Q&A With Eric Ozawa 

I love doing Q&As with authors who write the stories we read as well as the people in the publishing world who help the authors put these stories out there. Today’s Q&A will be with Eric Ozawa who translated Days At The Morisaki Bookshop & More Days At The Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa from Japanese to English. 

Q: So, Eric, this is my first time doing a Q&A with someone who has translated fiction from one language to another one. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself & what made you want to translate books from Japanese to English? 

A: I am the person that I am because of the books I encountered, especially the ones I found in libraries and bookstores when I was a teenager. They gave me a sense of the wider world, showing me other cultures and other eras in history. Because of that, I think I came to translating naturally. I was born in Tokyo and raised in the US. My family has been back and forth a lot over the years. I live in New York now, where I’m a clinical professor at NYU, teaching writing at Tisch School of the Arts.

Q: What is your favorite & least favorite part about translating books from Japanese to English?

A: I think my least favorite part about translating are those slow days when you feel like you’ve been working for hours with little progress to show for it. (which is also my least favorite part about writing). That’s also why I love when things fall into place, and you can hear the voices of the character without losing the humor and warmth of the original. 

Q: What is it like working with Satoshi Yagisawa? 

A: Actually, I wasn’t able to meet Satoshi until after I’d translated the novels, and yet in a way I think this was fitting. The novels, after all, are about the connection you feel with the lives of people you know only through the pages of a book. By the time he and I met this summer, I felt like I already knew him. Satoshi, was, of course, just as kind and generous as you’d expect from books. 

Q: While we were getting acquainted on Instagram, you mentioned that you were translating the first book in Satoshi’s other series Café Trnka. Would you please give a brief description about the Café Trnka series & where Satoshi’s idea for the story came from? 

A: I’m happy to be working on two more novels by Satoshi. I’m confident that fans of the Morisaki Bookshop series will enjoy them. They take place at a small, tucked away café in another one of Tokyo’s great neighborhoods, Yanaka, a neighborhood of little shops and homes, cafes and markets, with a strong artistic and literary tradition. 

Each section in the book follows a different character at the café. And each has a different narrator. That’s a challenge that Satoshi wanted to set for himself after writing Morisaki Bookshop novels in Takako’s voice. It’s also a challenge I’m enjoying as a translator. At their core these books are about the periods in our lives where we feel lost and the ways we find our way again. 

Q: Since you have translated Japanese fiction into English, would you ever consider writing and translating your own stories into English? What kinds of stories would you write? 

A: I think it helps to be a writer, to be a translator and, vice versa, particularly if you have wide-ranging tastes. You can get a sense of my writing from this story, “O-Bakanaru,” which was published in Granta, and, originally appeared with an endnote saying that it had been translated by Michael Emmerich. It was flattering because he’s a great translator, but the truth is that I wrote it in English. 

Q: What lessons do you & Satoshi hope readers learn after reading his novels & what emotions do you both hope readers feel after reading them? For me, I connect with Takako in Morisaki Bookshop since we went through similar things, one of them being us bottling up our emotions and family and friends had to tell us it isn’t good for us. The emotions I felt after reading the Morisaki Books were that I felt both books were moving. 

A: I think that’s certainly one of the lessons that Takako takes from her experience, and it’s one that she, in return, tries to impress upon the people she cares most about (I won’t say more about this to avoid giving away too much away about the plot of the sequel). And, of course, the novels are also a reminder of the power of literature to help us through dark periods in our lives.