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At a Tortoise’s Pace scrap

by Akiko Yajimago link Translated by Kalau Almonygo link March 4, 2026

At a Tortoise’s Pace 이미지

It has been more than twenty years since I first set foot in Korea to study abroad. I still remember the sight of Haneda’s old international terminal on the day of my departure—a place I’ve since seen countless times traveling between Tokyo and Seoul. It was packed with fans hoping to catch a glimpse of certain Hallyu stars making a visit to Japan. This was before the Korean Wave started in earnest, and at the time I had no particular interest in Winter Sonata. Thinking back, it’s hard to believe that I now make a living as a translator of Korean literature. 

 

I spent many years in Seoul as a student, and as my time to return home to Japan approached, I began wandering about, making visits to many places, anxious that there might have been something I’d left undone. One day, it struck me that I should visit the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. The staff were incredibly informative and told me that there was a list of books that qualified for translation funding. I was surprised to find on that list Hangeul in the World, the collected papers from a conference I had happened to attend at the invitation of a research assistant in my program. The preface was written by my graduate advisor. This was the moment I made the connection between my Korean language studies and the work of translation. My professor introduced me to the book’s contributors, who presented me with mountains of documents; I carried these home to Japan and began translating. It took considerable time, but this eventually became my first published translation. I still look back fondly on my time studying under the guidance of one of those contributors, the late Doctor Umeda Hiroyuki. 

 

Then came a thin book, one I had picked up during a trip to Seoul some time after moving back to Japan. The Nation of the Blind is a collection of essays by novelists, poets, and social scientists. These meditations were written in the wake of the sinking of the Sewol ferry in April 2014, a tragedy that claimed so many lives. The words of Kim Ae-ran, Park Min-gyu, and Hwang Jungeun reached deep into my heart. The essays mourn the deaths of the teenagers lost in the incident and reflect on how we live, questioning which aspects of our way of life we should confront as problems. It was impossible for me to think of this all as something distant, merely an issue of a foreign land. I had thought literary translation would come a bit further down the road, but after reading this book, I knew I wanted to translate it right away. As I worked on it, I began searching for a publisher, and that proved to be a long hunt. At the time, publishing a work of Korean literature in Japan was no easy feat. When the book finally reached bookshelves in 2018, the passionate responses from readers warmed my heart. This book is a collection of gems and a work I still treasure. 

 

Like the tortoise in Aesop’s fable, translations take their time. I do so much research, so much revision. I wish I could go just a bit faster, but I can’t change how I translate. I’ve shut myself up in the university library to dig through reference materials and even travelled all the way to Korea’s National Assembly Library in Seoul, just to check first prints from decades ago. If a song or film is mentioned in a work, I find it and watch or listen as I work. When I revise, I print out my drafts and read them aloud over and over, leaving my office a sea of used printer paper. I often laugh at myself— given the sheer time and effort, and lack of efficiency on top of that, my translation work must be putting me in the red. 

 

After discovering the joys of literary translation, I took on my first full-length novel: Won-pyung Sohn’s Almond. In 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the book was awarded first place in the Japan Booksellers’ Award for Translated Fiction. It was the first time a work of Korean literature had won the prize and the response was overwhelmingly positive. My translation had conveyed the emotion of the original to many readers in Japan. There is no greater joy for a translator. I was deeply moved by this honor. In 2022, my translation of Sohn’s Counterattacks at Thirty was awarded the same prize. I promised myself then that I would continue to translate each work with the same level of care. 

 

After Almond, I began working on more Young Adult fiction titles: Tangerine Green, I Will Cross Time for You, Girl Who Wants to Kill, and Biscuit. Somewhere far beyond the end of these stories, I see a light—faint, but clear. I fell in love with Korean YA fiction. 

 

I’m always surprised by the number of Japanese books on display in the bookshops in Seoul. But what about here in Japan? While the number of shops with a dedicated section for Korean books has certainly increased in recent years, their selections remain limited. I hope that readers in Japan will be able to find works of Korean literature more easily in the future. There’s only so much that I can do, but I plan to continue translating, savoring each work as I go. Moving, as always, at my tortoise’s pace.

Writer 필자 소개

Akiko Yajima

Akiko Yajima

Akiko Yajima is a Korean-to-Japanese translator based in Tokyo. Her translations include Almond, Counterattacks at Thirty, Prism, and Tube by Won-pyung Sohn, The Nation of the Blind by Kim Ae-ran and others, Tangerine Green by Cho Nam-joo, I Will Cross Time for You and Girl Who Wants to Kill by Lee Kkoch-nim, and Biscuit by Kim Sun-mi. She won the Japan Booksellers’ Award for Translated Fiction in 2020 and 2022.

Translator 번역가 소개

Kalau Almony

Kalau Almony

Kalau Almony is a Japanese-English literary translator based in Kawasaki, Japan. His translations include the works of Fuminori Nakamura, Tahi Saihate, Shinya Tanaka, Noboru Tsujihara, and Jose Ando. He is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow.

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