The Times of Botchan is difficult to read, and not just because of the clumsy English employed by the translators (though that certainly doesn’t help).

During my work on an earlier incarnation of this website, I bought a copy of Icaro, by the mangaka Jiro Taniguchi and the French master Moebius, for somebody else to review. I don’t think that the review ever got written (or, at any rate, I never saw it). Since I happened to have bought the book at Amazon, they promptly notified me when this new book — well, this new translation, anyway, of one of his older books — came out, about a week ago. Whoopee. You have to understand: my relationship with Amazon, almost a decade old now, is rife with contradiction and miscommunication; their file on my purchasing habits bulges to the breaking point with old enthusiasms, abandoned self-improvement crusades, and, you know, whatever. So I get a bunch of these notifications, two or three in one day, sometimes. I usually ignore them. “Oh, please,” I’ll say to myself, looking at my inbox. “I am so over Esther Dyson by now … and — what’s this? The Atkins Diet? You’ve got to be kidding.” I imagine that when I’m ninety years old, I’ll be sitting up in bed at the nursing home, blinking, blinking, blinking, each blink deleting some item of oh-so-helpful Amazon spam from the email inbox embedded in my brain. “Arctic Monkeys?” I’ll be muttering to myself (and because I intend to be a vicious, cranky old man, it will be a vicious, cranky mutter). “What the fuck is an Arctic Monkey?”

This time, though, I went ahead and bought the book, in part because I knew I was going to revive this website, and wanted something offbeat to review (who needs another review of the latest heavily-marketed corporate superhero story? Not me — at least not, you know, right now — I do plan to review at least one of those, and soon), and in part because I, like many other middle-aged American readers of comics, have a vague, growing, but poorly-tended interest in manga. Since every example of manga I’ve tried to read so far has either been aimed squarely at fourteen-year-old girls or eight-year-old boys, I couldn’t help but notice, even from the publisher’s minimal (and punctuation-challenged) description, that this one was very different:

The Meija Era (1868-1912) brought Japan into the Modern Age. Contemporary writer, Soseki Natsume, expressed the feelings of the time through his classic Botchan which Sekikawa explores through an adult story that Taniguchi illustrates with exquisite and elegant detail forming a transparent window onto this time of turbulent (and sometimes violent) change in Japanese society.

In short, The Times of Botchan is not your niece’s or nephew’s brand of manga. There’s no wandering, sad, adolescent, long-haired wizard/poets, clutching swords taller than themselves, on the one hand, and no big-mouthed, big-eyed, spiky-headed, screaming, power-toddlers on the other. This is something else altogether. According to writer Sekikawa, the purpose of The Times of Botchan is to “show Japan and its currents of thought” in Meiji-era Japan, a period of social reform and Westernization which occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century, said by some (by the author of the book’s afterword, anyway) to have lead inevitably to Japan’s disastrous participation in World War II.

To that high, ambitious end, Sekikawa and Taniguchi employ an aging intellectual protagonist, the historical literary figure Natsume Soseki, and his circle of young followers, each of whom occupies a different position in Meiji society. One’s a socialist, keen on embracing the latest Western philosophical fads. One’s a martial arts student with a yearning for the feudal past, etc. They’re all symbols for something bigger than themselves. Even Lafcadio Hearn, the one-eyed American expatriate who embraced all things Japanese, makes a turn across the stage, symbolizing the rejection of Western culture in favor of traditional Japanese culture — the opposite of the general trend the authors mean to explore. The characters are their positions (by which I mean their societal positions, but also the opinions they hold, their positions on the issues). Most of them are introduced in the second scene, by way of a set of five or six overlapping, not-quite-related arguments in a bar. In case the content of their arguments isn’t enough to establish their identities, a caption pops above the head of each character, the first time he appears (and they are all he’s) providing his name, age, social philosophy and occupation, like the stats on the back of a Pokemon card.

From the footnotes, I gather that every character in the book is a historical figure of some sort. Maybe that’s why the authors don’t feel compelled to flesh them out right away (or, um, ever): they only serve as placeholders for talking points. We’re supposed to know these people already, the way that, say, a book about the early life of some guy named Abe Lincoln wouldn’t bother spelling out to its American readers that this rough-and-tumble railsplitter would someday grow up to be president. Or something. I dunno.

My eyes glazed over.

Now, okay, here’s the thing: I know that the political and social arguments the characters engage in represent the real work of the book, the important subject matter the authors intend to explore: the importance of society as a whole (broadly speaking, an Eastern value) versus the primacy of the individual (a Western value), respect for tradition versus enthusiasm for scientific and social progress, war versus peace, and so on, and so on, and so on, blah, blah, blah. But showing us a young man shouting across a bar to another young man a bunch of carefully-expository talking points about socialism, or modern art, or the then-recent war with Russia, or the dissolution of the Samurai caste in the course of Meiji reforms, etc. — opinions and positions and concerns and thoughts that come across as outdated and as quaint as the clothing and facial-hair styles the characters sport — is not the best way to engage readers in the very real historical struggles these arguments represent. This is especially true when we don’t even know these characters yet, except for the labels floating above their heads and the dogma shooting out of their mouths. Surely people of the time, especially young, belligerently intellectual men, showing off for their mentor, had these kinds of arguments at every opportunity. I’ll buy that. But surely, too, there’s another way to show us why those arguments mattered, and to do so early in the book, so that when the arguments do come, we will feel we have a stake in their progress and their outcome.

I used to get the same fidgety feeling when I had to read Dostoyevsky or Thomas Mann in school, too, so, okay, there’s that. There’s the possibility that it’s just me and my sad, comic-reading, anti-intellectual ways. If I hadn’t decided to re-launch this site with a review of this book, I wouldn’t have bothered reading the rest of the book, truthfully, after that scene.

Let’s talk about the translation. The job of a translator — of a superior translator, anyway — is twofold: 1). to get the meaning of the work across in the foreign language (in this case, the foreign language is English), and 2). to provide a pleasurable reading experience, so that the reader, if he or she didn’t know better, would assume that the book had been written in the language he or she is reading. Jokes, colloquialisms, puns, and conversational flow are very difficult to translate well. The translators of The Times of Botchan don’t even try. They settled for the roughest possible publishable translation — it’s almost like reading Babelfish, in places.

“Gentlemen, shall we go out for a beer or something?”
“Better not. Even if you do like it, you have no head for it.”
“Ha ha! Besides, you can’t hold it!”

Now, that third line of dialogue essentially repeats what the second speaker has said. “Besides” is not the appropriate word. “Besides” would be used to preface a supporting argument that wasn’t addressed by the previous speaker. “Besides, you’ve got to go to school tomorrow!”, or “Besides, the car is kaput!” Surely the translators meant: “Ha ha! He’s right — you can’t hold it!” Or something like that.

Another example: Soseki says that writing novels, for him, is like a head fart. Clearly, the conversation is very informal. One of this students replies: “Ha ha! Head fart! Hear, hear!”

Hear, hear? Really? Unless the speaker is in the British Parliament, or is deliberately using anachronistic language, that’s a diction error of the first degree.

These examples seem tiny, I know. Multiply them by a thousand — almost every line of dialogue, almost every caption, almost every sentence in the book, in fact, has a similar small error, in diction, or in usage, or in clarity. Commas are misplaced, or are altogether absent, prepositional phrase openings come off as off-kilter, characters change the subject in mid-sentence without warning, their diction shifts from informal to formal and back again, at the drop of a hat, and so on, and so on, and so on. After a while, these errors of inelegance serve to distract the reader enough to pull him or her out of the story altogether. It’s almost as if you, yourself, are being asked to provide a final layer of translation — the one that makes this work, you know, actually readable (the same way that you have to read past the actual words that a machine translation provides, to figure out what was actually contained within the original text). When one comes across this kind of not-quite-right English in a Japanese RPG or a superheroic toddler story, the effect is cute, and almost adds to the experience. Trying to read a vast and serious literary/political epic, while being annoyed and distracted by this kind of muddy, unclear English, is almost impossible.

What almost saves the book, for me, is artist Taniguchi’s ability to show us, beyond the arguments and the “issues,” what life might have looked like to these people, as they lived it — almost despite the text he is illustrating. Ironically, the story opens up, and really feels epic, only in the quiet moments. Taniguchi is the master of depictions of everyday life: a cat curling up on a rice cooker; birds pecking at something in the snow. These tableaux serve to symbolize the interior life of the characters who are living among them (and scarcely noticing them) far better than the clunky, poorly-translated, over-politicized dialogue could ever hope to do.

To be fair, this is only a small fraction of the overall work. According to the publishers, this English volume represents one-half of the original first Japanese volume — and the completed Times of Botchan ran for five volumes, each of which was presumably at least double the length of this first English volume. Imagine reading only the first five or six chapters of War and Peace or Doctor Zhivago and trying to come up with a meaningful evaluation: you can’t. You can only get the sense of whether or not the rest of the book will be worth attempting to read.

I suspect that The Times of Botchan, if it could be made available in a better translation, would still be flawed, because of its overly politicized, shallow characters (a flaw shared by War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago, as well as Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and dozens and dozens of other classic historical epics, I might add). But it would be worth reading.

This version is definitely not.

More Information on The Times of Botchan, first volume at Amazon

Title: The Times of Botchan
Authors: Jiro Taniguchi and Natsuo Sekikawa
Translators: Shizuka Shimoyama and Elizabeth Tiernan
Publisher: Fanfare/Ponent Mons
Cover price: $19.95 (cheaper at Amazon)

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