I spent all week writing like a fiend and kept myself going with the promise of this reward:  that I would get to go to a book launch.  Normally, I hate things like that; I used to run the writing series at Grinnell College, so I know about that world inside out—all the hard work that goes into it, the schmoozing, the aggravation of things falling apart, the endless back-and-forth of making it happen.  You can lose your life in the Chinese water torture of e-mails.  God, it made me lose my taste for stuff like that.

It’s kind of like when I worked at one of those fancy department stores for the Christmas season:  afterwards I could never look upon retail with the same feelings.  All I could hear was muzak on a loop, the sharp eye of the angry customer, the arguments with patrons whose cards were declined.  To this day, I despise shopping.

But this book launch was different.  My friend–Prince Golmulvilas–was going to be the emcee.  He’s a famous playwright and a professor in the Creative Writing Program at USC.  I admire him because he has the most amazing liquor cabinet and, also, a cat that is so obese that it has gone viral on Japanese Television.  I would have gone just to see Prince.  Guess what I discovered about Prince?  He’s got an amazing public speaking voice:  like a radio announcer.  I guess that happens when you hang out with stage actors.

The major reason I came:  the book that’s being launched is super cool.  Lament in the Night is a Japanese American mystery set in downtown LA in the 1920’s.  What’s more extraordinary:  it was published in that era, as a serial, written by a Japanese American day laborer—Shoson Nagahara.

This is not the product of some writer with an MFA program behind him.  This is not some guppy in the fishbowl of the multicultural era, when ethnic writing is factory farmed.  This is the writing of a man as poor as his protagonist—a shiftless detective (really a borderline homeless bum) who has to steal his food if he wants to eat.  This is a dude who picks up the rinds of rotting fruit from the sidewalks of Little Tokyo.

Here’s a pretty startling reading from an excerpt in the book:

Lament in the Night was written for the Japanese language newspaper and, in all likelihood, would never have seen the light of day in the English press.  But this cool guy, Andrew Leong, found it in a bibliographical index at the beginning of grad school.  The book had been collected in a single volume after its very successful newspaper run but, over time, copies simply disappeared.

There were only five existing copies of Lament in the Night available in Japanese.  Andrew was lucky to find one.  Nobody knew it was important, so it was a circulating copy.  “I tried not to eat bagels around it.”  Once he was finished, he returned it to the library and it became reclassified as a rare object in the Special Collections.

Later, he went to the Japanese American Museum archives and found it in the original periodicals.  He told me he didn’t even really know that much Japanese at that point, so he cut his teeth in translation with this mystery.  Now, he’s a professor of Japanese and English at Northwestern University.  He wears a suit and glasses and looks  official–weighty, brilliant, sage.  It’s hard to find professor gigs; I’m glad that he got rewarded for his efforts.

I got to talk to Andrew Leong at the reception afterwards.  It was fun—we have a few friends in common—even though I had never laid eyes on him.  That’s the cool part of going to these things.  And he told me in greater depth about the process of discovering and translating. I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff.  It was probably one of the funnest times ever to get the inside story.

Andrew said he would sleep at one of the hostels in LA’s Little Tokyo–possibly the same hostel that Nagahara’s detective stayed at.  Then, he would work all day at the Japanese American Museum, copying the serialized novel from the rolls of microfilm.

I’ve done that kind of work:  it’s tedious and easy to mess up…which is exactly what happened; he ended up missing a few pages and had to travel back down to LA to get the rest.  The museum staff helped him find what little information there was about Nagahara by checking the shipping documents of the era.  They were able to outline the skeleton of a biography that way.  That’s some sleuthing:  sleuthing a sleuth!

I am eternally grateful that there are people like Andrew Leong around who do a great service to mankind in the act of translating–people who will disseminate and make widely available stuff that would be entirely forgotten.  Andrew is an intellectual hero for me.

Later on at night, I lay in bed and looked up at the cracks in the ceiling.  They looked just like the lines that a palmist might read;  I never thought that before and this made those lines beautiful–filled with promise, instead of worry and squalor.  I wondered what would happen if the United States was taken over by the Chinese? What would I do?  How would I ensure that I would be translated into the dominant language a hundred years later?  How would I get a future Andrew to pick up my stuff and breathe into it the inspiration of a second life?

I should have asked him that question when I had the opportunity.  I guess I’ll have to chance it.