A unique contemporary novel taking inspiration from "i-novels" which gained popularity during the Meiji period and were a type of confessional, auto fiction novel, where events in the story correspond and relate to those in the author's life, An I-Novel provides plenty of food for thought on the immigrant experience (specifically Japanese American) and the links between emotional life and language - all shown through one day in the author's life in 1980. I particularly enjoyed the foreword by the translator, which discussed whether this novel was truly "untranslatable" due to the fact that the original was written partly in English and partly in Japanese.

This book is just phenomenal. It made me fall in love with language even more. It made me want to take a long walk by the end of each chapter.

I became a fan of Minae Mizumura when I discovered "A True Novel," her haunting Japanese version of "Wuthering Heights."  I also admired and enjoyed this beautiful new translation of "An I-Novel," a layered, pitch-perfect novel about a Japanese woman who feels out of time and place. Juliet Winters Carpenter, the translator, tells us that in Japan this autobiographical novel was called the “first bilingual novel”: it was written in Japanese and English to reflect Minae’s experience in Japan and the U.S.. Naturally, the translation of this lovely bildungsroman is in English for our sakes.

The characterization is deftly developed as the reader is taken back and forth in time in America and Japan. The heroine, Minae, is a sad, anxious woman at an Ivy League school who has longed for 20 years to return from the U.S. to Japan. At the age of 30, she is still a graduate student in French literature, hiding out in a cockroach-infested apartment, doing no work, realizing that she is almost past her expiration date in the world of Ph.D.’s
Minae’s only personal contact is with her older sister, Nanae, a sculptor who lives with two cats in New York. Nanae calls her long-distance almost every day. She is barely getting by: she has broken up with her boyfriend, and she and Minae are are failures by their parents’ standards, both single women who can barely support themselves.

I love the sisters’ conversations about their mother’s insistence that they must marry. It never occurred to them that they would have to work.

"Having grown up without any notion that we needed to work, this perfectly ordinary fact had not occurred to either of us until recently. But it had probably never occurred to Mother either as she brought us up. She worked because she wanted to, not because she had to."

A lovely book that we can all relate to, even though we come from different cultures

Have you ever picked up a book, not realizing it was exactly the book you wanted to read?

I did not know I was looking for a book like 𝒜𝓃 𝐼-𝒩𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁 by Minae Mizumura (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter) until I found this book and started reading it. Out next month, this is a bilingual book, written in Japanese and English. To preserve the interplay between the two languages, English phrases and words are printed in a different typography than the translated Japanese text.

𝒜𝓃 𝐼-𝒩𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁 is a semi-biographical work, telling the story of two sisters Nanae and Minae who moved to the USA as kids. Now in their thirties, Minae longs for the Japanese homeland and reflects on her experiences as an immigrant. Minae articulated thoughts about immigration, identity, race, language and more that I had on my mind but had not had time to reflect upon. Though I moved to Canada in my early 20s, I related to a lot of the experience that Minae shared. I look forward to reviewing my notes and articulating a longer blog post on Armed with A Book about this amazing book for the 18th February.

Many thanks to the publisher, Columbia University Press, for providing me a complimentary copy of the book for an honest review.

I received an electronic ARC of this book via NetGalley for review.

This is a lovely translation of a book that, while not entirely to my taste, was absolutely worth reading.

The statement that the novel takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s is both true and false--the "current" timeline of the novel is one snowy day in which the narrator does not leave her apartment, but the events of the novel span the previous 20 years (and a bit more). It's an interesting story, and while somewhat meandering and not particularly plot-driven, it's enjoyable and avoids becoming confusing.

More than anything else, it's a novel about identity and language. The note at the beginning discusses the challenge of translating this particular novel, which apparently in the original is a mixture of Japanese and English that uses a somewhat unusual format to facilitate this stylistic choice. It's really fascinating, and taken together with the translated text of the novel is very thought-provoking on the interplay between English and other languages and what it means for writers who do not write in English.

This is a complex novel to review and I wanted to take my time before writing my review to consider all aspects of the novels and Mizumura's intent. Most importantly, as some other reviewers have noted, it is so important to read the translator's note and understand the care that Carpenter put into translating a "bi-lingual" novel where she was tasked with not just words and but also an experience and an exercise in understanding identity. 

This is a beautiful about language and identity and the ways in which those two things are intricately linked. Our world view is shaped by our culture interpretations of words and their meanings which is reflected in the novel's bi-lingual nature. Mizumura gives us a clear sense of that as we see her efforts as a child to try to make sense of life in a new place, America, with a Japanese world view and how what is "Japanese" and what is "American" collide and separate throughout her life. Through her own life experiences, Mizumura has a clear sense of language's ability to both free us and isolate us. This is a wonderful novel in that it discusses the immigrant experience not only in terms of place but in language.

AN I-NOVEL by Minae Mizumura and translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter is an engaging novel! Translated from the Japanese this is a semi-autobiographical book with Minae being the main character. She reveals her thoughts about growing up in the United States in the 80s as a Japanese woman while talking to her sister. There’s great discussion in this book on being an immigrant, being Japanese-American, Asian vs Japanese, cultural identity and language. There were lots of points I could connect with and Minae is such a relatable character. There were photos included in this book which felt a bit out of place to me. Overall I enjoyed reading this book and it would make a great book club selection as there’s so many interesting topics brought up such as longing for a home country that you haven’t lived in for twenty years, family responsibility, how languages impact your life and how sibling relationships can change over time.
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Thank you to Columbia University Press via NetGalley for my advance review copy!

By definition, an I-novel is a fictionalized memoir.  Although this story takes place on just one day while Minae is hunkered down in her apartment in a snow storm, her memories and reflections take us back to her family's layered past in both Japan and New York.  The focus of the story is Minae's alienation from her family, her adopted America, her native country, and most of her relationships.  Her ennui is manifest in her marginalized identity as neither Japanese nor American, as well as her insecurity with both Japanese and English languages, at the same time that she is working toward a doctorate in French Literature.  We become immersed in her quandary of how to tell her sister that she has decided at long last to take her doctoral orals and move back to Japan to write a novel.  While the plot is slow paced, the depth of Minae's reminiscences and introspection bring readers inside her mind so that of course we care.  The translator's introduction is helpful, and I have to assume that because the writing is so fine the melding of the Japanese and English has been successful.

An I-Novel is ultimately a story about two sisters and how their relationship is shaped as they each navigate the experience of moving to and living in America as Japanese expatriates. A meditation on identity and experience, ranging from as insular as family to as broad as race and nationality.

The novel’s most unique feature is that it was written in Japanese with English used freely throughout. This is of course intriguing, but the translation into English then feels as though you are missing something. That is certainly not due to the translator, but more so just the fact that the novel is not able to be translated successfully.

Although I did enjoy the writing, the novel did feel a bit long for its contents. While some parts were insightful and engaging, the novel as a whole did not captivate me to the extent that I had hoped.

The most poignant aspect of the novel is certainly how different the sisters have become over time despite having grown up together and traversing many of the same experiences. I also particularly enjoyed the feeling Minae wrestles with of being caught between two countries, as well as her musings on both American and Japanese culture. It is reflective in a way that feels realistic and balanced.

While this novel I think could be appreciated by anyone interested in the immigrant experience, or an expat themselves, it does feel targeted to a specific audience- Japanese living in America or the reverse.

James Baldwin once said, “Every writer has only one tale to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise and more and more reverberating.”

In An I-Novel - first published in Japan in 1995, with its English translation to be released in March 2021 by Columbia University Press – Minae Mizumura covers familiar territory. Those who have read her previous novels will recognize many of the same characters as well as themes – displacement, identity, familial tensions, lost time, fate versus self-determination, and what it means to pursue an artistic life. 

As the author has previously said, such repetition might seem strange to western audiences, but is commonplace in the Japanese I-Novel, in which the author writes about a character much like herself – a type of autofiction.

In An I-Novel, we again meet Minae and Nanae, who also appeared in A True Novel, Mizumura’s masterful retelling of Wuthering Heights. The sisters are in their thirties and still trying to find their sense of place in the world, twenty years after their parents uprooted them from their Tokyo home to emigrate to America. Minae yearns to return to her homeland to write The Great Japanese Novel, but suffers from a crippling lack of self-confidence. She is also increasingly aware that the Japan she feels such nostalgia for is a figment of her imagination, as she says, “a Japan that had never existed.” Most of all, she fears for Nanae, a struggling artist in Manhattan who, like Minae, continues to feel lonely and isolated in America. 

Despite living in different cities, the sisters have a codependent relationship and speak on the phone daily. Mizumura cleverly frames much of her sweeping work within one such call, which happens to fall on the twentieth anniversary of their arrival in America. The story starts with Minae as she prepares to break the news of her impending departure to Japan to Nanae. Though she is the younger sister, Minae feels responsible for Nanae. There is also the added burden of their sick father who is going senile and in hospital. As their mother has run off with her lover and now lives overseas, and Minae is interstate finishing her PhD, much of his care lies with Nanae.  

During the phone call, Minae reveals poignant flashbacks of her childhood and college years. When they first arrive in America, they are dismayed to discover that they are not seen as Japanese but rather ‘Asian.’ Minae is mistaken for a Chinese-American girl at school, while Nanae is set up on a blind date with a Korean boy. As Minae says, “Awareness came slowly, in bits and pieces. Experiences piled up, telling me that I was as Asian as any Chinese or Korean.” Minae also has trouble learning English. Her native tongue becomes her “staff of life” and she reads Japanese novels every night.

While her parents were enamored by the concept of the American Dream after World War II, the sisters feel ambivalent about its reality. They have both attended elite colleges but struggle with their academic and professional pursuits, and feel no sense of belonging. Dreams of marrying within their culture never eventuate – when Nanae returns to Japan to meet her boyfriend’s parents, they see her as too western, and are particularly shocked that she smokes. The relationship ends tragically and Nanae, devastated, returns to America. Their careers have also proved to be disappointing. Minae grapples with a sense of lost time. During the phone call, she asks her sister ‘What have I been doing all this time?’ and, later says, ‘I can’t help wondering how we ever ended up like this.’

As an adult, Minae pursues a PhD in French and clearly has an aptitude for languages. And yet, she fears that only someone who has grown up in Japan has the ability to write literature in that language. Her growing desire to return to her homeland to write a novel in her native tongue also makes this a Künstlerroman, much like A True Novel was. Just as Mizumura uses A True Novel, to explore a woman growing in confidence to finally declare herself a novelist, here too the character Minae gradually comes to a similar uplifting conclusion about the liberating role of art in life: “And then I knew, in a way I’d never known before, that the act of writing was itself bliss.”

The book has previously been described as ‘untranslatable’ because Mizumura uses both English and Japanese to convey her relationship with language, and writes the Japanese characters from left to write (as opposed to vertically). While English readers will have a very different experience than Japanese readers, and will not pick up on the full inventiveness of the novel, it is still moving, evocative and often very funny. 

Mizumura has said that her novel is “a story of a woman who made a wrong choice in her life...what was the meaning of those twenty years in America if all she had ever wanted was to become a Japanese writer?” But as Mizumura’s body of work shows, those ‘wrong’ choices were not a waste after all, and they continue to provide rich territory for the author to mine in her semi-autobiographical novels.

We fall into the melancholy, the quiet solitude, of an author pondering language in the opening paragraphs of An I-Novel, a semi-autobiographical novel that uplifts and transforms the traditional私小説, a confessional style of literature rooted in the Meiji period of Japanese literary history. In a first person, stream of consciousness style, Minae Mizumura recounts her experience as an immigrant, lost between two worlds as she toys with the idea of writing a novel.

Nostalgia – not just for childhood, but for Japan – colors Mizuramura’s language, rendered beautifully by Juliet Winters Carpenter in a novel previously considered untranslatable by the author due to its bilingual origins. Longing and profound loneliness cling to every word alongside meticulous, lyrical detail that is reminiscent of translations of Sōseki, a fitting comparison given Mizumura’s publication of Light and Darkness Continued, as she takes pains to describe the setting: a rundown apartment just outside a college campus on the eve of her family’s exodus: the twenty-year anniversary of their arrival in America.

Caught in the world of books and language, Mizumura finds herself caught in limbo, much like her family, who remain in America despite their insistence that it is only temporary, buoyed, alongside Nanae in the idea that they would eventually return to Japan to marry Japanese men, a facet of life considered “proper.” What unfolds instead is a nostalgia infused series of conversations on love, life and childhood, wherein Mizumura comes to terms with her identity by renouncing the American experience – an experience tinged with insensitivity, racism and otherness – facets of her childhood that she fails to recognize until adulthood: “To her, the fact that American made no distinction between Koreans and Japanese simple reflected the reality of the United States as a foreign land, but Nanae and I had to find out place in that reality.”

Through it all, Mizumura struggles with her attempt to leave, torn between her desire to write a novel in Japanese (and live in Japan) and her obligation to take care of her sister, who is rooted firmly in New York. What unfolds is instead is an exodus of self, spurred on by Mizumura’s relationship to the Japanese language, the book containing Ichiyo’s writing a balm and a new beginning, the strength required to write, to tell her story to anyone that will listen. An I-Novel is presumably that story, a work of hardship that blends the best (and worst) of both worlds, originally depicted in English and Japanese and masterfully translated in a single language demarcated by different typefaces, though they can be hard to decipher in digital formats.

I really enjoyed this confessional-type novel. It was my first exposure to the genre. I also liked reading about the narrator's challenges straddling two homelands - the original and the adopted. Would recommend.

A bilingual semi-biographical work by Minae Mizumura, is written in stream of consciousness style. With Japanese phrases sneaking in, its a feeling of nearness and togetherness that the author feels natural inclination towards, and the writing slips from English to Japanese. The shift from observatory style to an almost melancholic poetic note is blatantly obvious, and shows how immensely talented the author is and how natural her writing truly is. 
Early this year I did read a book by the author this year and briefly enjoyed it. 

<i>Thank you to Netgalley and Columbia University Press for providing me with a free copy of this e-book in exchange for an honest review. </i>

At first, it seems as if the book is about nothing in particular.

It's snowing, and Minae looks out the window. There's nobody outside in such weather, not even the prostitutes hanging around the street, nor anyone at the „Afro-American Student Center” across the street, or at the „University Cabaret” next to it.

And as she looks out the window, she ponders on the violent nature of American streets, on what her life in Japan would be like, had she moved back, on whether a prostitute she used to know is alive and well.

Her older sister, Nanae, calls to tell her it's the 2o-year anniversary of their arrival in the US when they were 9 and 11 and their parents moved for job-related reasons. 

In stream-of-consciousness style, one thing and then another spark memories, and we come to know about her life in a zigzag fashion going from present to distant past to somewhere in between in no particular order, with no great overarching story arc, but as engrossing and fascinating as a mystery nonetheless - perhaps because the people themselves and their lives were mysteries.

As the book goes on, it felt to me as if it moves away from snapshots of past and present and towards a more emotional and philosophical stance (though this may merely be an impression, and not true). 

The story itself is a semi-autobiography based on Minae Mizumura's own life, though I haven't quite managed to figure out what is fiction and what is truth - perhaps that's intentional. 

In very simplistic terms, it's the story of an immigrant to America, a girl taken away from her home country when she was old enough to have lived a great part of her childhood in Japan, but nowhere near old enough to make the choice to move for herself. It's a tale of the nostalgia and desire for the home country, of trying to integrate into the new one, never quite belonging. It's a story of being angry with language, and of discovering that those around her don't see her and will never see her as one of their own.

I found the historical details fascinating; the details of what the family brought along from Japan, of what they ate, of what they found in the US, but most of all, their feelings towards it all, and their perceptions. The inability of the mother to quite understand the concept of a blind date, Minae's tendency to sink into an out-of-date, book-inspired Japan that never quite existed, her sister Nanae's surface-deep imitation of American girls, tanning her skin and bleaching her hair.

It's also a story of <i>language</i>. Minae Mizumura scattered her book with English phrases and sentences. When she talks to her sister, when she speaks of things she associates with America, she turns to English. This is so deeply, <i>deeply</i> familiar. While I myself am not a migrant, I pepper my Romanian with English with my friends - I am bilingual, and most of my reading is in English. I've been this way since school, and switching is as natural as breathing. 

How odd that a Japanese woman writing in the '90s seems to describe cultural conundrums that I feel deeply as a Romanian woman in 2020, that she speaks of Japanese people of her parents' generation despising their own culture and turning towards the West, while my generation does the same. That she's aware Japanese is an insular and local language and that writing a book in English would gain a worldwide audience (but she decides to write in Japanese), because English is now universal. That there's a constant back and forth: over there or home? Is home even home? To stay or to go? What would be better? 

Juliet Winters Carpenter does a brilliant job with the translation (I assume; my Japanese is really nothing to write home about) and has come up with a good way to show that the novel is <i>bilingual</i>, even if the second language is English - words in English in the original have a different typography (my copy shows them as bolded), giving a good sense of when the register is changed. I wonder what it would have been like to read "An I-Novel" in my native Romanian, with the English left as English, but, alas, it hasn't been translated (yet). Would it have felt tacky? Odd? Or even more natural and relatable? I don't know. Maybe one day I'll find out.

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. I hadn't expected to love this quite as much as I did.

I'm so delighted with this novel, and for the meticulous, poetic way that Juliet Winters Carpenter has translated it. As she says in her foreword, "The original, based on the author's experiences growing up in the United States and Japan, freely mixes natural American English with Japanese." She shares her thinking and her choices about how to capture that dichotomy of language in her translation, with the goal of making the novel accessible to non-Japanese speakers. I think she's come as close to 'amazing' as you can get for such a task and I enjoyed reading this book very much. At the same time I wouldn't recommend to anyone that they read it as an e-book--I would have strongly preferred to have the "I-Novel" in my hands, with the thoughtful and meaningful formatting choices that the translator made, to delineate the languages and where they're used, more readily apparent. I also wonder if it might not have been a good idea to have the original text on the facing page.

I'm fascinated with the world of truly bilingual fiction--it's so interesting to think of an author choosing it as a way, as the only way maybe, to express her inner world. It seems particularly right as choices go for an author trying to explore the way her life was affected by immersion in two different languages, two different cultures.

My thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for this reading experience.

This is a really good novel, the story of Minae, a doctoral student with more doubts than words on her thesis, reminiscing about her actual situation, her past, her family, the change that came to her life when she moved from Japan to the United States, all done through the classical Japanese I-Novel genre, a typical genre where the life of the author is put into words in the story of the book. It is not by chance that Mizumura chooses one of Japanese literary genres par excellence to create a story that, even if simple on first sight (a person worrying about what their future will be, what happened to their youth, why are they expending so many years on a silly doctorate), has so many layers and ways to look at it that it can perfectly become a topic for a fascinating discussion on language and literature.

What is interesting to realize, when reading "An I-Novel", is that it works on two very different levels. First, the most obvious, the chance to look into the mind of the author, to see her fears, her desires, what she envisages or what she would like to change, and how her decisions have taken her to that point of her life. It is an engaging read, a, in some ways, quintessential I-novel story, with the particularity that in this case, the story is seen through the eyes of a Japanese woman that moved to the United States when she was still of young age, this change of scenery, of language, culture, friends... impacting her development and her views.

The second, and for me more fascinating, is too see how language, and in this case, English and Japanese, shape the novel, the author, her views, her feelings, how she reacts to how other see and behave towards her. The role of language in this novel cannot be understated and in that regards, of course, it is a pity not being able to read it in Japanese and English. The translation, though is really good, helping to bridge this shortcoming. This, of course, was the biggest fear I had when I started reading it: that the translation wouldn't be able to bring across the message of the role of language and the impact English has had on the whole world. The only way to maybe, just maybe, replicate the feeling of the original would have been using Spanish as the English of the original, as Spanish is widely spoken and many of its words have become common knowledge. But the decision by the translator and author works, surprisingly, really well. Even if we cannot feel the same as if reading the novel in Japanese-English while being fluent in both languages, like Mizumura, or Juliet Winters Carpenter (the translator), the way the translation has been done helps to recreate within the reader part of the feelings of alienation or loneliness that Mizumura has to deal with, not 'belonging' to anywhere anymore. It is probably, one of the most difficult translation works possible, and Winters Carpenter has done one of those astonishing feats very few translators can do: make the novel feel like a bilingual one even if read just in English.

The only thing (if we forget the not being able to read it as a bilingual work) I had some issues with, is that sometimes Mizumura (or the translator's) words feel a little bit crass, like when the author talks about her middle and high school classmates. Maybe here is where vocabulary, and different languages, express things in a way that is difficult to replicate.

One of those works that is more than just what appears on its pages, "An I-Novel" develops language and conversation in captivating ways.

It’s a snowy evening at a college town in the U.S. It’s sometime in the 1980s. Snowed in, graduate student Minae struggles to cope with ennui, loneliness, and procrastination. Her attempts to call the French department’s secretary at her prestigious college to schedule her oral exams have been futile thus far. She has been trying for a while; she wishes to move forward. Minae looks out the window, daydreams about her move to Japan after her orals, and her enthusiasm is disrupted by thoughts about her dysfunctional family and anxiety about the future.

Japanese writer Minae Mizumura’s fictionalized autobiographical work An I-Novel takes place over the course of a day–the day that marks the twentieth anniversary of, what Minae and her artist sister Nanae call, “our Exodus.” Their family’s move to America from Japan, following Japan’s defeat in WWII. The seemingly uneventful day also reveals to its narrator and protagonist Minae that she has come to a threshold.

As Minae makes the difficult decision to move forward and return to Japan in the novel, she reflects on her memories in the U.S. and in Japan, her struggle with the English language, her identity as a graduate student and as an aspiring novelist–a process of meditation instigated by her phone conversations with Nanae who, like her sister, has long grappled with a sense of belonging in two different cultures.

As the narrative moves back and forth in time, Minae tries to get to the root of her desire to move to Japan and to write in Japanese. “When did I start wanting to go back to Japan?,” she asks, “So many years has passed with me haunted by the longing to return that the wish seemed to have been there from the first.” Although like her parents, she is thrilled about the prospect of the move overseas, she remembers how, once in the Land of the Free, she feel “as trapped as a cloistered nun or a languishing exile.” Her constant struggle with the English language and failure to speak it fluently as a kid further relegates her to the periphery. She thus takes solace in Japanese novels, as well as in the idea that she will surely return home one day. She writes:

“All through my girlhood, I was consumed by thoughts of the homeland I’d left. I longed for it with an intensity that words like ‘yearning’ or ‘nostalgia’ could not convey. I felt I was someplace I should not be. Japan steadily grew near-mythic dimensions in my mind, transfigured into a place where life transcended the smallness of the everyday. Since these were the years that shaped me, I was never again to be free–not even when I finally did return for a visit.”

Later she explains that she goes to graduate school–:

“…simply as a means of prolonging my life in limbo. But I was powerless to halt the stream of time. Awareness of how much time had gone by hit me all of a sudden, as if one day, I Urashimo Tarõ, the Japanese Rip van Winkle, had opened a jeweled box and been greeted with a puff of smoke and jolted to the present. Was it because of the unfamiliar ring of the words ‘thirty years old’ ? Or the disappearance from my living room of Tono’s back hunched over his big desk? Or was it because the Colonial house in Long Island was suddenly gone and my parents became such different people from who they had been? To my astonishment, I myself was no longer a young girl, and neither was Nanae. And for the first time I realized what I had always known deep down: I was afraid of going back to Japan. My crazed obsession had shaped me so profoundly that–like an invalid fearful of being cured–I was terrified of losing the thing that defined me.”

She gradually realizes, however, that she wishes to return to a home that does not exist– home as defined by the Japanese novels she reads; home whose meanings she re-constructs through a combination of memories, illusions, and tales. Mizumura thus highlights the intimate link between language and identity through her narrator’s desire to write a novel in Japanese. Minae reflects on her hyphenated identity as follows:

“the gulf was not between me and America. It was something more like a gulf between myself and American self, or between my Japanese self and my American self–or, to be still more precise, between my Japanese-language self and my English-language self. My Japanese self did not disappear just because I had come to America; it would continue as long as I spoke and read Japanese. And I was convinced that my Japanese-language self was my real self and I could only be true o it by one day going back to Japan; my English language self felt utterly beneath me, alien.”

Whenever she mentions her desire to write a novel, the first question she receives is: “Are you going to write in English or in Japanese?” One of her dissertation committee members, for instance, is amused by her aspiration. “Can you write Japanese?” he asks, “I mean, good Japanese. After all, you weren’t educated in Japan, Minae.” He then tells her: “Well, whatever you do, try not to mix up your Japanese with English. “

Even though Minae reassures him that she will “try not to,” the existence of the novel we read suggests that Minae was able to move beyond all the ideologies, illusions, and the pressure to belong. The original version of An I-Novel, which was published in 1995, mixes Japanese and English seamlessly, creating a novel that reflects its narrator’s desire to find her true self. Like the novel we hold in our hands, Minae is audacious and multifaceted, and she does not fit into a box.

Although it seems like its translator Juliet Winters Carpenter has done a wonderful job with the English version, An I-Novel is one of the books that I wish I could read in its original language. Its refreshing approach to the Japanese confessional genre is certainly admirable. But Mizumura’s reflection on what it means to feel at home, to write, and to exist in two cultures and two languages has allowed me to think about my own experiences with the English language: why, I, unlike Minae, was always drawn to the English language when I lived a quiet life thousands of miles from it.

I do believe that this novel has found me at the right time, when I’m slowly reading and writing more in Turkish.


Many thanks to Columbia University Press and Netgalley for the advanced copy!

As a graduate student who is sometimes incapacitated by homesickness and bouts of existential fear, I thought reading Mizumura’s account of a struggling Japanese doctoral student would be extremely relatable. Alas, it wasn’t. Its stream-of-consciousness style was not for me, especially as it was just a rundown of a normal, not particularly eventful life. I guess it was too close to home and the boredom I am experiencing in my own life—reading about it felt like reliving the ennui all over again.  

Also, the zigzagging style of the writing was dizzying at times. Its excessive amount of detail was not necessarily alluring, and it kind of dragged on. I struggled to connect with the character, even though it should have been fairly easy for me to do so. Sadly, I also think the translation is a bit clunky. I appreciate it is a big feat to translate a bilingual text, and it seems the translator tried to evoke as similar a feeling as reading the original Japanese text, but it read like a translation, and I feel like a good translation should not show its seams. 

Unfortunately, the book failed to stir any emotions in me. It was not for me.

The I-Novel is a style/genre that I wasn't familiar with before reading this one, and now I am intrigued. I was left wondering how much of this was true to Mizumura's experiences, and a quick Google search shows that there are many details that reflect reality. But more so, I wonder about the thoughts that are expressed, because they are revealed with such devastating feeling. There were parts that I could relate so much with and that put to words feelings that I've had, and seeing them on the page was brutal, yet satisfying. Although the book really takes place within a short amount of time, the back and forth between past and present makes it much longer. In a sense, this novel could have been edited a bit to be published as a series of essays on immigration, identity, loss of self, race, language, etc.

An I-Novel, by Minae Mizumura and translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, is a moving novel that takes place over the course of one day but takes us through the years of the semi-fictional Minae's life.

After I finished this novel I tried to figure out what exactly made it so impactful for me. I am not a woman, I am not an expat living in a different culture, I am no longer young nor any longer a grad student. A certain amount of why it moved me is the basic idea of empathy and relating as well as one can to a character, any character. What I think put this into exceptional area for me is that even though the events portrayed, both on the day of the novel and throughout Minae's life, were not immediately relatable for me, Mizumura conveyed the basic human feelings underlying these events so well that I could relate in that way. It wasn't just an expat's loneliness, it was a human loneliness. And so on for the spectrum of emotions I felt.

I won't repeat the history of either the I-novel form in Japanese literature or the dual-language aspect of the original novel. Those things are discussed in most of the book blurbs and, if you're like me, you'll look up more information about I-novels before starting this one. Doing that extra little bit of work does help to make this an even more impressive work, but certainly isn't necessary to enjoy the book.

I don't know Japanese and so never read the original, so I can't speak to the quality of the translation beyond acknowledging that it worked for me. That alone makes it a success to some degree. My understanding from the one person I know who read the original and this translation is that it is impressive, so I will go with that.

I highly recommend this to readers who like to explore that area where the minutiae of everyday life meets the lifelong arcs of a character's, and by extension our own, life. This is not action packed, but you will definitely have made a journey once you complete this book.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.