During the Tokugawa period, Chinese fiction was often in vogue and led to the publication of many Japanese adaptive translations of Chinese novels. This penchant for reading literature in translation continued into the Meiji period, and Western works of fiction soon found their way into Japanese incarnations. Initially, these were done as adaptations, but as language facility improved among Japanese, more and more stories from the Western canon, including Victorian novels, poetry by Goethe and Heinrich Heine, and Shakespearean theater, made their way into Japanese. Some of the revolutionary changes in literary style, such as the emergence of the de aru copula ending in written Japanese, stem from grammatical challenges faced by early translators of Western prose (see GENBUN ITCHI).
Throughout the 20th century, translations of nearly every major Western novel were completed, often within months of the original’s publication, and Japan became, in literary terms, one of the most translating nations in the world. Some of Japan’s early writers, such as Futabatei Shimei and Mori Ogai, began their publishing careers as translators, and that trend continues today with Murakami Haruki beginning his career as a translator of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, John Irving, and Paul Theroux. Murakami’s own style is considered a dialect of Japanese that imitates the style of a translation from English.
See also ABE TOMOJI; FUKUZAWA YUKICHI; FURUI YOSHIKICHI; HIROTSU KAZUO; HORI TATSUO; HORIGUICHI DAIGAKU; KINOSHITA JUNJI; KISHIDA KUNIO; KOJIMA NOBUO; MARUYA SAIICHI; MORIMOTO KAORU; NAGASAKI; NAKAE CHOMIN; SHIBUSAWA TATSUHIKO; SHIZUOKA INTERNATIONAL TRANSLATION COMPETITION; TAWARA MACHI; TSUJI KUNIO; UEDA BIN; WATANABE KAZUO.
Historical dictionary of modern Japanese literature and theater. J. Scott Miller. 2009.