with translators, and are optional for writers of fiction. When they appear in Japanese writing, they foreignise it; Japanese people still consider kare and kanojo to be borrowed words which can even indicate a degree of disdain towards the person to whom they refer.

1 The Japanese literary language had a neutral third-person pronoun kare, which could indicate both male and female characters.

2 Komori Yōichi, ‘Hon’yaku buntai ni okeru “ta” to “r(u)”’ [‘“Ta” and “r(u)” Forms in Translation Style’], in Futabatei Shimei zenshū [Futabatei Shimei’s Complete Works], ed. by Shinsuke Tagawa and Ryōhei Yasui, 8 vols (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1984–93), iii (1985), cited in the associated Monthly Bulletin, 3, pp. 3–4 (p. 3).

3 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), pp. 29–40.

4 With all Japanese names, surnames appear first and given names follow.

7 For further details on this topic, see ‘Japanese Tradition’, in Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies, ed. by Mona Baker (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 485–94, and Donald Keen, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), esp. ‘The Age of Translation’, pp. 55–75.

8 I. S. Turgenev, ‘Aibiki’ (‘The Tryst’), trans. by Futabatei Shimei, in Futabatei Shimei zenshū, 8 vols (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1984–93), ii (1985), pp. 3–16 (p. 5). All translations from Japanese in this text are my own unless otherwise indicated. Futabatei’s original text is as follows:

秋九月中旬といふころ、一日自分がさる樺の林の中に座してゐたことが有ツた。今朝から小雨が降りそゝぎ、その晴れ間にはおりおり生ま煖かな日かげも射して、まことに氣まぐれな空ら合ひ。あわあわしい白ら雲が空ら一面に棚引くかと思ふと、フトまたあちこち瞬く間雲切れがして、無理に押し分けたやうな雲間から澄みて怜悧さかし氣に見える人の眼の如くに朗らかに晴れた蒼空あをぞらがのぞかれた。自分は座して、四顧して、そして耳を傾けてゐた。木の葉が頭上づじやうで幽かに戰いだが、その音を聞たばかりでも季節は知られた。

9 Futabatei Shimei, ‘Yo ga hon’yaku no hyōjun’, in Futabatei Shimei zenshū, ed. by Yoichi Kōno and Mitsuo Nakamura, 9 vols (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1964–65), v (1965), pp. 173–77 (p. 174). I have used the English translation of this passage provided by Marleigh Grayer Ryan in her Japan’s First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 120. This talk was addressed to the reading public, and it was published in the journal Seikō (Success) in 1906. Futabatei was interviewed among many other cultural celebrities, as he had begun producing many more translations in 1904 after the Russo-Japanese war broke out.

11 Antoine Berman, ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, trans. by Lawrence Venuti, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 284–97 (p. 290).

12 A. S. Pushkin, Rokoku kibun: Kashin chōshi roku (The Captain’s Daughter), trans. by Takasu Jisuke, in Hon’yaku shōsetsu shū 2 (The Selection of Translated Novels 2); Shin nihon koten bungaku taikei: Meiji hen (New Japanese Classic Literature Series during the Meiji Era), ed. by Mitsutoshi Nakano, Shinsuke Togawa and others, 30 vols (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2001–13), xv (2002), pp. 291–348 (p. 295). Takasu’s original text is as follows:

山脈蟠蜿ハンエン万里ばんり似ニ亘ワタリ　林樹嵡蔚アウウツ幽谷いうこくニ連つらなリ　蕪ぶ蕪ぶタル荒原アリト雖いへドモ　荊棘ケイキヨク、地ニ蔓まんシテ纔わづカニ樵蹊シヤウケイヲ通ジ　狐コ狸リノ居ル処、豺さい狼らうノ叫ブ処　此これハ是こレ露国ノ北部即チシビリヤ地方ノ一村落ムラザトニシテ最モ寒陋僻カンロウヘキ鄙ヒノ境ナリ

13 Ōno Susumu, Nihongo no bunpō o kangaeru (An Examination of Japanese Grammar) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1978), p. 129 and pp. 140–42.

14 Kimura Shōichi, ‘Futabatei no Tsurugēnefu mono no hon’yaku ni tsuite (‘On Futabatei’s Translations of Turgenev’s Works’), Bungaku (Literature), (1956), 41–49 (p. 44).

15 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 19–20.

16 For a detailed examination of -ta forms in the two versions of ‘The Tryst’ and ‘A Chance Encounter’, see Hiroko Cockerill, Style and Narrative in Translations: The Contribution of Futabatei Shimei (Manchester: St. Jerome, 2006), pp. 30–72; and also my Futabatei Shimei no Roshiago Hon’yaku (Futabatei’s Translations from Russian) (Tokyo: Hōsei University Press, 2015), pp. 17–49.

17 Yanabu Akira, Hon’yakugo seiritsu jijō [Circumstances Surrounding the Establishment of Words Created by Translation] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982), pp. 195–96.

18 Chongbo Li, ‘“Kare” no goshi to sono shūhen: San’ninshō daimeishi ga seiritsu suru made no michisuji (The History of Japanese “kare” and its Related Phenomena: Up to the Establishment of the Third-person Pronoun), Dynamis, 4 (2000), 1–33 (pp. 16–26).

19 Yanagida Izumi, ‘Meiji no hon’yaku bungaku kenkyū’ (‘A Study of Literary Translations during the Meiji Era’), in Yanagida Izumi, Hideo Nagata, Shōō Matsui, and others, Nihon bungaku kōza (Lectures on Japanese Literature), ed. by Giryō Satō, 15 vols (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1931–32), XII (1931), pp. 1–98 (p. 68).

20 Futabatei Shimei, ‘Yo ga genbun-itchi no yurai’ in Futabatei Shimei zenshū, ed. by Kōno and Nakamura, 9 vols (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1964–65), V (1965), pp. 170–72 (p. 171).

21 Okumura Tsuneya, ‘Daimeishi “kare, kanojo, karera” no kōsatsu: Sono seiritsu to bungo kōgo (‘The Third-person Pronouns “he, she, and they”: Their Establishment in Written and Spoken Languages’), Kokugo Kokubun (National Language and National Literature), 23 (1954), 63–78 (pp. 66–68). Hirota Eitarō has observed that the first instance of kanojo used in translations is found in Bairai yokun (The Peach Buds and their Fragrance) trans. By Ushiyama Kakudō from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819). This translation was published in 1886, a year after the publication of Shōyō’s The Character of Modern Students. See Ida Yoshiharu’s article ‘Yakugo “kanojo” no shutsugen to Sōseki no buntai (‘The Emergence of the Translated Word “kanojo” and Sōseki’s Writing Style’), Eigakushi Kenkyū (History of English Studies), 1 (1969), 68–78 (p. 68).

22 See Momiuchi Yūko, Nihon kindai bungaku to ‘Ryōjin nikki’ (Japanese Modern Novels and ‘A Sportsman’s Sketches’) (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2006), pp. 343–47.

23 Musashino is the name of a district of Tokyo.

25 Tōson began using -ta endings in The Broken Commandment (Hakai, 1906), though he employed only a few instances of third-person pronouns in the work.

26 A futon can mean either a quilt or a thin mattress. This is the first of a number of first-person confessional novels known as I-novels. The protagonist of The Quilt (modelled on Tayama himself) weeps into the futon used by his female disciple, after she rejects him.

30 Nakamura Hakuyō, Koko made ikite: Watashi no hachijūnen (I Have Made It This Far: My Life of Eighty Years) (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1971), pp. 174–75.

31 Nakamura Hakuyō, ‘Hon’yakubun no hyōgen to shidō’ (‘Expressions and Guidance for Translated Sentences’), in Nihon no hon’yakuron: Ansorojī to kaidai (Japanese Discourse on Translation: An Anthology with Commentary), ed. by Yanabu Akira and Mizuno Akira (Tokyo: Hōsei University Press, 2010), pp. 267–77 (p. 268).

33 Natsume Sōseki, ‘Kanji no ii hito’ (‘A Pleasant Person’), in Futabatei Shimei zenshū, ed. by Shinsuke Tagawa, viii (1993), pp. 294–95 (p. 295).

34 Kumakura Chiyuki, Sōseki no takurami (Sōseki’s Plot) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2006), pp. 275–79. Kumakura thoroughly researched the use of -ta endings in Sōseki’s works and compiled a useful chart showing the percentage of -ta endings against all sentence endings. I have taken the percentages from this chart.

35 Morita recollected in his book Natsume Sōseki Zoku (A Sequel to Natsume Sōseki) (Tokyo: Kōchō Shorin, 1943), pp. 667–79, that he first recommended Idiot to Sōseki, and later, other works by Dostoevsky—presumably Crime and Punishment, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov.

36 Wada Yoshihide, Roshia bungakusha Nobori Shomu and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke ronkō (Discussion on Russian Literary Scholars Nobori Shomu and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke) (Osaka: Izumi Shoin, 2001), pp. 247–300.

37 Yanase Naoki, Hon’yaku wa ikani su beki ka (How Translation Should be Done) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000), pp. 11–52.

38 See my ‘Stylistic Choices’, 63–81, and also Cockerill, Futabatei Shimei no roshiago hon’yaku (Futabatei Shimei’s Translation from Russian), pp. 253–30.

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