Page:Eminent Authors of Contemporary Japan.pdf/7



The plays and short stories which appear in these two volumes are all translations from the well-known playwrights and authors of contemporary Japan. I commenced this work several years ago, and it comprises all I have translated since January 1925 till now. Many of these stories and all the plays have already been published in either “The Japan Times” of Tokyo, or “The Osaka Mainichi.” It is with their kind courtesy and permission that I am able to reprint them in book form.

My most grateful thanks are especially due to the authors who so graciously gave me their consent to translate their plays and stories into English.

My aim in doing these translations has been to enable English readers in Japan to have the opportunity of reading the works of some of Japan’s best-known writers, for up till the present time I think none of these have been translated into the English language.

It is almost impossible that any translation can equal, much less excel the original; so to derive any true benefit or thorough enjoyment from any work of this kind is by getting into direct touch with the original text written in the original form and language. I have therefore decided to include the Japanese texts which may add to the interest of the Japanese reader.

The task of a translator becomes doubly hazardous when he is translating the Japanese language into English, because the very inspiration of the two languages is so widely different. The habits, traditions, and even the thoughts of the Japanese people are extremely different from those of Europeans, and there is very little kinship in the grammatical constructions of the English and Japanese languages. This makes the work of the translator all the more difficult.