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By:
Aline Pereira,
on 5/30/2012
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Children’s and YA Books in Translation from Japan ~ by Holly Thompson
Part 3 of 3 (read Part 1 here and Part 2 here)
Over the years of raising our children in Japan, I have kept my eyes out for Japanese children’s books translated into English. Sadly, far more titles go from English into Japanese than from Japanese into English. Having peaked in numbers in the 1980s, nowadays few Japanese children’s and young adult books are translated into English each year.
The reasons for so few Japanese books being sold to English-language publishers are layered and complicated ranging from cultural differences and weak English copy or sample translations used for marketing books to foreign publishers, to stagnant picture book markets in English-speaking countries and a lack of interest from markets that are focused intently on books set in their own countries.
Currently, most of the children’s books translated from Japanese into other languages are sold to other countries in Asia—particularly Korea and Taiwan, and more recently, China. The International Library of Children’s Literature in Ueno, Tokyo, held an exhibit in 2010 Children’s Books Going Overseas from Japan and much exhibit information on translated Japanese children’s books appears on their website.
Because our children are bilingual, when they were young we read most Japanese picture books in Japanese, but we 
searched out English translations of Japanese picture books as gifts for relatives, friends or libraries in the U.S. Some of the Japanese picture books in translation that we loved to give are Singing Shijimi Clams by Naomi Kojima, The 14 Forest Mice books and others by Kazuo Iwamura, and books illustrated by Akiko Hayashi. Our all-time family favorite Japanese picture book was the widely read Suuho no shiroi uma, published in English as Suho’s White Horse, a Mongolian tale retold by Japanese author Yuzo Otsuka, illustrated by Suekichi Akaba, and translated by Peter Howlett—featured in this PaperTigers post.
R.I.C. Publications has a number of well-known Japanese picture books and some Ainu folktales in translation. Kane/Miller Book Publishers now focuses on books set in the U.S. but used to focus on translations of books from around the world; their catalog has a section on Books from Japan including the hugely successful Minna unchi by Taro Gomi, translated by Amanda Mayer Stinchecum and published in English as Everyone Poops. And recently Komako Sakai’s books have traveled overseas including Ronpaachan to fuusen published by Chronicle Books as Emily’s Balloon and Yuki ga yandara released as The Snow Day by Arthur A. Levine Books.
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By:
Aline Pereira,
on 3/25/2011
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It’s not too late to join this year’s Reading the World Challenge if you haven’t already – just take a look at this post for details.
In our family we have all joined together and read picture books set in Mongolia, which is our current focus on PaperTigers. I had to hunt around a bit but we came up with a good selection. I’m not going to go into a great deal of detail here as they are all gathered up in my Personal View, Taking a step into children’s books about Mongolia. We have really enjoyed delving into the culture and heritage of Mongolia and these picture books have been read all together and individually.
One bedtime Older Brother read Horse Song: the Naadam of Mongolia by Ted and Betsy Lewin (Lee and Low, 2008) to Little Brother – quite a long read and they were both engrossed. Watching them from the outside, as it were, I came to an added appreciation of the dynamics of Ted and Betsy’s collaboration, both in the energy of their shared enthusiasm and participation in the events surrounding the famous horse-race, and also of being struck by a busy, crowded scene one page and then giggling at the turn of expression on an individual study’s face the next.
And I’ll just share with you Little Brother’s reaction to Suho’s White Horse, which you can read about in a bit more detail in my Books at Bedtime post earlier this week:
It was a moving story. The governor made me angry because he broke his word and was cruel to Suho and his horse.
[Listening to the musical version played on the Mongolian horsehead fiddle, the morin khuur] Once you know the story, you can tell which part of the music is telling which part of the story. How do they make that music with just two strings? It fills me with awe.
I also read The Horse Boy: A Father’s Miraculous Journey to Heal His Son by Rupert Isaacson (Viking, 2009), an amazing story of a family’s journey to Mongolia in search of horses and shamans to seek healing for the torments that were gripping their five-year-old autistic son’s life: as Isaacson puts it with great dignity, his “emotional and physical incontinence”. If you have already read this humbling, inspiring book (and even if you haven’t), take a look at this recent interview three years on from their adventurous journey. Now I need to see the film!
And talking of films (which we don’t very often on PaperTigers, but I can’t resist mentioning this one), The Story of the Weeping Camel is a beautiful, gentle film that takes you right to the heart of Mongolian life on the steppe. Who would have thought a documentary film about a camel could be so like watching a fairy tale? Don’t be put off by the subtitles – our boys love this film. Take a look at the trailer –
By:
Aline Pereira,
on 3/23/2011
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Suho’s White Horse: A Mongolian Legend is the retelling of one of the legends that explains the origins of Mongolia’s national musical instrument, the morin khuur, or horse hair fiddle, which always has a carved horse’s head at the top of its pegbox.
Suho, a young Mongolian shepherd boy, rescues and rears a white foal. A few years later he is persuaded to enter a horse-race with the governor’s daughter’s hand in marriage as the prize. With his beautiful white horse, of course Suho wins the race – but when the governor finds out that Suho is a shepherd he not only goes back on his word, but has his soldiers beat Suho up and steals the horse.
Suho manages to get home and is nursed back to health. Meanwhile, the white horse escapes. Incensed, the governor orders his men to catch the white horse – and if they can’t catch it, to kill it. The white horse does manage to return to Suho but is so badly injured that it dies. Suho is heartbroken but the horse comes to him in a dream and tells him to use different parts of his body to create a musical instrument – and so the morin khuur is born.
This retelling of Suho’s White Horse by Yuzo Otsuka, and translated by Richard McNamara and Peter Howlett (RIC Publications, 2006) is great for reading aloud, with plenty of detail. Both Older Brother and Little Brother became emotionally involved in the story very quickly, reacting to the different stages with outrage, horror and sadness. Hans Christian Andersen Award winner (1980) Suekichi Akaba‘s illustrations are beautiful, conveying the vastness of the steppe as well as the story’s emotive narrative.
And a real bonus with this edition is the accompanying CD that contains a musical retelling of the legend played on the morin khuur itself by “the horse-head fiddle’s finest player” Li Bo (scroll down this page to read an interview with him). We were all captivated by the haunting music and the boys had quite a deep discussion of which bit of music referred to which bit of the story.
I’m excited to have found this recording of Suho’s White Horse on You Tube with Lai Haslo playing the morin khuur and Zhang Lin on the Chinese dulcimer. I hope you enjoy it as much as we have – listen out for the horse galloping.
Renowned throughout the world as the founding head of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Genghis Khan’s legacy as “the first children’s writer” is perhaps generally less well-known. But the strong oral tradition in Mongolia means that many of his stories are still told today, and some can now also be read in English, thanks to a fine anthology of Mongolian Folktales published recently.
According to the National Library of Mongolia, at one time Mongolia’s “most popular slogan was ‘Everything for children’” and in 2003 the library opened its Book Palace for Children in Ulaanbaatar, which does indeed seem to provide everything in the way of books a young visitor to the Library could possibly desire. Meanwhile, author and publisher Dashdondog Jamba has spent his whole life ensuring that children in Mongolia have access to stories and the written word, taking his mobile library out to the remotest areas of the country, first by camel and oxen, more recently by truck. You can read his account of one of his journeys here.
Many children’s stories from and about Mongolia reflect its place in world history. The cultural heritage of those times remains strongly evident today, especially when you look beyond the urban areas towards the vast grassland steppe that consitutes most of Mongolia’s geography. This means that picture books with a contemoporary setting and the retellings of traditional stories merge to offer insight into each other that is relevant to today’s young readers, wherever they come from.
The list of books given below is not long, and I’m sure there are others to be found: but in the meantime, all of these are enriching and worth seeking out.
Picture books
Bolormaa Baasansuren, adapted by Helen Mixter,
My Little Roundhouse
Groundwood Books, 2009.
A delightful picture book, which brings the nomadic life of a Mongolian community to life through the eyes of one-year-old Jilu, who shares his experiences of all the roundness in his life, from the ger that is his home to the encircling love that enfolds him. There’s plenty here for young children to contrast and compare with in their own lives. My Little Roundhouse was selected as part of the 2010 Spirit of PaperTigers book set.
Demi,
Marco Polo
Marshall Cavendish Children, 2008.
Marco Polo’s adventurous life is relayed through compact text and sumptuous illustrations bursting out of borders that reflect the rich patterns and brocades of the Silk Route. We read about his many years working under Kublai Khan and the sceptiscism of
