A distinguished, award-winning novelist in Japan, Minae Mizumura is little-known outside her native country because she made what she has archly described as a “terribly wrong choice”. Born in Tokyo in 1951, Mizumura moved with her family to a suburb of Long Island when she was 12 after her father was appointed head of the New York branch of his company. This presented her with the “rare opportunity” of “switching my first language from Japanese to English” – a “universal language” of seemingly unstoppable global dominance, the mastery of which would have dramatically expanded her potential readership. Instead, she spent her youth avoiding English, yearning for Japan and reading old Japanese novels (as well as Western classics in translation). Then, in her thirties, having lived in the US for more than half her life, she decided to return to Japan to become a Japanese-language novelist.
An I-Novel is the first English translation of Mizumura’s second book Shishōsetsu from left to right, which appeared in Japan in 1995. As one might infer from its title – Shishōsetsu is the name of a cherished genre of confessional fiction in Japan – it is an autobiographical novel about Mizumura’s decision. It is “not just a how-I-became-a-writer story; it is also a how-I-became-a-Japanese-writer story”.
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