Parasite Eve and The Perils of Translation: Part 4

Parasite Eve

Hideaki Sena

translated by Tyran Grillo

Like all good Japanese horror, Parasite Eve makes you forget you are reading a horror novel until the horror really starts. The first half of Parasite Eve, however, is no walk in the park. Dr. Nagashima is a genetic researcher whose work is interrupted by a terrifying phone call. His wife has been in a car accident. The hardest decisions a husband would ever have to make follow in this detailed opening that feels like it unfolds in real time. The story is spattered with flashbacks of Nagashima's wife Kiyomi as well as her potential kidney recipient, a 14-year-old named Mariko. The flashbacks sometimes seem innocuous, but as the the hints of what horror is to come begin to take shape the episodes begin to carry more impact.

Also like good Japanese horror, this is no chainsaw and hockey mask scare-fest. Parasite Eve follows in the footsteps of Dark Water and Uzumaki by making an everyday something truly frightening. It would ruin the fun to say too much more, but first time author Dr. Hideaki Sena nails both the setup as well as the squishy delivery.

Sena was a grad student when Parasite Eve was first published in Japan, and was received with both critical and public praise. There are a lot of medical and scientific terminology used, and extensive notes are included. Despite having no real science background outside of a few 100-level courses in college, I didn't find the need to refer to the notes, and the writing is clear enough to keep things from getting bogged down. I have no envy for translator Tyran Grillo. The technical phrases and scientific explanations that dot the story must have made plenty of headaches for him, but thankfully they are not passed on to the reader.

There is another translation point I noticed, something probably only a reader of Japanese would pick up on, and likely led to a conversation between the translator and editor. Without spoiling anything, one character is referred to as "She" instead of "she" and "Her" instead of "her". Japanese doesn't have capitalization, so the style choice to use it in English is an interesting one. In English this kind of usage is usually only seen in religious texts in reference to the Christian God. The character certainly has a high opinion of herself, and the distinction works here. I am not sure what the original text looked like, but it reminded me of another struggle in translation I had to tackle when translating both The Dirty Pair novels and Blood+ novelizations.

As I have mentioned in the past, savvy Japanese writers can use the language to hide information until needed. It's easy to not reveal a character's gender or a monster's "humanness" (I'll explain below) in Japanese, but that becomes a tricky area for the translator when bringing that same level of reveal in English.

There is a scene in The Dirty Strike Again when our heroes, Kei and Yuri, are flying in ships and are being pursued by "shadows". In Japanese the term 影 or kage, can be used in sentence after sentence showing that the true identity in this aerial battle is not clear. This ambiguity is fine in Japanese, but doesn't really work in English. This is an extensive fight scene, with the shadow's identity only revealed at the end. I was unable to decide on my own whether to use "it" or "he" in sentences where I didn't want to use "shadow" over and over, and after a discussion with the editor, we decided to use "it" until the identity was revealed.

A similar issue came up in the Blood+ novelizations. In the story we have an ages-long battle between humans and bloodthirsty Chiropterans. Some of the Chiropterans, like Saya, Diva and the Chevaliers are very human in their form, where others are large, monstrous-looking creatures. Identifying human-looking Chiropterans as "he" and "she" while identifying genderless monsters as "it" was obvious enough, but what about when the Chiropterans change from human-looking to monster forms? When we know the specific identity of the monster I maintained the gender-specific "he" and "she", but there were times when the monster's identity wasn't clear initially, but was revealed later. Like in the Dirty Pair situation, we decided to use "it" until the actual identity was shown, and then the appropriate "he" or "she" was used.

It isn't rocket science, and in the end my fear of switching from "it" to "he" or "she" wasn't as obvious as I thought it might be. However I still feel a curious guilt about another aspect. The Chiropterans of Blood+ are almost all former humans and none of them make the conversion out of free will. I did feel bad about referring to former humans as "it" as it very purposely and obviously took away their humanity. I know they are fictional characters in a fictional world, but at the same time it is hard for a translator not to feel a connection with the characters in the story he or she is translating. One unexpected peril of translation is that the translator can become emotionally attached to a story and to characters in unpredictable ways.