Translators’ Roundtable Series “More than Worth Sharing”

The End of the Moment We Had by Okada Toshiki

Okada Toshiki was born in Yokohama in 1973 and lives in Kumamoto. He is a playwright, novelist, and the founder and artistic director of the chelfitsch theater company. His play Sangatsu no itsukakan [Five Days in March] won the 49th Kishida Prize for Drama. His novel The End of the Moment We Had (Shinchosha, 2007) was the second recipient of the Oe Kenzaburo Prize. His production of Pratthana—A Portrait of Possession was awarded the Selection Committee Special Prize in the 27th Yomiuri Theater Awards. His dramatic works collection Miren no yūrei to kaibutsu—zaha/tsuruga (Unfulfilled Ghost and Monster—Zaha/Tsuruga) (Hakusuisha Publishing, 2020) won the 72nd Yomiuri Prize for Literature Drama Award.

Lee Hong-i completed undergraduate work in the Department of Psychology at Yonsei University and has a master’s degree in Performing Arts Studies from Seoul National University’s graduate school. She is primarily engaged in translating dramatic works. Her translations include Ahn Eak-tai and Yagi Hiroshi’s R. Strauss (Dalasil, 2021), Maekawa Tomohiro’s Before We Vanish (Alma, 2019), and Okada Toshiki’s Rakkanteki na hō no kēsu [The Case of the More Optimistic One] (Alma, 2017).

Born in Bangkok, Thailand, Matana Jaturasangpairoj is a faculty member in the Japanese Section of the Department of Eastern Languages at Chulalongkorn University. She specializes in modern and contemporary Japanese literature. Her translations include Murakami Haruki’s 1Q84 (co-translation, Gamme Magie, 2011–2012), Kawakami Hiromi’s Zarazara (Sunday Afternoon, 2012), and Okada Toshiki’s The End of the Moment We Had (Gamme Magie, 2016).

Heike Patzschke was born in 1959 and resides in Germany. She majored in Japanese-English-German translation and interpretation at Humboldt and Tokai Universities. She did doctoral work at Humboldt and the University of Tokyo and in 1987 received a PhD in Japanese Studies. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Japanese Studies, University of Bonn, and is also a Japanese-German and German-Japanese interpreter and translator. Her translations include Okada Toshiki’s “Kyori, hitsuju-hin” [Distance, a Necessity] (in Jetlag Café, 2011), “Mondai no kaiketsu” [Answer to a question] (in Neue rundschau, 2012), The End of the Moment We Had (2012), all published by S. Fischer Verlag, and “No Sex” (in Das Wetter, 2020), published by Das Wetter. She has also translated numerous other works by such authors as Mori Ogai, Shiba Ryotaro, Masuda Mizuko, and Ono Masatsugu.

Born in 1981, Sam Malissa is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn, New York. He holds a PhD in Japanese literature from Yale University. His translations include The End of the Moment We Had by Okada Toshiki (Pushkin Press, 2018), Bullet Train by Isaka Kotaro (Harvill Secker, 2021), and short fiction by Sakaguchi Kyohei, Medoruma Shun, and Furukawa Hideo, among others.