Takiguchi Yūshō: 'When I’m writing fiction, I have very little sense I’m the one inventing the story'

We've already heard from Diana Evans, Bruna Martini, Joel Cox and Holly Edwards in this Spring series of podcasts. Now we bring it to a close with Takiguchi Yūshō and the translator Jesse Kirkwood.

Takiguchi tells us that the wandering narrator in Peppermint is following the same method as his author.

"It's when things start heading somewhere unexpected and when unexpected things begin to happen that it really starts to feel like the novel is working properly," he says.

Just as in life, Takiguchi continues, "even if you don't want to go off track, you end up doing so. Things never quite unfold the way you intended, and you still have to keep moving forward in some way."

And it's no good looking back. Memory may be "always with us", he explains, but it's also "profoundly unstable". So whether we reach for prose or images, it's impossible to capture the past.

"No matter how many photographs we have, no matter how much we try to preserve something in words, it's never the same as the thing itself."

That gap between words and the things they represent is familiar territory for the translator, Kirkwood adds. But you can start to solve the puzzle when you focus on the voice.

"Once you have that voice," Kirkwood says, "a lot of your other decisions become very easy, because you just listen to the voice."

It's an echo of the way Takiguchi writes his fiction. Instead of coming up with his stories, it's a question of paying attention to what his characters are telling him.

"What matters more," he says, "is whether I'm able to listen well to someone's story."

That's the last of these Spring podcasts. We'll be back with another season of stories for Summer.

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