An I-Novel

Minae Mizumura

Published by Columbia University Press 2021

An I-Novel

Minae Mizumura
Translated by: Juliet Winters Carpenter

https://doi.org/10.7312/mizu19212

Overview
Contents

About this book

Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. This formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition and offers a luminous meditation on how a person becomes a writer.

Author / Editor information

Mizumura Minae :

Minae Mizumura was born in Tokyo, moved to New York at the age of twelve, and studied French literature at Yale University. Acclaimed for her audacious experimentation and skillful storytelling, Mizumura has won major literary awards for all of her novels. Her English translations include A True Novel (Other Press, 2013), The Fall of Language in the Age of English (Columbia, 2014), and Inheritance from Mother (Other Press, 2017). She lives in Tokyo.Carpenter Juliet Winters :

Juliet Winters Carpenter studied Japanese literature at the University of Michigan and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. In 1980, Carpenter's translation of Abe Kobo's novel Secret Rendezvous (Mikkai) won the Japan–United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. She is the translator of all of Mizumura's English-language translations.Minae Mizumura is one of Japan’s most respected novelists, acclaimed for her audacious experimentation and skillful storytelling. Three of her books, all of which won major literary awards in Japan, have been translated into English, all by Juliet Winters Carpenter: A True Novel (2013), The Fall of Language in the Age of English (Columbia, 2014; cotranslated with Mari Yoshihara), and Inheritance from Mother (2017).

Juliet Winters Carpenter is a prolific translator of Japanese literature. She received the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 1980 for Abe Kobo’s Secret Rendezvous and in 2014 for Mizumura’s A True Novel.

Reviews

Ann Bauer, Washington Post:
Mizumura's writing is urgent yet thorough...her prose is controlled and dense as poetry.

Adam Kirsch, New York Review of Books:
[R]eaders...will find in Mizumura a fascinating example of how a writer can be at the same time imaginatively cosmopolitan and linguistically rooted.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
An I-NOVEL part 1 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
An I-NOVEL part 2 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
Note on Names Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	329
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	331

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 23 b&w photographs

eBook

Published: February 25, 2021
ISBN: 9780231549660