On Royalties and Bath Plugs

   One of the reasons why I married my wife were the silly conversations we would have, like the following:

   Riko D: How much money do you think you'll make once you sell your book?

   Aonghas Crowe: How much does a book cost? One or two thousand yen? And royalties? Haven't got a clue, but they can't be high. Do you know?

   RD: No.

   AoCr: Well, let's say I'll get ten percent.

   RD: Ten percent, huh?

   AoCr: Yeah, so ten percent of fifteen hundred's a hundred and fifty yen a book. That's not a lot of money, but it adds up. So, if I were to sell two books, one for me and another for you, I'd make three hundred yen. Of course, if I were to write a second book, it might sell as many as ten copies . . .

   RD: Honey, be serious.

   AoCr: I can't. Especially when you ask me silly questions like that. Anyways, like I said, I don't know. I don't want to know.

   RD: Why not?

   AoCr: Because if I thought about how much money a book would make me, I wouldn't get anything done. I'd have all these dollar bills dancing around in my head, having a wild party and kicking up a helluva racket. “Keep it down, you guys!” I'd say, but you think they'd listen to a wet blanket like me?

   RD: If I were a writer, I'd know how much I’d get in royalties.

   AoCr: Oh, I'm sure you would know. What I want you to understand is that I'm not writing for money. That's never been the point. If I were writing for money, I . . .

   RD: I know, honey. But, but, but you must understand that I worry about the future and whether you'd be able to support me and our children. I worry that we wouldn't have enough money to buy proper clothes for them if the book you wrote didn't sell.

   AoCr: I don't know what's to worry about it. If it got too expensive to keep the three kids, we could always send one of them away. Take a hike, kid! Not enough food to go around for all of us. Oh, he might be sad and cry out to his mother, but that's life. Besides, think about how obedient the remaining too kids would be. They'd know that if Daddy's next book didn't sell well, why they might be the one who gets the boot next. “Mummy, Daddy, can I do anything for you today? Clean? Cook? Do the shopping?” They'd be petrified with fear every time they made the slightest mistake . . .

   RD: Can I tell you what my dream is?

   AoCr: Shoot.

   RD: I want to marry someone like Murakami Haruki. (She goes on to explain why she likes his writing, his lifestyle and success.)

   AoCr: I enjoy reading his stories, too. But, Murakami has never once made me look up from the page and think, Wow! Not like, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.[1] Granted I've only read a few things by Murakami, most of them in English, so . . . 

   RD: Oh, he's very good at describing things and using metaphors. I read an interview of him once where he said that he considered himself a pretty useless person. He wasn't like the plug in someone's bathtub, he said. The plug's quite small and simple, but it does its job well, keeping the water from flowing away. I really liked that image.

   AoCr: I've always thought of bath plugs in terms of oppression: chained his entire life to the side of a bathtub, shut up in darkness most of the day, only to traumatized every evening when he's forced into a hole and made to bear the back-breaking weight of so many gallons and gallons of water. You think the plug wants to do it? You think he feels he's being useful? I doubt it. When he was just a kid, still the sap of a rubber tree, he probably had grand dreams of becoming the tire of a bicycle tooling about the countryside . . .

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[1] Check out my Gabo tweets. Ninety thousand followers and counting!

If you are interested in knowing more about how authors are paid (or not paid), check out this site. Hope you like peanuts.

Vonnegut, translated

   A friend recently posted an interview of Kurt Vonnegut on Facebook.

   Vonnegut is one of my . . . no on second thought, he is my favorite author. Gabriel García Máquez is a close second but for very different reasons.[1] I am also a fan of Phillip Roth, David Sedaris, Joseph Heller, Frank McCourt, and others. Haruki Murakami used to be up in the top five, but since his agency told me, in not so uncertain terms, to take my translations of his essays off of my website immediately, the Japanese author has dropped in my esteem to about tenth place.

   Watching the video of Vonnegut got me to wonder how many of his books I had lying around the house. So, I climbed out of my futon, cleared the dining room floor and started laying the books out. The above photo is the result. Twenty-five books. There are still some that are missing from my collection—a conversation about writing between Vonnegut and Lee Stringer, called Like Shaking Hands with God (Read it!) must be in the closet somewhere.

   Vonnegut often said that he was one of the few living authors lucky enough to have his entire body of work still in print. He also argued that the success of his or any author’s works translated into another language depended to such a large extent upon the talent of the translator that the translators themselves should receive a greater share of the royalties. As examples of good translators, he offered two women—his Italian and Russian translators—noting that his books had been well received in those two countries. In Germany, too. In France, however, his books never managed to do very well.

   I would say that Vonnegut could also add his Japanese translator to that list of good-for-nothings.

   While it is not hard to find one of Vonnegut’s translations in major bookstores here—there’s a whole shelf dedicated to him at the local Village Vanguard—you won’t come across many people who have heard of, let alone read anything by, the author. Those who have read him seem to have only done so because they had to, simply because Murakami is such a fan (and dare I even say plagiarizer) of Vonnegut and, of course, whatever Murakami-sama[2] says, his loyal Japanese fans dutifully obey.[3]

   Oh, but what dreadful translations they are!

   Many years ago when I was first dating my wife, I bought her several of Vonnegut’s novels translated into Japanese. I had been reading Timequake[4] at the time and, every time I came across a particularly funny scene, I would translate it into Japanese which would invariably cause her to laugh, sometimes so hard she cried. When she actually got round to reading the Japanese translations, however, she was disappointed.

   Incredulous, I took a look for myself and, reading the Japanese version of some of the choicer sections of Timequake, I could see what the problem was: the translator had succeeded so thoroughly in taking all the fun out of the book that it had become a dry shell of the original. It was as if he were adding warm tap water to champagne and, were I Vonnegut, I would have sued the translator for criminal malpractice.

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[1] Follow my Gabo tweets! Over 60,000 followers and counting!

[2] Sama (様) is a title of respect added to the end of names. San often denotes some familiarity with the person.

[3] Were Murakami to publish his used toilet paper, it would surely sell 300,000 copies overnight.

[4] Still one of my very favorites. Highly recommended if you have also read Breakfast of Champions.

Iizuka

   In a day or two I'll get around to uploading some photos of Iizuka, Japan, a former coal-mining town in the center of Fukuoka prefecture. 

   The low con-shaped mountain on the left of this picture is a slag heap. The locals call it the Mt. Fuji of Iizuka (I think they're all delusional). Incidentally, if you look up "slag heap" on Wikipedia then go to the Japanese page, you'll find some pictures of Iizuka's famed slag heap.

   I walked around this old pile of rock and dirt the other day and was surprised to discover how large it was--nearly as big around the base as the Great Pyramid of Giza (approx. 1600 m). There's wasn't much to see from up close, unfortunately.
   As I made my way around the mountain, I couldn't help but wonder what remained below ground if all that rock and dirt, plus coal had been dug up. How long will it be before the earth collapses in on itself and swallows up Iizuka like the town of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.