Public Service Announcement: Anthony H. Chambers's translation of Arrowroot

It has come to my attention that Anthony H. Chambers's translation of Arrowroot, by the great Japanese author (and beloved of my literary heart) Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, falls prey to the common modern Western temptation of downplaying supernatural elements in Japanese literature due to cultural unfamiliarity with how it works. While I can understand the desire to make the work more 'accessible' (whatever that's supposed to mean nowadays) to readers in countries where it isn't generally assumed that foxes can take human form and have genetically normal human children (which unless I'm gravely mistaken is currently pretty much every country other than Japan), I feel that IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE JAPANESE FOLKLORE, YOU SHOULD NOT BE IN THE BUSINESS OF TRANSLATING JAPANESE LITERATURE OR TEACHING IT TO IMPRESSIONABLE YOUTH. Even at a school like Arizona State, which is apparently where Chambers teaches.

YOU DID ARROWROOT
WITHOUT
THE MAGIC FOXES.


All right. I'll go through this once again, slowly. In Arrowroot the main character is a guy called Tsumura. As with several works by Tanizaki, there's also an unnamed and slightly less sympathetic first-person narrator who serves in a secondary role (something that Murakami copied with the utterly unsympathetic narrator of Sputnik Sweetheart). Over the course of the novella, Narrator-san puzzles together that Tsumura's family is under the protection of magical foxes, his mother was almost certainly a fox, and his fiancee may very well be a fox as well. These aren't 'foxes' in the Jazz-Age sense of 'sexy women', although the story was written in the late twenties. These are literal foxes, of the subspecies Vulpes vulpes japonica. Foxes can shape-shift in Japanese legend, what of it? Nobody complained when they did the same thing with seals in The Secret of Roan Inish.

It's not as if the foxes are unimportant to understanding the story. They're absolutely crucial to it and to be honest reading the story without them I didn't really follow it until I did some research. Because in the original the mother is explicitly a fox and the fiancee is implied to be one, but Chambers played with the translation until the mother was only implied and the fiancee not even that.

Not cool. That is totally not radical, man. Posi-lute-ly 4F shoddy job of it, my most heinous chap. For God's sake, Dr Chambers, your translation of The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi in the same volume as your translation of Arrowroot was faithful to even the bad parts of Tanizaki's style! You left in the sentence 'The bacterium of the disease that causes one's nose to fall off had been introduced to Japan at about this time'. You left in the Krafft-Ebing textbook sadomasochism.

WHY COULD YOU NOT LEAVE IN THE MAGIC FOXES????

I repeat:

THEY TRANSLATED ARROWROOT IN A WAY THAT DIMINISHED THE ROLE OF THE MAGIC FOXES.

Seriously. Screw that, Dr Chambers.