Translating a Life
By Kazuko Smith

It started as a retirement project. For three decades, on and off, I had been teaching Japanese language at Cornell University, and I was eager to try my hand at something else. In the advanced reading courses I offered in the later years of my career I often asked students to submit translations so I could see whether they had fully grasped the meaning of particularly difficult passages. What I grasped from reading their exercises was a new appreciation for the struggle one must go through when trying to do justice to an original text, and even more so to do justice to the life that gave birth to that text.

When Professor Nakano, Makiko's son, sent me a copy of his published edition of her diary I knew immediately that I had found my challenge. He gave me his permission to translate the book, and I slogged away at the task during school vacations for the next two or three years but eventually realized that the job required longer, uninterrupted stretches of time. So I set the project aside for some years, and returned to it only after I had retired from teaching. Translating the text of the diary took me almost a year. And another year's work went into writing the Introduction and preparing the footnotes.

Before then I never had done translating professionally or undertaken the task of translating a whole book. But I had an ambition to try out what I had learned from my students' struggles. Translating literary texts was not what I had in mind: I knew that many other people are better qualified than I to do that. However, over the years I had come to realize the value that personal documents can have for students and scholars of Japan, and I thought I might contribute translations of those kinds of documents.

What I had in mind was to introduce western readers to the lives of ordinary Japanese by transmitting as directly as I could their stories as they told them. As a woman I am more interested in the lives of Japanese women than those of men. But when I reviewed the sources available in English I soon found that very few of them are about ordinary Japanese women. Almost all of the translated personal accounts of Japanese family life have been written by women of elite social classes or individuals who had distinguished themselves in public life or in the arts.

Makiko's diary was different. It contained a treasury of ethnographic information about Japanese life in the late Meiji period as seen through the eyes of a young woman in a merchant household in Kyoto. Personally I was curious about how women got along in such large and complex households a century ago, and about city life then as ordinary people experienced it. In my Introduction I sketch the preconceptions I had held about "Meiji Women" and how reading the diary made me aware of the ways that I had become a prisoner of cliches. And that led me to try to publish the diary, not just because it is a good read and a great primary source for researchers, but because many other people are tangled in the same web of cliches.

One difficulty in translating from the Japanese is that the subject of a sentence may not be stated. Personal documents such as diaries compound the ambiguity since they tend to be written in a telegraphic, shorthand style whose meaning one cannot pin down with certainty. I was able to solve most such puzzling passages (with a few exceptions) by paying careful attention to the immediate context of the event: to what had happened just previously and what came right after. The difficult but fun part of the work was when I had to assemble pieces of information and reconstruct the sequence of events in order to clarify an obscure entry in the diary. Because Makiko did her recording at night, after long and busy days, she sometimes dashed off short phrases and sentences that seemed to have no connection with one another. That made my job like detective work in many ways, and I always felt a little thrill when the pieces fell into place and I could say to myself, You have the answer!

There is a limit to what guesswork can accomplish, though. My goal was to leave nothing vague, but the reader of my translation will come across a few footnotes that say "Unidentified."

Manifold issues arise when one has to deal with a Japanese noun that has no direct counterpart in English. How should one identify vegetables and plants and fish unnamed in English? The Latin and Greek scientific names given in dictionaries mean nothing to most ordinary readers, and even if there is a vernacular English word for some item the word may be obscure or antiquated. An obvious example from the Diary is a common vegetable that Japanese call fuki. "Butterbur" according to the dictionaries-but I have never met an American who has heard of it. A translator can provide glosses ("it's a bit like asparagus") but they seldom are satisfying. The task has become a little easier in recent years now that Japanese words such as tofu and sushi have settled into the everyday English vocabulary alongside their ancestors geisha and samurai.

A personal document needs to be read against the background of its time and social setting, including the history and composition of the diarist's family. Before embarking on my journey with Makiko I read some nineteeth-century diaries of American women, and I came to realize that the more an editor or translator can paint in the background scenery the more that a diary will stand out.

My task would be fairly easy, I thought at first, because in the Japanese edition of Makiko's diary Professor Nakano includes a thorough introduction plus footnotes that offer details which only could be provided by a social scientist who knows the diarist and her life intimately. But his materials posed a problem for me because they were written for a Japanese reader who could be presumed to know at least the outlines of Meiji history and culture. For me it was informative, particularly his Introduction, but I felt certain that a direct translation of it would only baffle most English readers. So I ended up writing a new Introduction for the English edition. It is a longish one but I enjoyed preparing it, and reviewers have commented that for them it is the best part of the book.

Also I had to increase the number of footnotes since many of those by Professor Nakano explain too little about mundane customs and events familiar to most Japanese but known to only a limited number of English readers. The task propelled me into doing many hours of library research, communicating many times by fax and letter with Professor Nakano, and ultimately visiting him in his house in the Tokyo suburbs. The number of footnotes swelled to 800, and they were brought back under control only by the efforts of a persevering editor. She deftly reduced redundant items and incorporated others into the body of the text until the total came down to 600.

Professor Nakano was generous about supplying family photographs to use in my book but the one picture I wanted more than any other was simply not available. It was a portrait of Makiko. We see her in many group photos of family and friends but she seems never to have been photographed alone. I had to ask a studio to crop and airbrush a shot of Makiko and her sister-in-law in order to create a portrait. I conclude from this that in 1910 a married woman seldom posed for an individual portrait. Snapshots still were uncommon then; and studio photographs were expensive and almost always included a group or at least a couple.

I knew-because I had seen them in books-that period photographs of Kyoto exist. Finding appropriate ones, and obtaining permission to use them, launched me on yet another quest. Checking through all the books and albums and magazines relating to the Meiji period in the Cornell University library left me frustrated. Almost all photos of Japan late in the 19th- and early 20th-centuries had been taken in Tokyo or Yokohama.

The Kyoto Prefectural Archive has the best collection of photos of Kyoto in Makiko's time but very few of them show indoor scenes. Disappointed in my search, I returned home to find that the Cornell University Museum also has a collection of photos of Meiji Era Japan and that quite a few of them appear to have been taken indoors. These are so-called "souvenir pictures" and sets of them are known as "Yokohama Albums."

They were made by professional photographers (both Japanese and Western) and typically were sold to foreign tourists as they left Yokohama after their sojourns in Exotic Japan. A number of the pictures show home-like scenes. But judging from their costumes and body-language the women in them were geisha or prostitutes brought to studios and paid to mimic the behavior of ordinary housewives. I rejected using them, and in the end was unable to document visually the kinds of family activities that Makiko sketches verbally.

I was not pleased by the decision to use some of those "souvenir pictures" in Makiko's New World. They perpetuate stereotypes. However, hearing the reactions of non-Japanese viewers-to whom it did not matter who the women were-I understand how it may be acceptable to use posed photos of geisha and all in order to afford viewers at least some sense of what domestic interiors looked like in Makiko's lifetime.

A teacher who used my book in class wrote to tell me, "Students' questions and comments demonstrate the book's ability to link a single individual's activities to many of the major themes in Japanese culture. When students ask if Makiko had more of a business relationship than a loving relationship with her husband, they are indeed asking a profound question about the nature of Japanese social structure, ethics, priorities and they are asking for an explanation of just what exactly a family is in the Japanese context. The question serves also as a challenge for the instructor to build a cultural bridg...to encourage students to see life from other people's perspective...to expand student appreciation of human diversity." It is the kind of comment that makes the strain of translation worthwhile.

Makiko was not in the least the kind of early twentieth-century Japanese woman you usually find in novels and films: passive, obedient, with no will of her own. Makiko had many duties and was subject to many restrictions-but that was in a time when women around the world were given secondary roles, with no part in public affairs, and did not enjoy equal opportunities with men. At that time the Japanese government was promoting as its ideal woman the "good wife/wise mother," and Makiko strove to live up to that ideal. But there were moments when she was not entirely won over by it. At one point she wrote, rather plaintively, "Why do women have to cook all the time?"

"But was she happy?" American students want to know, and "Did she love her husband?" My answer is that she was quite content with her situation, including her relationship with her husband. Such questions seem to me beside the point when one wants to understand this young woman and her appetite for living.

My experience with Makiko's diary convinced me that translation is indeed a creative act. Computers and mechanical word-processing may serve to render scientific and technical articles into more or less comprehensible prose. But I can't imagine them translating a life. The hand and mind of the translator will always show in the decisions she made and the options she exercised.

More than all the sociological details in the text it was Makiko's personality that attracted me, and I vowed to do my best to make that vitality come through in translation. The Makiko I see dramatized in Makiko's New World is not quite the Makiko I imagined-but my image of her has been influenced by those old family photographs. Throughout the time I was doing the translation she was so much alive in my mind that I could not see her in less than three dimensions. When difficult passages left me frustrated I found myself trying to think like her; and that often resolved the problem for me.

Deep into the project there were periods when I could not separate myself from her, for I lived with her every day for a very long while. I still cannot talk about her in the past tense. My meeting with Makiko has enriched my retirement years by bringing me a translation prize, but what matters so much more is that it has brought me Makiko herself.