English for Mishima is the logical choice. It still annoy me the other western translations have been done after the English ones a Mishima's insistance (Japanese rendered in English is a bit flat, and some Japanese I know quite agree. French is better suited to render the more poetic/evocative turn of phrases of Japanese, though structurally/rythmically it's as far from Japanese as English is). He used to have a point that westerners were lacked experience at translating Japanese accurately (and English was the only language he knew enough to revise and approved a translation that he then labelled had the same value as the Japanese original), but that's no longer quite true. Mind you, Mishima is a rather dry writer, so that probably wouldn't change much. But for modern "stylists", I much prefer to read them in French translation.

There's also a very strong pool of translators of Japanese in France. Far more japanese writers are translated in French than in English, for one, and even in popular mediums there are many specialists, often people of Japanese descent (the language in which the most manga titles are available in the West is French, for example. The popularity of manga in the west started there, and even today France is the country - by a fair margin at that - where the most mangas are sold after Japan itself. Japanese friends were impressed by the quality of the translation.).



Well... though I doubt this plays a big role, the field of Dutch-Japanese /Japanese-Dutch translation is by a long shot the longest established. For very long, all western texts entered Japan through the works of Dutch scholars (incl. all the works of the German and French philosophers), and all Japanese texts entered Europe through a Dutch translation on which the others were then based (and it's not that long ago, it's only in the first decades of the 20th century that changed). Perhaps this is still reflected in a demand by the Dutch for Japanese writers, I guess.

Do you have so many unilingual bookstores still in Québec? You'd expect most to have both French and English books anyway, albeit with a marked preference for one or the other.

Most of them are unilingual to an extent. Most of the English bookstores in Montréal have a much, much smaller French section that can't compare to the French bookstores's offering (but for best-sellers and such, you get their better prices as they're much bigger chains and all). Most French bookstores barely offer book in English - occasionally you'll get some very popular titles (in genre literature for instance), or titles from popular writers for which the translation takes too long to come (eg: a new WOT book will get stocked for a while, until the French translation is available), or on occasion they'll stock the English original when the French version is released (they do this for a lot of American best-sellers, as Québécois being North-Americans they're very picky about the way American realities get translated. It's frequent to see reviewers trash the translation done in France, and recommend that people pick the original... whenever they do, the original show up in French bookstores!) With exceptions (in areas with some English communities), most bookstores outside Montréal don't stock any English books.

Mind you, the English bookstores are having a hard time, like everywhere else. Amazon has screwed that market big time. Someone in the administration of a big Canadian chain was telling me that maybe 3 years from now, they foresee that books will get only 20% of their store space (it's 65% now). It's almost over.

The French bookstore chains are not having their best years, but they have the advantage that they had a few more years to adjust to the new realities, launch their websites to compete with the Americans (when Amazon.ca finally started selling French books, the customers were already used to the local chains's sites). Of course, the really big booksellers, like FNAC or Amazon.fr, aren't solid competitors the way Amazon US or CA is to Canadian English bookstores because of oversea shipping and the fact they sell in Euros.

Makes sense, yes.



Nope, their motive (as explained in the article I read about the FU) was that IQ84 has been massively popular in Japan (it's a phenomenon) and got immense mediatic attention even outside Japan as a result, and they wanted to take advantage of that to make a break-through in sales and enlarge his readership (and he has already a very solid fanbase in the US). So they wanted to release a translation earlier than usual, but it didn't work. It's still coming out fast compared to the usual timeline for US translations. They're very often the last (or so) to get the big foreign titles. Monaldi and Sorti, Zaffon, even the Millenium trilogy to name a few of the huge best-sellers of the last years - they got all those almost 2 years after they've been huge phenomenons in most other countries. Part of that is perhaps due to the fact a book must really be quite a phenomenon to grab the attention of the American public and media before it comes out in the US, so the American publishers don't benefit much from that early publicity and anticipation for a foreign title. It's different in most other countries. When a book becomes popular in a country abroad (that includes US best-sellers too), we often read about that fairly early, before the translation is out, and anticipation builds up for it. Books like the Zaffon, Millenium (or Suskind, many years ago) etc. were already much awaited when they came out in France, because of what happened in Spain, Sweden, Germany etc. Murakami's IQ84 was a bit of a special case, mostly due to his very avid American readers the article was explaining - avid enough to keep a watch on the foreign media for news about the new book.