Dialogue and Dialect in Kawakami Mieko’s Natsumonogatari

In 2019, novelist Kawakami Mieko returned to her 2008 novella Chichi to ran and published a newly expanded version of the story under the title Natsumonogatari. In this talk, David Boyd will discuss the relationship between Chichi to ran and the expanded novel. He will then speak about the process of co-translating Natsumonogatari into English with Sam Bett as Breasts and Eggs, focusing especially on the voices of the three women at the heart of Kawakami’s original novella.

David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated novels and stories by Hiroko Oyamada, Masatsugu Ono and Toh EnJoe, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat (Pushkin Press, 2017) won the 2017/2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. With Sam Bett, he is cotranslating the novels of Mieko Kawakami for Europa Editions.