After that, Kawanishi-san has a dream about a woman who he asks to become his kindness. There was another problem, too: kindness is in the title. To be honest, I couldn't think of any American painkiller ads at all. But I couldn't think of any American painkiller ads that really had any cultural relevance. The dentist appreciates his attempt at humor, and laughs. That kind of pop culture pun must have come to him completely naturally. He works at a company that publishes magazines about television, and they always have a bunch of TVs turned on. Kawanishi-san is supposed to be smart and funny, and here he is, making a joke. It's a single line, but it matters so much. It had a very famous ad campaign in Japan with the slogan: Bufferin is made half from kindness. Kawanishi-san replies, “Are they made half from kindness?”īufferin is a low-grade pain-killer much like aspirin. Or she can give him stronger pain-killers. After Kawanishi-san gets his second tooth extracted, the dentist says that if his teeth hurt later, he can take Bufferin. He spends a good amount of time sitting at his cute dentist's office, recollecting his relationship with Ito-san. It's almost Christmas, he has a few cavities, and he is in the process of breaking up with his boyfriend. “Cavities and Kindness” is the story of Kawanishi-san. It bothered me, and I didn't know what to do. But there was one tiny scene that really stuck out. Some sloppiness about tenses here and there. When I started editing there were, of course, tons of problems, but most of them weren't so serious. I don't remember the initial translation process, but I feel like it went relatively smoothly. I remembered that I had “Cavities and Kindness” in a folder somewhere on my computer, and I thought to myself, “Wow, I should finish that.” I finished a first draft of the story and then didn't look at it again until March of the following year, when I got an email from Michael Emmerich saying that Words Without Borders was looking for a Japanese piece to include in their queer issue. This was in October of 2013, almost ten years after Don't Laugh at Other People's Sex debuted. I just thought it was a really great story and that it would be nice to work on something short that I could finish and show to people. The next day I started translating “Cavities and Kindness” without even thinking about what I would do with it. I bought the book, took it home, stayed up later than I should have that night, and finished the whole thing. Takahashi says that “it is the name of a woman who lives in an advanced capitalist society” and that “it signifies her will to live on gallantly in this world.” You see Yamazaki, then Naoko, but then the name just keeps going. In Japanese, the cola part comes like the punch line to a joke. There's the name Naoko, which is also quite common. The hyphen is a way to let the English reader know that two things are being forced together. In Japanese, the family name comes first, so it's Yamazaki Nao-Cola. Translators talk a lot about things that are untranslatable, and the visual effect of seeing this name in Japanese is completely lost in English. He wonders, “So, what kind of name is 'Nao-Cola,' or 'Naoko + Cola?' Why would she pick such a strange name?” In his afterword to the book, author and critic Genichiro Takahashi actually says he knew this book would win the Bungei Prize based on the title and the author's name alone. The unrelated short story, “ Cavities and Kindness” is appended to the end. The title piece is narrated by a nineteen-year-old art school student, Mirume Isogai, who recounts his relationship with Yuri, his teacher, who is twenty years his senior. The book's title is also really good: Don't Laugh at Other People's Sex. But I don't know if I could have connected my friend's story about an impressive book by a young female author who won the prestigious Bungei Prize, for new authors, with the physical book staring me in the face in some bookstore, if not for that name. I had heard about the book from a friend, and I knew it won an award, and then I happened upon it in a bookstore. I first picked up Don't Laugh at Other People's Sex because of the author’s cool name.
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