Jôji TANI, Chroniques d’un trimardeur japonais en Amérique

The collected short stories of Chroniques d’un trimardeur japonais en Amérique were written by Tani Joji (also known by the pen names Maki Itsuma and Hayashi Fubo). Known at the time as ‘Merican Jap Stories, most of these short stories were written in 1925, in the Shinseinen magazine.
Born on Sado Island, after spending his childhood at Hakodate, Tani Joji went to study abroad in the United States at Oberlin College in 1920. He ended up abandoning his studies immediately after his arrival, and then set off to the Midwest to travel across Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and New York. In 1924, he embarked on a freighter to return to Japan, and in January 1925, he published his first ‘Merican Jap Story in the Shinseinen magazine.
I was fascinated by how innovative the composition of his stories were and how unusual the themes would have been at the time they were released. And I say his stories were innovative because he pushed the Japanese language to its limits with his complex sentences, his jazz-like repetitions and improvisations, his stylistic mixture of Japanese and English, and his nonsensical humor. Moreover, his stories dealt with problems that were not very present in Japanese literature, such as Japanese immigration, racial discrimination, racial tension, and other identity problems that arose during the advent of popular culture in the United States during the 1920s. The readers can meet, through the eyes of the narrator, the icons of the Roaring 20s, like Rudolph Valentino, Charles Chaplin, Babe Ruth the baseball player, and not to mention the Ford Model Ts and the omnipresent advertisements.
Translating Tani Joji’s ‘Merican Jap Stories seemed utterly impossible at first. Several years ago, a teacher by the name of Emmanuel Lozerand had encouraged me to translate Tani Joji after he let me present his works to him, and I was moved by the idea, but I was also quite skeptical about it. I was not a professional translator, so I was worried that I did not have any right to translate his works. But even so, I was inspired to show a different side of Japanese literature, and so I overcame my initial hesitation and decided to confront the difficulties of this type of writing. How can I translate Tani Joji’s peculiar prose into French? How can I bring over the complex mixture of Japanese and English into French? How can I make sure the 21st century readers don’t get confused by all the dizzying references to American popular culture in the 1920s? I was stuck with these kinds of problems from when I started my translation until I was finished with it.
Translating these short stories of America's lively prohibition era not only turned out to be a literary challenge in its own right, but also an archaeological bibliography of the American culture of that time period.