Nina Schuyler | An Unconventional Love Story

At one point, in my novel, THE TRANSLATOR, my main character, Hanne, laments, “How much easier if this chapter of her life was about a love story.”

Hanne is right that the novel isn’t a love story and she is also wrong.

For a solid year, Hanne works on one project, translating a Japanese novel into English. Over the course of that long involvement with the novel, she becomes emotionally entangled with the main character, Jiro. It’s a phenomenon that happens to writers—and also readers, if the writer has done her job well—of feeling like you know the character intimately, sometimes better than the people who populate your life. It’s what novelist Marilynn Robinson calls “the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls.”

Here’s Hanne, thinking about her recent dream: “Another fragment from last night’s dream floats up to the surface of her mind. Jiro’s voice wasn’t just a sound nestled near her ear. It was all around her, as if his voice had become warm water and she was immersed in it.” It’s a love affair of the mind, and, of course, doomed.

Soon, another possible love story soon flickers on the page, when Hanne travels to Japan and seeks out the inspiration for the character, Jiro. Moto is a former master in the art of Noh theater, in his fifties, Hanne’s age, and the counterpointed note to Hanne. While she is controlling and practical, he is whimsical and emotional. He probes and teases and doesn’t let her get away with anything. When I created him, I thought of the beloved inquisitor in central Europe and Asian literature, who arrives and asks what your life has been about, and there is no changing the subject, no sidestepping the question--you are forced to answer.

“Quixotic, that’s what you are Moto,” she says.

“Oh, yeah. The woman who must name everything,” he says.

A frustrating, intriguing, charged relationship unfolds. It’s exactly what Hanne needs—someone to crack open her world and make her see anew. When they have sex the first time, she views the act as just another appetite of the body. “Lust, she thinks, and also curiosity—does he make love like Jiro?”

Later in the novel, when Moto returns to the stage and is away at rehearsals, Hanne’s isolation and loneliness bear down like a boulder on her chest. Moto has a day off and returns to the house, where she is staying, and he senses her sadness. “He runs a finger from her throat to her breast bone, his touch full of appreciation. Wordlessly, they drift over to the bed into the tumble of blankets and sheets that fold around them like waves. His fingers spill all over her, unbuttoning her blouse, her skirt.”

Afterwards, Hanne is naked, literally and figuratively. In this raw, open, vulnerable state, Hanne feels love. I thought the book would end there. Hanne falls in love not with the character, Jiro, but Moto, a real, live human being. “She’s nearly forgotten the part that’s alighting, heating her body. An ache that catches in her throat.”

But the book didn’t end there. More pages begged to be written. There is a love story, after all, but not for Moto.

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About Nina Schuyler

THE TRANSLATOR won the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. It was named a Recommended Book by the San Francisco Chronicle, and has been translated into Hebrew, Taiwanese and Chinese.

Nina Schuyler's first novel, THE PAINTING, (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004), was a finalist for the Northern California Book Awards. It was also selected by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the Best Books of 2004, and dubbed a “fearless debut” by MSNBC and a “great debut” by the Rocky Mountain News. It’s been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Serbian.

Her stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her poems and short stories have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Santa Clara Review, Fugue, The Meadowland Review, The Battered Suitcase, and other literary journals. She writes a column for Fiction Advocate that focuses on stunning sentences and reviews books for The Rumpus and The Children’s Book Review. She teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco and writing classes at Book Passage.

She attended Stanford University for her undergraduate degree, earned a law degree at Hastings College of the Law and an MFA in fiction with an emphasis on poetry at San Francisco State University.

About THE TRANSLATOR

When renowned translator Hanne Schubert falls down a flight of stairs, she suffers from an unusual but real condition ― the loss of her native language. Speaking only Japanese, a language learned later in life, she leaves for Japan. There, to Hanne’s shock, the Japanese novelist whose work she recently translated confronts her publicly for sabotaging his work.

Reeling, Hanne seeks out the inspiration for the author’s novel ― a tortured, chimerical actor, once a master in the art of Noh theater. Through their passionate, volatile relationship, Hanne is forced to reexamine how she has lived her life, including her estranged relationship with her daughter. In elegant and understated prose, Nina Schuyler offers a deeply moving and mesmerizing story about language, love, and the transcendence of family.