“I am honored to have ushered Mario Bellatin\u2019s biography of the great Shiki Nagaoka, a writer and artist almost entirely unknown to English-language readers, into English for the first time, and it is my hope that this new translation begins to redress his under-acknowledgement as a major influence on contemporary world literature. Bellatin\u2019s highly stylized study is the most important work on the author to appear since Pablo Soler Frost\u2019s 1986 monograph, Possible Interpretation of [untranslatable symbol], notable for its pedantry, perhaps best evidenced by the average (mean) tally of semicolons per page: 47.”<\/p>\n
This is how translator David Shook begins his preface to Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction<\/em>. However, Nagaoka never existed; Shook is just going along with a joke which, according to a New York Times<\/em> article, originated at a writer\u2019s conference years ago. When asked about his favorite writer, Bellatin answered that it was a Japanese author who had an unusually large nose and wrote a highly-influential novel in an untranslatable language. The audience members believed the Mexican writer, so Bellatin decided to write this \u201cbiography.\u201d <\/p>\n Nagaoka\u2019s story begins with his birth, which was difficult because of his nose. The two midwives who assisted his mother thought his large appendage was a \u201cpunishment\u201d for his aristocratic family\u2019s \u201cexcessive enthusiasm that accompanied the arrival of foreign ideas.\u201d At an early age, he wrote hundreds of stories (mostly about \u201caffairs related to the nose\u201d) and later experimented with writing stories in multiple languages. Besides literature, Nagaoka was also interested in photography. His combined love of literature and photography later resulted in the book Photos and Words<\/em>, which \u201cheavily influenced\u201d Juan Rulfo, the real-life writer of Pedro P\u00e1ramo<\/em>. However, his early investigations into photography resulted in an unsolved murder which, according to a \u201ccertain Mexican writer,\u201d is mentioned in the untranslatable novel. <\/p>\n Following that incident, Nagaoka joined a Buddhist monastery and lived there for 13 years. During this time, he attempted to write \u201ca large novel\u201d that was originally going to be a \u201cmasculine version\u201d of Murasaki Shikibu\u2019s The Tale of Genji<\/em> but somehow ended up being a Japanese version of Marcel Proust\u2019s In Search of Lost Time<\/em>. At the same time, his nose became so big at one point that he needed someone to hold it up for him during meals. As if his troubles during mealtimes were not bad enough, the other monks, despite the rules of the novitiate, would taunt Nagaoka and play with his nose.<\/p>\n After being expelled from the monastery, Nagaoka set up a kiosk to sell rolls of film and develop them. One of his customers was a famous Japanese writer. Oddly enough, Nagaoka was not interested in this writer\u2019s works but rather in his photographs of bathrooms. These photographs inspired Nagaoka to compose \u201chis most solid work,\u201d Photos and Words<\/em>, which was popular enough to be translated into English by LIFE<\/span><\/em> magazine in the 1950s.<\/p>\n Still, despite the book\u2019s popularity, Nagaoka lived in a modest house and didn\u2019t take his writing career seriously, although he continued to write in notebooks, one of which had a giant nose on the cover. \u201cAt the end of his life,\u201d the narrator writes, \u201che embraced the idea that, realistically, the size of his nose had determined his existence.\u201d Some of these recorded memories appeared in a posthumous work called Posthumous Diary<\/em>, which inspired a French cult-like group called the \u201cNagaokites\u201d to further investigate his work. However, \u201cin his final years, Shiki Nagaoka wrote a book that for many is fundamental. Unfortunately, it doesn\u2019t exist in any known language.\u201d<\/p>\n Bellatin is obviously having a lot of fun telling this story, and he never tries to hide the fact that it\u2019s a prank. He also slyly pokes fun at the audience members who originally bought the story about Nagaoka. In one scene, while in a state of dementia, Nagaoka throws his manuscripts into a bonfire, which nearly destroyed a forest near the monastery. \u201cOnly the timely action of the rest of the monks, who were woken by Shiki Nagaoka\u2019s anguished screams, reduced its consequences to a circle of singed forest. On that occasion, Shiki Nagaoka lied. He said that the fire originated from the passion he had put into his prayers.\u201d Later, the narrator informs us that at the time, the monks didn\u2019t question this.<\/p>\n Following the biographical portion of the book are 30 pages of photographs by Ximena Berecochea. While these photos appear in a section titled \u201cPhotograph Documentation of Shiki Nagaoka\u2019s Life,\u201d most of them consist of objects and locations mentioned in the book. Only three of them contain the author, but they were either manipulated to hide his nose or taken from a distance. In fact, the funniest photo is Nagaoka\u2019s fifth grade graduation photo: Only a circle on the faded right side of the photo indicates Nagaoka\u2019s appearance in it. <\/p>\n While it may appear that Shiki Nagaoka<\/em> is a joke that has gone on for far too long, it is actually worth reading, thanks to Bellatin\u2019s skill as a writer and prankster. Also, the actual text is only 43 pages, so that in one sitting you can also enjoy what the audience of the writer\u2019s conference heard (and believed) so many years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “I am honored to have ushered Mario Bellatin\u2019s biography of the great Shiki Nagaoka, a writer and artist almost entirely unknown to English-language readers, into English for the first time, and it is my hope that this new translation begins to redress his under-acknowledgement as a major influence on contemporary world literature. Bellatin\u2019s highly stylized […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[54156,39996,26906,56176,56166,56156,6516],"class_list":["post-297966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-christopher-iacono","tag-david-shook","tag-mario-bellatin","tag-phoneme-books","tag-phoneme-media","tag-shiki-nagaoka-a-nose-for-fiction","tag-spanish-literature"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":337956,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297966\/revisions\/337956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}