Even readers of English who have a passing familiarity with the pantheon of modern Japanese novelists might be forgiven if they have not heard of Shishi Bunroku. Tanizaki? Sure. Oe? You bet. Mishima? Ugh, yes. But Shishi? Shishi who? Well, Shishi who was a best-selling novelist in the 1950s, whose collected works comprise sixteen hefty volumes, who (like Tanizaki) was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit, but whose fiction, plays, and essays have scarcely appeared in any Western language. School of Freedom, originally published serially in Asashi shinbun in 1950 as Jiyū Gakkō, is the first of his novels to appear in English. Although flawed in certain respects, this translation by Lynne E. Riggs should be regarded as important for that reason alone: it broadens, enriches, and enlivens the landscape of postwar Japanese literature as seen by English-reading audiences.

Set against the backdrop of Tokyo during the U.S. occupation, School of Freedom is a novel in what Shishi cheerfully referred to as his “defeat trilogy,” a record of the impact of defeat and occupation as he saw it. Far from dwelling on the past, however, School of Freedom turns eagerly forward, and captures what Yoshikuni Igarashi has described as a pervasive sense of liberation in the immediate postwar period. As Riggs notes in her afterword, Shishi Bunroku's novels “captured the hearts of readers starved for light or humorous topics with writing that touches the comic lode in the serious stuff of history and the realities of ordinary people's lives” (p. 251).

The novel begins with a furious wife throwing her shiftless husband out of the house. It then follows those two protagonists, Komako and Iosuke, as they grapple with newfound freedom of various kinds: freedom from prewar social mores and gender roles, as well as a temporary escape from marriage. It will come as no surprise to the reader when each of them independently discovers that freedom in excess can be a dangerous thing. But the novel's charm does not lie in its plot, nor in its familiar reiteration of the battle of the sexes, which could easily serve as the basis for a Hollywood romantic comedy even now—indeed, Jiyū Gakkō has been adapted for film twice in Japan. Rather, it is the author's keen, irreverent, and good-humored observations of human nature and foibles, as well as his sense of the absurd, that make his work a pleasure to read.

Instead of front-loading a fairly slender volume with biographical narrative, Riggs saves her introduction to Shishi's life and works for the afterword. There, we learn that “Shishi Bunroku” is the pen name of Iwata Toyoo, who lived through the tumultuous period from 1893 to 1969. A contemporary of better-known and more-translated authors such as Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Dazai, Iwata was deeply involved in theater, and considered himself a playwright first and foremost: he began writing novels in order to pay the bills and support his family. The son of a former samurai turned businessman, he was raised in cosmopolitan Yokohama and educated at Keiō Gijuku University. As a young man, he spent several years in France and returned to Japan with a deep appreciation for theater, as well as a French wife, Marie Chaumy, who helped support him by working as a tutor. After she died of illness in 1932, leaving him with a young daughter, Tomoe, he later married Tominaga Shizuko, a sewing instructor at a women's school. Riggs describes her as a “serious and hard-working woman” who “ran the household that sustained Shishi as a professional writer” (p. 246).

It is difficult not to see the silhouettes of these two women in the character of Komako, who seems modeled on them in industriousness. For Komako, the new equality of women promulgated by the postwar constitution is not about freedom to enter the workforce: she already works out of necessity. She and Iosuke are former members of the upper class whose fortunes have fallen since the war, and because Iosuke's pathologically idle temperament makes him all but useless to employers, it is Komako who must shoulder the burden of supporting the household. Iosuke, while good-natured, has outrageously little grasp of both the value of money and of work. After Komako throws him out of the house, he becomes a vagrant in Tokyo, leading a life free of responsibility—one that ends in hilarious disaster.

Riggs notes that Jiyū Gakkō was selected by the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion program “because it stands out as a work of refined humor in the era of modern Japanese fiction” (p. 242), but unfortunately it is in the transmission of that humor and lighthearted sensibility that the translation occasionally falls short. As any translator is well aware, and as Riggs acknowledges, humor is often one of the most difficult (not to say impossible) elements of a text to translate. However, the importance of timing and pacing to humor is equally well known, and in a comic novel that relies heavily on dialogue, the dialogue needs to be snappy. This is where School of Freedom sometimes fails. Rough or awkward patches in passages of narration are perhaps easier to overlook, in no small part because the narrator's voice is jaunty and distinct enough to overpower them with the wit of its observations. Clumsy dialogue is another matter.

In one of the funniest and most nerve-wracking scenes in the novel, innocent Iosuke is duped by some new “friends” into unwittingly acting as the leader of a drug smuggling ring, as he is physically big and intimidating enough to look the part. The scene is inherently amusing, because it makes clear to the reader that Iosuke is in over his head, yet he pulls off the charade through sheer dumb luck, all without ever realizing what is going on. But the underworld wheeling and dealing is bogged down by clunky, redundant dialogue:

Here, the momentum of an otherwise enjoyable farce is lost as the reader stumbles over the baffling “since I'm selling, it's okay to sell to you,” which sounds as if it might be a too-literal rendition of the original (kocchi mo shoubai dakara, katte kudasaru no wa, arigatai ga). In fact, it is not too literal—it is merely awkward and unclear. Nor is this example an isolated instance. Just try to navigate the multiple negatives in “Don't you think that someone who hasn't developed his abilities to the fullest can't be considered a real man, can he?” (p. 60). Triple negatives can sound clear and natural in Japanese, but in English they only produce headaches.

In other respects, the translation is more successful. Through Komako, who is perplexed by the newfangled English-filled slang of her young acquaintances, the author observes and remarks on generational shifts in the Japanese language. Riggs is careful to highlight these instances, which are marked in the Japanese simply by the use of katakana, by using italics and/or adding an embedded gloss to note that the phrase was spoken in English. Such additions are unobtrusive and convey important information that might otherwise be lost.

Riggs, who has previously translated mostly nonfiction, describes the process of translating Jiyuu Gakkou as “focused on faithfulness to the quality, tone, and meaning of the original” (p. 255). Faithfulness and freedom are often imagined to be mutually exclusive opposites, in life and in translation practice, but as the characters in School of Freedom discover, it can be a false dichotomy. At times, faithfulness may be the only way to achieve freedom, and at times, reaching for freedom is the only way to remain faithful—to the self, to a spouse, or to an author. It is unfortunate that here the translator and her editors were unable to channel a little more of the sense of liberation that pervades the novel, and in doing so, to let Shishi Bunroku's voice ring through as freely as it should.