The Translation Warrior introduces Sid Court, author of The Beach Girl and The Decision Vision

How do you describe a way of life so fundamentally different than ours? “Describe” means putting a bunch of words together into a logical order. But does that get across how something looks, what it sounds like, or how it may taste? How can you evoke these in the reader? Maybe you can’t. Maybe the best you can do is tell a story and let the audience make of it what they will.

As author of The Beach Girl, a novelette, and the short story The Decision Vision, this is what Sid Court hopes to do. He hopes to communicate what it’s like to not just reside in Japan, but to live in Japan by putting the reader through it’s courses. In service of this, Sid tends to write ambiguously, seeking not clear-cut conclusions that are satisfying as morals to the story or as story endings, but rather letting the action take its own ambiguous path.

Certainly life has been ambiguous to the author and the translation warrior. And herein may lie one of the great lessons of living in Japan: that you can hold your own views on things, but as long as you do not burden other people with them, you are remarkably free. However, this approach of theirs calls for formality in interactions nearly all the time. It takes a lot to get to a frank expression of the person. But I have known many Japanese people who on the outside were “typical” but on the inside free-spirited and “indie”. See? Here I go again, trying to describe rather than illustrate. Let’s hope Sid does better in his stories.

You can find Sid Court‘s stories on Amazon by following the links below. Please give them a read! 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H67ZLFL

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07G7HWSV7