An Interview with Takami Nieda on Translating Yusuke Norishiro

In Xiao Yue Shan’s conversation with Takami Nieda, translator of Yusuke Norishiro’s Traveling Practice, the focus falls on the novel’s subtle language, silences, memory, and attention to place. The book follows an author and his young niece on a six-day journey along the Tone River, using walking, writing, and close observation to explore how experience becomes memory. Nieda explains that her translation aimed to preserve the novel’s leisurely pace, the space around its sentences, and the emotional force of what remains unsaid. She connects Norishiro’s approach to the Japanese aesthetic of shasei, or sketching from life, and to literary figures such as Masaoka Shiki, Naoya Shiga, and Kunio Yanagita. One of the challenges was balancing the novel’s different voices while keeping its emotional relationships understated and ensuring that hints of the tragic ending did not become too obvious in English. Nieda also describes the book as a meditation on human connection during the early days of the pandemic, when isolation could make people more attentive to the small acts of closeness and companionship around them.