Part of
New Insights in the History of InterpretingEdited by Kayoko Takeda and Jesús Baigorri-Jalón
[Benjamins Translation Library 122] 2016
► pp. 75–98
Edited by Kayoko Takeda and Jesús Baigorri-Jalón
[Benjamins Translation Library 122] 2016
► pp. 75–98
Nagasaki Tsūji in historical novels by Yoshimura Akira
An alternative way of studying the history of interpreters
This chapter attempts to illustrate the significance of studying the history of interpreting through novels, focusing on Yoshimura Akira who portrayed pre-modern interpreters within socio-political contexts of the time. Four of Yoshimura’s novels will be analyzed: (1) Fuyu no Taka (1974), describing the translation of a medical book in Dutch into Japanese; (2) Von Siebold no Musume (1978), offering an insight into the role of interpreters; (3) Umi no Sairei (1989) illustrating how Ranald MacDonald taught English in Japan; and (4) Kurofune (1978), depicting interpreters at the time when American battleships came. Yoshimura’s works testify the potential of historical novels as an alternative way of studying past interpreters to help us understand how they lived and how they worked.
Keywords: historical novel, history and fiction, Nagasaki Tsuji, Oranda Tsuji
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Tanaka, Miyuki
2023. Oranda-tsūji (Japanese‒Dutch Interpreters) in the Eighteenth Century: The Case of Yoshio Kōzaemon. In Tsūji, Interpreters in and Around Early Modern Japan [Translation History, ], ► pp. 27 ff. 
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