At one point, in my novel,
THE TRANSLATOR, my main
character, Hanne, laments,
โHow much easier if this chapter of her life
was about a love story.โ
Hanne is right that the novel isnโt 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. Itโs a phenomenon that
happens to writersโand also readers, if the writer has done her job wellโof
feeling like you know the character
intimately, sometimes better than the people who populate your life. Itโs
what novelist Marilynn Robinson calls
โthe
best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to
other human souls.โ
Hereโs Hanne, thinking about her recent dream:
โAnother fragment from
last nightโs dream floats up to the surface of
her mind. Jiroโs voice wasnโt 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.โ Itโs 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, Hanneโs age, and the
counterpointed note to Hanne. While she is controlling and practical, he is
whimsical and emotional. He probes and teases
and doesnโt 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.
โQuixotic, thatโs what you are Moto,โ she says.
โOh, yeah. The woman who must name everything,โ he says.
A frustrating, intriguing, charged relationship unfolds. Itโs exactly what
Hanne needsโsomeone 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.
โLust,
she thinks, and also curiosityโdoes he make love like Jiro?โ
Later in the novel, when Moto returns to the stage and is away at
rehearsals, Hanneโs 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.
โHe 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.โ
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.
โSheโs
nearly forgotten the part thatโs alighting, heating her body. An ache that
catches in her throat.โ
But the book didnโt end there. More pages begged to be written. There is a
love story, after all, but not for Moto.
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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
โfearless debutโ by MSNBC and a โgreat debutโ by the Rocky Mountain News.
Itโs 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
Childrenโs 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.
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 Hanneโs shock, the Japanese novelist whose work she recently
translated
confronts her publicly for sabotaging his work.
Reeling, Hanne seeks out the inspiration for the authorโs 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.
© 2003-2026