Mystery is one of my favorite genres,
so I was excited to get The Devotion of
Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (Minotaur Books, $24.99, February 2011). Though
Higashino is one of the most successful writers in Japan and Asia, this is only
the second of his novels to be published here.
His first novel came out in 1989, and his breakout was the 1999 novel Himitsu (The Secret), which was an award-winning bestseller and the basis for a hit Japanese movie (remade later by Luc Besson in France); it's scheduled to be a Japanese TV series. Since that breakout novel, Higashino's work has simply exploded.
His work was translated into Chinese about two years ago and now he's possibly the bestselling novelist in China, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. In Japan, Higashino has assumed an almost iconic status. He and Haruki Murakami are often cited in tandem as the two major writers that a general reader would be expected to know immediately, like Stephen King or James Patterson.
I am intrigued by Japanese mysteries because there is something "other" about them, something more formal, beyond being set in another culture. When I found out that Higashino doesn't give interviews--common among celebrities in Japan--it occurred to me that interviewing his translator might give me, and other fans, some insight into Japanese mystery writing. So I called Alexander O. Smith, the primary translator, with a few questions.--Marilyn Dahl
What is there about Japanese
mysteries that makes them different?
Well, I think there are a number of angles you could go at that question from. By the formal nature, I assume you're talking about the scene structure that strikes you....
A little bit. And sometimes the interactions, or the characters' demeanor--there seems to be a certain calmness in a lot of the characters, even when they're plotting something or have done something bad. For instance, one sentence says, "Ishigami's reply was calmly mechanical," and that seems to be a common theme.
Part of this is surely coming from the nature of [the protagonist] Ishigami--a man whose true devotion is to mathematics first. But the other characters are talking across metaphorical (and in some cases, physical) walls. It makes the "Devotion" in the title sound rather ironic.
Style-wise, Higashino feels very Western to me. He's drawing much less from the set-piece style of writing you see going all the way back to the Tale of Genji, where a lot of the characters are interchangeable and it's really all about setting up these moments, these sort of perfect scenes--somebody peeking through a hole and somebody falling in love at first sight.
Higashino has a bit of that Japanese emphasis on the scene, together with the Western emphasis on motivation and characterization, and I think the really successful authors mix the two quite nicely. In The Devotion of Suspect X in particular, his style is very sparse, and feels very modern in that way.
And it seems very cinematic. When Yasuko is being driven home in the taxi with Kudo, and Ishigama is waiting with his umbrella at the bottom of the steps, I could visualize that perfectly.
Yeah, that's a great scene, a great moment. And it translates really well into what are called "home dramas"--a cross between soap operas and miniseries, basically soap operas with a clear beginning and ending, running in prime time for one or two seasons on Japanese TV. Almost every mystery book that Higashino Keigo has written has been made into a home drama. The Devotion of Suspect X and the characters in it inspired a home drama called Galileo, where the Yukawa character, the professor, becomes the main protagonist, and he goes around solving mysteries.
One of the
interesting changes that happened in the TV version was they decided to add a
little more on-screen tension and 'sexy' it up. Instead of using the detective
Kusanagi as the main foil to Yukawa, they changed his sidekick to a woman. That
adds a number of new story elements to play with: the role of the woman in a male-dominated
Japanese police force, and the sexual tension, or lack thereof, between her and
the ethereal professor Yukawa.
The changes propagated back to the novels, too. For his subsequent book, Higashino adopted the home drama idea, and he made the sidekick to the lead detective a woman.
I think it's interesting that the cinematic moments in The Devotion of Suspect X lead to a cinematic treatment (on the small screen), which then influenced the future novels in the series. The Professor Yukawa novels are not a chronological series as much as a series with the same characters--a classic detective series, in other words.
I like the "otherness" of this book, but if I were a bookseller, how would I sell this to someone who has not read Japanese mysteries before, or read a couple and was put off?
Well, it does require a bit of suspension of comfort. Especially in the first third, but once you get around the "otherness"--and this is the same advice I would give to a student stepping off the plane in Japan for a semester abroad--you will find that the things driving the characters and the motivations behind the characters are exactly the same as us.
Some of your translation choices intrigue me; for instance, when you are describing Togashi, you say he lived large. Then, later on in the book, Yukawa says, "Stop right there, how tall was the victim?" and Kusanagi says, "One hundred and seventy centimeters plus change." Why would you go with the American slang but then use the metric system for height?
That is a great question. The answer is that with expressions like "he lived large" (literally, "he flapped his wings well"), translation requires setting aside the specific words of the Japanese idiom and paying more respect to intended effect of the original phrase. You localize as much as possible and make the language feel as natural English as possible, while being careful not to trample motifs and characterizations. It's a very delicate process.
With the metric system, I left the choice up to the publisher, but the metric system is used in many English-speaking countries, and it's part of the setting, so I leaned toward leaving it alone. With mystery novels in particular you want to be very careful about changing specific details because you never know when something is going to get referenced later and actually become crucial, and you can end up with a huge messy rewrite.
It doesn't hurt to remind of us of the exotic setting--even when that's a dreary apartment complex in the middle of Tokyo.
And one has to pay a lot of attention to unfamiliar social cues, because they impact the story. I liked having to give it that kind of consideration.
Clearly you're willing to do some work as a reader.
As long as the book is good.
I think that it does reward a little effort. And that's a question you have to ask as a translator as well: how easy should I make this? I know that the dialogue in the first quarter of the book, especially, can seem a little disjointed because all of the formalities haven't been smoothed out. It definitely rewards a little attention.
It takes a while to get into the rhythm, the flow of the narrative when you are inside Ishigami's head. Everything in his world happens as though it's a mathematical proof, it's all A, B, thus C. Everything is happening in a real discrete order, and you see him paying attention to the kind of details a detective might pay attention to, a very exact attention to the world around him.
The title page of The Devotion of Suspect X notes it was translated by you and Elye Alexander.
I was first contacted to do this work by Keith Kahla at St. Martin's Press, because he had seen my translation of The Twelve Kingdom juvenile fantasy series published by TokyoPop. I had worked on those with Elye; I often collaborate with him on novels that have a real strong poetic feel to them, because I feel like the interplay works well. I will translate the novel as well as I can into flowing English, then I pass it to him and he does little tweaks as sort of an editing pass. And then I get it back and make sure nothing got scraped too far from the original. It gives me a little separation from the work, so I can give it my all, and pass it off to him again, and when I get it back it's a good sanity check. Elye doesn't speak or read Japanese, so it helps catch those little bits of translation-ese. I always prefer the collaborative approach to lone-gunning it, and I think the creative give-and-take contributes to a superior result.