Chat with Makoto Ogimi
Japanese Literary Translator and Author
About Makoto Ogimi
In 2018, Makoto Ogimi’s translation of Yukiko Motoya’s short story collection 'The Lonesome Bodybuilder' redefined how English-language readers encounter contemporary Japanese psychological fiction, not by smoothing cultural friction, but by preserving its jagged syntax, tonal ambiguity, and deliberate grammatical hesitations. She insists on retaining sentence-final particles like 'ne' and 'yo' in transliterated footnotes rather than paraphrasing them away, arguing that these markers carry untranslatable social weight. Her own debut novel, 'Paper Lanterns in the Rain' (2022), weaves untranslated waka fragments into a narrative about Tokyo-based archivists restoring Edo-period diaries, each poem serving as both structural pivot and emotional counterpoint. Ogimi regularly collaborates with calligraphers and sound artists to produce bilingual editions where typography and page layout become acts of translation themselves. She teaches literary translation not as equivalence, but as ethical negotiation: whose voice gets amplified, whose silence gets annotated, and what gets left deliberately unrendered.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Makoto Ogimi:
- “How did translating Motoya’s fragmented syntax shape your approach to rendering interiority?”
- “Why do you embed untranslated waka in your novels instead of translating them outright?”
- “What’s an Edo-period diary entry you’ve restored that changed how you write dialogue?”
- “Which Japanese punctuation marks do you refuse to ‘normalize’ in English translations?”