The Translation of Love<\/a><\/em>, which debuted on U.S. shelves in April. She gathers a remarkable cast from three countries \u2013 Japan, Canada, and the U.S. \u2013 through which she reveals little-known history, pulls at the heartstrings, questions authority, and tells a spellbinding, magnificent story.<\/p>\nWorld War II is over, but the struggle to survive remains a daily battle for too many residents of 1947 Tokyo. In a first-year middle school classroom in Tokyo, two girls are assigned to share a desk. The teacher chooses Fumi Tanaka to \u201clook after your new seatmate,\u201d Aya Shimamura, who is Canadian. Aya\u2019s ancestry may be Japanese, but her primary language is English, and she\u2019s spent most of the war years imprisoned in her birth country. For Aya\u2019s father, the war cost him too much\u2014including his wife, their home, his livelihood. Feeling too broken to start over, reeling from the hate all around, he signs the papers to repatriate which \u201cgave the [Canadian] government what it wanted\u2014the ability to deport him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sent \u201cback\u201d to Japan where Aya had never been, Aya becomes the pariah \u201crepat girl,\u201d whose strange Japanese isolates her further. Aya\u2019s English, however, is what motivates Fumi to make of her a desperate request: Fumi\u2019s sister Sumiko, 10 years older, is missing \u2013 last seen going to work among the occupying American GIs \u2013 and Fumi needs Aya\u2019s help to find her.<\/p>\n
Fumi is convinced that General Douglas MacArthur \u2013 Tokyo\u2019s most famous post-war resident \u2013 can help, as MacArthur is rumored to personally read the thousands of letters he receives from Japanese citizens. Some letters offer gratitude and praise. Others are filled with anger and complaints. Most ask for something impossible. Fumi believes that a letter could make miracles happen \u2013 and enlisting Aya\u2019s help in writing the missive finally cements the girls\u2019 growing bond. The letter lands in the hands of Matt Matsumoto, a Japanese American who is part of a pool of U.S. Army personnel charged with translating the Japanese letters into English. Directly and indirectly, the letter will affect the lives of many.<\/p>\n
Even after the bullets and bombs have disappeared, post-war Tokyo \u2013 caught between being occupied by the enemy and the desperate need to rebuild a shattered country\u00a0\u2013 a battleground of clashing cultures, divided morals, tragic misconceptions. In this conflicted landscape, the need for translation \u2013 beyond the word-for-word \u2013 couldn\u2019t be more immediate. As a former librarian who studies and translates Japanese literature, Kutsukake, age 64, is an ideal cipher for exploring multiple meanings and misunderstandings between the citizens of two nations attempting to negotiate toward peace.<\/p>\n
When did you learn about your family\u2019s experiences during World War II? Were both your parents were interned?<\/strong>
\nWhen I was growing up as a child, I knew that my parents had been in what they called \u201cghost town\u201d camps in the interior of British Columbia. And I knew that they were sent there by force. Nobody really used the word \u201cinternment\u201d until I was older \u2013 maybe a teenager. People talked about \u201cthe camps.\u201d As a small child, I remember being quite confused by the term \u201ccamps,\u201d which had a different meaning from the kind of camps that other children were sent to for fun. I think my understanding of what happened to my parents came to me gradually over time. It wasn\u2019t like anyone sat down and gave me a history lesson. It was over time that more and more came out and it was clear that my parents had ended up in eastern Canada because of the war.<\/p>\nHow did your parents survive during and after WWII in Canada?<\/strong>
\nMy mother and her family were sent to an internment camp called Slocan. My father and his family went to a different camp called Greenwood. They didn\u2019t meet until they moved to Toronto. Both my mother and my father separately had moved to Toronto during the war in 1943. They always said it was because there was a labor shortage because of the war and that there were jobs here. In my mother\u2019s case, she was able to come east because she had found a job first working in a hospital kitchen and then working as a domestic. In my father\u2019s case, his older brother had been sent to Ontario to work on a farm and then after he moved to Toronto, he found my father a job. I think it must have been very hard being in Toronto during those war years.<\/p>\nWhat brought your family originally to Canada? Did you grow up with stories shared by the first and second generations of your Japanese Canadian family?<\/strong>
\nI wish I knew more about the reasons why my grandparents\u2019 generation came to Canada, but I don\u2019t. Just some vague notions of wanting to have a better life, that sort of thing. I didn\u2019t grow up with family stories unfortunately.<\/p>\nDid you weave some of your parents\u2019 experiences into Translation<\/em>? And since you had little access to your further-back family history, where else did you find inspiration, background, and research for the rest of your novel?<\/strong>
\nThe personal part comes from knowing that my parents and grandparents had been interned. The novel is not autobiographical, but I wanted to evoke the scenes of the camps mostly because I wanted to imagine them myself. I went on a bus tour of the internment camp sites in 2010 \u2013 it was totally fortuitous. I knew that I wanted to have a Japanese Canadian character, a young girl, who had been \u201crepatriated\u201d to Japan after the war, but I hadn\u2019t originally intended to have a flashback scene in the internment camp. But after I took the tour and saw the landscape of where the camps were situated, I was very moved, and I knew I wanted to write something that would evoke that landscape, the physical and historical and emotional landscape.<\/p>\nThe postwar history, the visceral sense of what it was like in the immediate postwar years, came from reading a lot, especially John Dower\u2019s Embracing Defeat<\/em>, but other books as well. There is a book by Tatsuo Kage called Uprooted Again: Japanese Canadians Move to Japan after World War II<\/em>, and it contains personal interviews and stories.<\/p>\nActually, as I try to think back on where the novel came from, it\u2019s a hard question because so much of the writing came in bits and pieces. I would write and research, research and write, going around in circles.<\/p>\n
Since we\u2019re BLOOM-ing, what finally prompted you to put all those \u201cbits and pieces\u201d together? You\u2019re 64 now, and I believe you finally began writing Translation\u00a0<\/em>in your sixth decade\u00a0…\u00a0is that right?<\/strong>
\nYes, I guess I started writing in my 50s, so that\u2019s my sixth decade. I think it\u2019s natural to ask what took so long. For most of my life I was trying to become a translator, not a writer. I first went to Japan when I was 25, as an English teacher. That was when I started studying Japanese; before that I only knew a few words. And then I started studying Japanese literature, and once I could read Japanese literature, I wanted to translate it. My dream was to become a translator. But I couldn\u2019t figure out how to go beyond just translating short pieces for myself, like when I was a grad student. I couldn\u2019t make that next step to getting published, although I kept at it for a long time. Eventually, thankfully, I was able to publish a collection of short stories by Masuda Mizuko, a contemporary woman writer, but by then I was eager to try something else.<\/p>\nBy the time I was ready to start writing my own work, I guess I had had a lot of practice translating, and I realized that perhaps all along, the act of translating was an intermediate step to being a writer. When I began writing, I was kind of scared. It seemed like something that would be so hard, too hard for someone like me. So, the way I overcame my fear was to pretend that I was \u201ctranslating,\u201d to write what I wanted to write but as if I was composing a translation. Translating, without the bother of worrying about someone else\u2019s words. I only had to write for myself. I was writing short stories that were set in Japan, so that leap wasn\u2019t so far. I started taking writing courses at a continuing studies program at the university where I worked as a librarian. Taking courses also gave me the courage to write.<\/p>\n
And you\u2019ve retired now from the University of Toronto library?<\/strong>
\nYes, I took early retirement from the library in 2007. I started taking writing courses in 2005, kind of in anticipation of this retirement.<\/p>\nYou mention you initially knew only a few words of Japanese before going to teach English in Japan. You didn\u2019t become fluent until your 20s. Were your parents fluent? Did they make a conscious decision to not pass the language on to their children?<\/strong>
\nWe never spoke any Japanese in the home. My parents were native speakers of English \u2013 they were born in Vancouver \u2013 and they were more comfortable in English. But they could speak some Japanese to their own parents. They definitely made a conscious decision not to pass on Japanese after the internment. It was very common among Japanese Canadian families. People were afraid of racist backlash because of the experience of the war, and they also told themselves that as long as they were living in Canada, the only language their children needed was English.<\/p>\nYou moved to Japan in 1976 to teach English. Why Japan \u2013 certainly the ancestral connection, but did other factors take you there? What was it like to be a foreigner in your ancestral country?<\/strong>
\nAnother fortuitous occurrence. I didn\u2019t have a job at the time and didn\u2019t have any particular prospects. I didn\u2019t have much ambition. A friend who was looking for a teaching job in Toronto was checking the bulletin board at the teacher\u2019s college. He saw a notice advertising a job teaching English at a kindergarten (!) in a suburb just outside of Tokyo. He thought I might be interested in it because it was in Japan. I was skeptical at first. At the time, it hadn\u2019t particularly crossed my mind that I should go to Japan. I was more interested in Europe. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought I should try it. I didn\u2019t have anything else to do. And it turned out that that decision really changed my life.<\/p>\nI am sure I would never have learned Japanese if I hadn\u2019t gone to Japan and been forced to learn it in order to survive! Because of the way I look, in Japan people just assumed I spoke Japanese. And when I didn\u2019t, they thought I was deaf or an idiot or something. They also assumed I understood what to do and how to act, but of course I didn\u2019t know any of those cultural cues because I was Canadian. So I had to learn fast.<\/p>\n
How often do you go to Japan? Do you feel like less of an outsider now that you can speak\/read\/translate the language?<\/strong>
\nPretty often. I have been fortunate to be able to go back and forth a lot. At first for longer stays for study, etc., for a year or longer. But even now, I try to visit every few years if it\u2019s possible. Knowing the language and having friends makes all the difference between being an outsider and feeling part of the culture.<\/p>\nHave you been able to connect with any extended family in Japan? Perhaps even \u2018compared notes\u2019 on the difficult period of U.S. occupation after Japan\u2019s defeat?<\/strong>
\nI\u2019ve tried to trace roots but haven\u2019t met anyone yet. So unfortunately no.<\/p>\nAnd we can\u2019t sign off without my asking \u2013 what might you be working on now?<\/strong>
\nI would like to write another novel set in Japan, but it\u2019s only at the stage of thoughts percolating in my head. I also have some short stories that I had always hoped could work as a collection. I may go back to working on them.<\/p>\nSo here\u2019s the real test of your commitment then to your next book \u2013 I read an article about your writing of Translation<\/em>, which included pictures of you with an oversized one-eye-inked Daruma doll. [For our readers not familiar with Daruma dolls, they are usually black\/white\/red traditional Japanese \u2018dolls\u2019 which are made with two blank white eyes. When a certain goal is set, one eye is inked; when that goal is achieved, the other eye gets inked, making the doll complete.] And have you inked in that first eye of your next Daruma?<\/strong>
\nThank you for asking! Yes, I filled in one eye of my next Daruma shortly after The Translation of Love<\/em> was ready to go to print, once I knew that the book was completely finished and I would have to let it go. I very much needed to push myself forward onto a new project. The Daruma, with only one eye, is on a shelf in my study (out of sight, so I don\u2019t have to look at him every day!). But I\u2019m conscious of his presence and hoping that I\u2019ll be able to finish something else sometime in the future.<\/p>\nAuthor interview<\/strong>: \u201cQ&A with Lynne Kutsukake,\u201d Bloom, June 7, 2016<\/a><\/p>\nReaders<\/strong>: Adult<\/p>\nPublished<\/strong>: 2016<\/p>\nAuthor photo credit<\/strong>:\u00a0Edmond Lee<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cEnemy aliens\u201d is an all too familiar label, although just who gets thusly labeled seems to change with the political winds. With such an aggravated election year, these two words won\u2019t be disappearing from the media anytime soon. Beyond our northern border, our Canadian neighbors…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40980,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,274,9,6,76,426,6535],"tags":[182,6608,22,10,11,24,51,720,6918,39,28,44,6917,45],"class_list":["post-40976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adult-readers","category-author-interview-profile","category-canadian","category-canadian-asian-pacific-american","category-fiction","category-japanese","category-japanese-american","category-repost","tag-bloom","tag-bookdragon","tag-civil-rights","tag-family","tag-friendship","tag-historical","tag-identity","tag-japanese-american-imprisonment-during-wwii","tag-lynne-kutsukake","tag-parent-child-relationship","tag-politics","tag-siblings","tag-translation-of-love","tag-war"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"Lynne_Kutsukake_c_Edmond_Lee](\"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/10\/2016\/06\/Lynne_Kutsukake_c_Edmond_Lee-on-BookDragon-via-BLOOM-664x800.jpg\")
\u201cEnemy aliens\u201d is an all too familiar label, although just who gets thusly labeled seems to change with the political winds. With such an aggravated election year, these two words won\u2019t be disappearing from the media anytime soon.<\/p>\n