An I-Novel

Winner, 2019-2020 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation   

Winner, 2021-2022 Lindsley & Masao Miyoshi Translation Prize, Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture

Minae Mizumura's An I-Novel is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of 1 day in the 1980s. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the U.S. for 2 decades but turned her back on the English language & American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the 20th anniversary of their family's arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude & over the phone with her sister about their life in the U.S., trying to break the news that she has decided to go back to Japan & become a writer in her mother tongue.   

Published in 1995, this formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. It liberally incorporated English words & phrases, & the entire text was printed horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically & from right to left. In a luminous meditation on how a person becomes a writer, Mizumura transforms the “I-novel,” a Japanese confessional genre that toys with fictionalization. An I-Novel tells the story of 2 sisters while taking up urgent questions of identity, race, & language. Above all, it considers what it means to write in the era of the hegemony of English—& what it means to be a writer of Japanese in particular. Juliet Winters Carpenter masterfully renders a novel that once appeared untranslatable into English.   

Minae Mizumura is 1 of Japan’s most respected novelists, acclaimed for her audacious experimentation & skillful storytelling. 3 of her books, which won major literary awards in Japan, have been translated into English by J. Winters Carpenter    

Juliet Winters Carpenter is a prolific translator of Japanese literature.