Michelle Kyoko Crowson, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Japanese)

Michelle Kyoko Crowson is a Japanese American writer and emerging translator based out of the Pacific Northwest. She was awarded the 2019 Kyoko Selden Memorial Prize for her translation of Akiko Akazome’s (1974-2017) Akutagawa Award-winning novel The Maiden’s Betrayal, which she honed with a fantastic group at the 2018 Bread Loaf Translator’s Workshop, thanks to the support of a Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship.

Set in contemporary Kyoto at a foreign-language university, Maiden’s follows Mikako and her classmates in a German immersion program, as they feverishly prepare for an upcoming speech contest judged by their instructor. Professor Bachman, an eccentric who calls his all-female students “maidens,” demands they recite a passage from Anne Frank’s translated Diary, battering them with incessant memorization and pronunciation drills. The maidens are also zealous creatures who obsessively value purity in their readings of Anne Frank (and each other), idolizing Anne Frank as a tragic, universal heroine untethered by historical, ethnic, or religious circumstance. When a rumor arises about something “impure” between Bachman and one of Mikako’s favorite classmates, she must decide whether to bow to her clique’s ostracizing power, or turn toward hard, tangled truths.

The novel juxtaposes parodic artifice and acute tenderness, intertwining themes of Anne Frank’s persecution and murder with notions of female purity and contemporary Japanese anxieties of belonging. In a caricatured world rife with troubling affections, Akazome continuously foregrounds the circumstances of Anne Frank’s creative (re)productions, forcefully claiming that a “pure” understanding is untenable for ethical readers. Yet Akazome’s own deep feeling for Anne remains, suggesting that we can be ethical, attentive readers—and translators—without rejecting literature’s power to nurture affinities across vast distances. Michelle was transformed by her readings of Maiden’s: first, as a heritage speaker in an immersion classroom; then, as a teacher rendering it for her students in an undergraduate course on gendered treacheries in/of translation; and now, as an aspiring literary translator. As a Travel Fellow, she is grateful for the chance to share this novel with the ALTA community.

Michelle holds a Comparative Literature PhD from the University of Oregon, where she is currently a Research Assistant, translating classical Japanese and Chinese poetry for the “Tekagami and Kyōgire” digital exhibition, a stunning collection of calligraphy fragments from the 8th to the 17th centuries. She previously worked with Oregon’s “Gertrude Bass Warner Collection of Japanese Votive Slips (nōsatsu), 1850s to 1930s,” a collection of slender, woodblock-printed slips created and collected as a form of spiritual entertainment. Both projects have nourished her interest in the intersection of linguistic and material art. Her inclination toward translation first emerged during her MFA studies in Poetry at Vermont College, and later infused her dissertation on the (in)visibility of 18th-century haiku poetess Kaga no Chiyo, which she is now revising into a book project that blends historical research, literary translation, and lyric explorations of Asian American belonging in and across cultural-linguistic realms. Her current pastimes include fangirling over Sayaka Murata and Ginny Tapley Takemori, rediscovering yoga, job hunting, and battling insomnia.