Wayne P. Lammers, Japanese-English Translator
Still Life and Other Stories
by Junzo Shono.
Stone Bridge Press, 1992. ISBN 1-880656-02-7 (softcover).
So little in these stories by Shono Junzo is overtly "Japanese" that readers of the translations may at times even forget that the stories are set in Japan. This gives them a universal appeal and familiarity, allowing them to become stories about any family of any modern society, not merely exotic stories of a country far away... The stories make one think of haiku poetry--especially the way haiku describe scenes or momentary events as if to say "Look!" ... [I]f we heed the command and turn our attention in the direction pointed, we see more than we had ever noticed before, even among the most commonplace of things.
by Junzo Shono.
Stone Bridge Press, 1992. ISBN 1-880656-02-7 (softcover).
So little in these stories by Shono Junzo is overtly "Japanese" that readers of the translations may at times even forget that the stories are set in Japan. This gives them a universal appeal and familiarity, allowing them to become stories about any family of any modern society, not merely exotic stories of a country far away... The stories make one think of haiku poetry--especially the way haiku describe scenes or momentary events as if to say "Look!" ... [I]f we heed the command and turn our attention in the direction pointed, we see more than we had ever noticed before, even among the most commonplace of things.
- • PEN West Literary Award for Translation
- • Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature (Modern)
Reviews
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Small Press
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"This collection should be sipped and savored like warm sake."
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Library Journal
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"The simple voice in these stories gives them a timeless, almost placeless quality that leaves the reader with a sense of rest and serenity."
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Prof. Van C. Gessel, BYU
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"Shono is one of the leading writers of postwar Japan, a master of simplicity and subtlety. The placid surfaces of stories conceal a painful uncertainty about contemporary Japanese life. Lammers's sensitive translations convey both the pain and the placidity with moving clarity."
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Publishers Weekly
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"A penetrating collection of stories. . . .Lammers's excellent translation keeps the dialogue and language deceptively simple yet nuanced and subtle; he makes the family Japanese and universal at the same time."
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Education About ASIA
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"Shono's settings are clearly Japanese, but as layers reveal themselves, the Japaneseness of the whole work recedes and becomes only a backdrop...[Shono's fiction] captures the heart of the reader, whether American or Japanese. It slowly reveals itself as universal, rather than narrowly nationalistic."
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PEN West Award Citation
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"The translator accomplished the highly difficult and original task of finding an idiom that was at once familiar and outlandish. Elegant, fluent and colloquial, Lammers' English text reads like an invisible language one has somehow always known."
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Kenyon College Book Review
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"These stories are so artful. . . they seem like the artless productions of life itself. . . The nuances and tone of Shono's style--a very quiet and sophisticated music against a background of subtle and careful observations--don't escape the translator's ear, and the translator's ear in English is remarkably exact, too. . . Few authors have had a better translator."
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Hiroaki Sato, translator and critic
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"Junzo Shono describes domestic scenes with airy sophistication and charm. . . . Begin any of his narratives and you become Junzo Shono, an amused observer of daily occurrences. Wayne Lammers's translations recreate Shono's unique voice with natural precision. Reading Lammers is reading Shono."
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The New York Times Book Review, on "Still Life" in The Showa Anthology
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"[T]his collection of family scenes, told without a trace of contrivance and rendered by Wayne P. Lammers into English so natural that one sometimes wonders if it is about a Japanese family, is among the most successful stories in the anthology."
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