I'll be near the Kinokuniya bookstore in San Francisco next week and I was thinking about getting a Japanese language copy of After the Quake to get Lani's opinion on the translation.
It really hard with translation to know what belongs to the translator and what belongs to the source. It can make a huge difference (I've read Crime and Punishment in three different translations and one of them is vastly superior to the other two). I enjoyed the first story in After the Quake very much but at several points the writing consisted of lengthy periods of short, simple, declarative sentences which I find a little tiring.
I assume that is carried over from the source and not a writing style introduced by Jay Rubin.
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