After a year of getting feedback from readers, I’ve been happy to hear how readers were moved and impressed by Tei’s remarkable story but very few readers can really evaluate the quality of my translation.

Happily, last October I received a letter from Columbia University after I submitted Tei to the 2015- 2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. I didn’t win the translation competition but the judges sent me a very nice letter which I will share below.

Translation, especially from Japanese to English, is a tricky business since the two languages are so very different. I want the translation to be as accurate as possible and at the same time, the English version to be as readable as possible.

I’m grateful the translation judges felt I did a decent job. I hope Tei Fujiwara will be happy to know that English readers are can also appreciate the rich textures and nuances of the story she wrote seventy years ago.

I just finished listening to the audio book of “The Art of Asking” by Amanda Palmer who became famous for her TEDTalk in which she said something like – perhaps we ought to think about, not how do we MAKE people pay for music, but how do we LET people pay for music. That made me think about the new audiobook I made of the Tei book. How do I make it as easy to listen to Tei’s story as it is to listen to music?

Just like music, audiobooks have almost become a required staple of many busy people. Audiobooks are easy to load, listen to while we do all the mundane chores of our lives — driving, washing dishes, writing blogs. In fact, I am listening to an audiobook now as I write this blog. (Haruki Murakami’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”).

This month, I plan to explore where I can distribute the audiobook version of Tei. I hope to let readers/listeners access the audiobook for free or a low fee. If you have any suggestions, please use the contact form here to share your ideas. Thanks!

Fujiwara’s spirit radiates through the pages and her love for her children is unmistakable. Her emotional memoir, written over 60 years ago and now available in English, will inspire thought and feeling as she shares her struggle and her will to survive.

Word of this book is spreading through the English language community in Japan. Check out the review by the biggest and oldest English language newspaper in Japan–the Japan Times.

Books

A Curious Madness: An American Combat Psychiatrist, a Japanese War Crimes Suspect, and an Unsolved Mystery from World War II, by Eric Jaffe, Schribner (2014)

The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945-1956 by Andrew E. Barshay, University of California Press (September 2, 2013)

Year Zero: A History of 1945, by Ian Buruma, The Penguin Press. (September 26, 2013)

Under the Black Umbrella, Voices from Colonial Korea 1910 – 1945, by Hildi Kang, Cornell University Press (2001)

YouTube videos

Two film of Tokyo, Japan in the 1930’s. http://youtu.be/wY2hAFPBIaI
Manchukuo (Manchuria) 1938 http://youtu.be/16IVkiVQut8

Wikipedia articles.
Manchukuo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchukuo

Other

Some of the Serious Conditions in Japan After World War II http://www.phoenixbonsai.com/bigpicture/PostWarJapan.html

Tei has been generating positive reviews in Amazon where there are 17 five-star reviews as of this date, and in Goodreads where Tei has earned an average 4.81 star rating with 26 ratings and 18 reviews. Thank you for your comments and reviews.