What it's like reading Snow Country in Japanese for the first time
I have been reading Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country (雪国) for two weeks, at the pace of one or two sentences per day, and have almost made it to the end of the first scene, in which the main character, Shimamura, creeps on a young girl on a train and sniffs his finger. This is a book I've read in English twice already, although not recently, so I was surprised to be thinking so early on, "this guy is creepier than I remember," and "wait, did I never notice him sniffing his finger before?"
Well, here is the English translation (Seidensticker):
In his boredom, Shimamura stared at his left hand as the forefinger bent and unbent. Only this hand seemed to have a vital and immediate memory of the woman he was going to see. The more he tried to call up a clear picture of her, the more his memory failed him, the farther she faded away, leaving him nothing to catch and hold. In the midst of this uncertainty only the one hand, and in particular the forefinger, even now seemed damp from her touch, seemed to be pulling him back to her from afar. Taken with the strangeness of it, he brought the hand to his face, then quickly drew a line across the misted over window.
It really did gloss over the ecchi stuff! Here is the original, with my own amateur translation. (You can click on the words to see their translations).
もう三時間も前のこと、島村は退屈まぎれに左手の人差指をいろいろに動かして眺めては、結局この指だけが、これから会いに行く女をなまなましく覚えている、はっきり思い出そうとあせればあせるほど、つかみどころなくぼやけてゆく記憶の頼りなさのうちに、この指だけは女の触感で今も濡れていて、自分を遠くの女へ引き寄せるかのようだと、不思議に思いながら、鼻につけて匂いを嗅いでみたりしていた……
Ok so no, somehow we lost the part where he brings his finger to his nose and sniffs it. And also we've chosen to translate 濡れる as "damp" rather than "wet." I can't say for certain about back then, but for sure now it carries all the connotations that the English word does. Also, I hope this doesn't spoil the plot too much, but the fact that this whole story is based on the guy going on a trip to get away from his family to go see a prostitute is not helping his case. Of course, the story is beautiful, the scenery and life back then described in poetry, the woman full of pathos, and you can tell me that I'm just applying Western prudishness to a foreign and bygone culture, but for all that, the main character is a sex tourist who sits on a train for three hours alternating between thinking about sex and staring at the "young unmarried girl" (I guess back then they used the word that's now used for "daughter," 娘, which I should read in context, but it doesn't help me either) through her reflection in the window.
And by the way, it's not a bygone foreign culture. I live in Roppongi, which is a neighborhood in the middle of Tokyo that's filled with expensive escort clubs and cosmetic surgery clinics. I walk past the ojisans with their teenage sugar babies every night, and I see the sugar babies leave the hotels every morning and get into taxis by themselves. It is not romantic.
Off-topic, but this is a blog post so whatever, I have a theory that when women are systematically kept out of good working jobs (e.g. by rigging their med school admissions scores), then that pushes the most successful ones down a step in the social hierarchy, which pushes girls from that step down another step, until you end up with a huge class of girls with no jobs but prostitution. Or if not prostitution, then in general with their best chances of improving their lives being finding a man, and that's why the girls in Japan look so good (I mean like how much time they spend on fashion and makeup).
Ok, sensationalist ranting aside, what I wanted to talk about was "what it's like reading in Japanese," and in particular: A) how hard it is, and B) whether it's satisfying or not. (Yes and yes, btw.)
On the difficulty curve, after N2 you actually have enough grammar knowledge to read this comfortably. Or you would, except if your Japanese curriculum has been test-focused, all your vocabulary is centered around school and work. So in my case, this is my second book in Japanese, and I have to look up almost every word. Or at least it feels that way. Lots of words look easy but I still don't know them.
「はあい」と、駅長が声を張りあげた。
Like, I know 張る means to stretch and I know あげる means to raise, but to put them together to say that the station master "stretched (like a string on a guitar) and raised his voice (in both volume and pitch)" is not something I could have figured out on my own. In English, that sounds like a very poetic way of combining verbs, but it's a common expression in Japanese, apparently.
Here is the English translation.
"I'll tell him," the man called back.
In other words, yes, it's absolutely satisfying to read in the original language, even at the pace of one word at a time. I just feel like there's lots of gems of language, that I don't appreciate in my own language because they're common, and which Japanese native speakers might not appreciate in their language either, that only spark a little epiphany for second language-learners. (Obviously this is not specific to Japanese. E.g. my wife's favorite expression in her language translates as "a pedaling horse," which is to say that something is as useless as a horse with bicycle pedals attached.)
And also just going slowly itself is really rewarding. Like in English, when I first read this book, it wasn't super obvious to me that this girl would be an important part of the story at first, or really, how excessive Shimamura's attention to her is. It just sounded like, "Ok, he's on a train. He's got no book or smartphone or anything, and there's a cute girl." But going one sentence a day really feels like, "man, I've been watching this Shimamura guy stare at this teenage girl for like a week now." But also each sentence is beautiful, and like, just wrapping your head around the construction of a long sentence (all the clauses are basically backwards and nested and triple negated in Japanese, compared to English) gives you a little "oh" moment when you finally can hold the whole thing in your head at once and see the meaning.
And also, I know from my first book that it's only glacially slow in the beginning. Once you build up the vocabulary (you are doing flash cards, right? RIGHT?) then you start reading a paragraph a day, and then a page or even a chapter.
I had a long list of little translation examples I wanted to compare, like how Shimamura gets ira-ira watching the girl take care of some other guy, but it got translated as him being "impatient" watching her, but I think probably, if anyone was really interested in that, they could probably find an article written by an actual literary critic or a linguist or something. Anyways, I'm sure that out of 100 people starting to learn Japanese, maybe one or less actually gets past the basics, and that a lot of that just comes from not enjoying it enough. So for all the people out there who are not based anime enjoyers, please try a good book, even if it's a little out of range.