The White Hippo

This novel was written a long time before ‘Lost in Translation’ although it is a story of a translation, or rather a mistranslation, of a Japanese novel into English. It is set in the early, heady years of the great Japanese ‘bubble.’ The hero is Gareth Williams, a rambunctious, outrageous, boozing, philandering Welsh poet who lives and teaches in Tokyo and who moonlights by making racy translations of foreign porn into Japanese, sold and distributed by the yakuza.

His best friend is a struggling Japanese writer, who, despairing after his great magnum opus is again rejected by publishers, threatens suicide, which, after all, is what many famous Japanese writers do. Gareth suggests that his friend could achieve instant fame by publishing abroad, and while deeply in his cups, promises to translate the work. The trouble is that although Gareth speaks Japanese he cannot read the language. A succession of girl friends dictate this long and very boring novel onto tapes which Gareth rewrites in highly imaginative Celtic English. The result is a gloriously ribald mistranslation that becomes a runaway best seller in New York. Meanwhile Gareth has fallen in love with a girl who turns out to be the daughter of a yakuza boss, and has escaped to his native Wales to evade the father’s wrath, and to save his pinkies and other nether parts. He has taken the original Japanese manuscript with him. Now, Japanese publishers are eager to publish the original, and mistakes, misadventures and hilarity ensues.

C.W.Nicol is a Welsh born Japanese citizen who writes novels and children’s stories in both Japanese and English. In total he has over a hundred and twenty books published in Japan, with over a dozen in published in English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Chinese and Mongolian. He lives in the Japan Alps.