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Several novels by Morimi Tomihiko (1979-) have been translated into other languages. However, readers of the original Japanese must wonder how such texts, heavy as they are in cultural associations, can be translated without losing the key elements that characterise the author’s works.   

Morimi is a prize-winning author of both essays and novels, many of which feature Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan. His contemporary stories feature preposterous characters and settings that are rich in cultural reference. As well as realia, which represents both material culture and specific concepts (e.g., Mayoral 1999), and intertextuality, there is a wealth of cultural associations apparent from expressions, vocabulary, orthography, and classical verb and adjective conjugation. By carefully selecting these cultural elements, the author constructs a literary style that is reminiscent of modern Japanese literature from Taisho (1912-1926) and early Showa (1926-1989). His style also effectively creates a universe that exudes traditional Japanese aesthetic associations expressed by both cultural objects (e.g., food, art, music, decorative objects) and legendary beings (e.g., gods, monsters). Morimi’s abundant humour twists these associations: for example, he uses classical orthography and ancient vocabulary to describe trivial incidents, and he places traditional Japanese ornaments in unexpected settings. This serves to presuppose the diversity of Japanese cultural knowledge on the part of the reader.

The present study analyses both Morimi’s novel The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl (2006), and its English translation. Comical and fantastical, it has two narrators: a male university student in Kyoto and his object of love kurokami no otome (“dark-haired maiden”), who recount various episodes to the readers while making full use of the cultural elements described above. It has been adapted into an animation film in 2017, which won an international award and possibly led to the translation of the novel. Its English translation was published in 2019 (translator: Emily Balistrieri) without any translator’s notes, which suggests use of other translation techniques for cultural elements. The study identifies the different types of cultural elements present in the source text while considering their literary effects and analyses how – and how often – they are translated into English.