Author Nick Bradley’s new book a love letter to Japan
A keen admirer of Japan and Japanese culture, author and teacher Nick Bradley also lived in the country for a decade, later turning to it for inspiration for two novels, the second of which, Four Seasons in Japan, has just been published.
The acclaimed author of BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick The Cat and The City (2020), Nick holds a PhD from the University of East Anglia focusing on the figure of the cat in Japanese culture and teaches at the University of Cambridge, as part of its creative writing masters programme.
Four Seasons in Japan, which is a love letter to Japanese culture, landscape and literature, deals with themes of belonging, loneliness, the comfort found in books and the (mis)understanding between generations.
Nick, 40, says: “It’s my second novel, and it’s set in rural Japan this time – my first novel was set in Tokyo – and when I set out to write it, I was hoping to write something that was quite simple, but that never happens, so it’s ended up being a little bit more complicated…
“It’s a translated novel within a novel, if that makes sense, so a character from my first novel is living in Tokyo and she started out as a literary translator and she’s finding that having achieved her dream of becoming a literary translator hasn’t brought her happiness and she’s struggling in her relationship.
“She’s also not really connecting with any literature – so she’s not finding any new projects that she wants to translate, until one day a drunk passenger drops a book on the Tokyo subway and she picks it up and she starts to read. The reader then gets to read her translation.”
Nick, who is originally from Bath, notes that the book is divided into four sections, each representing a season.
“The book within a book is separated by the four seasons,” he explains, “and Flo, the American translator, translates each seasonal section in that season in her own life, so we get to see her life progressing alongside the characters within the book.
“It becomes apparent as you read that the reason why she’s connecting with the book within a book is because she has a lot in common with the two main characters in it.”
The book within a book is set in a small city called Onomichi, which is one of the first places Nick lived in in Japan, and where he learned Japanese.
“I suppose the overarching theme of the whole novel is about failure,” he notes, “and about how we live through failure to find happiness, as it were.”
Nick first went to Japan on the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) programme and initially intended just to stay for a year or so.
“I was working in junior high schools there on the JET programme but I was also studying Japanese and going to language classes,” he recalls, “so then I got qualifications to work as a translator and an interpreter.
“Then after that, I ended up working for various Japanese companies doing translation and interpretation, that kind of thing.”
On what first drew him to Japan and its culture before he went out there, Nick says: “It’s difficult for me because it was quite a long time ago... but I seem to remember that really I just wanted to go anywhere.
“I had a very strong idea that I wanted to be a writer, but I was from a generation where I think if you wanted to be a writer, you studied English literature.
“So I did that but I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I used to write on Chaucer and I was going to write my PhD on The Canterbury Tales, but I had this imaginary Geoffrey Chaucer in my head who was saying, ‘Don’t write 100,000 words on my work, go out, live life and travel and do things, and write your own book’.”
A Japanese friend of Nick’s told him about the JET programme and advised him to look for the adventure he sought in her homeland.
“At that time I didn’t really know anything about Japan,” admits Nick. “I watched a lot of Japanese films because I was very much into world cinema, but I didn’t really have a sense of where I was going to – which was actually really exciting.
“So I wasn’t one of those people who got obsessed with the country from the UK and went there because of that, I kind of went out into the unknown, not knowing what I was going to find, but I ended up loving it and I ended up staying for a lot longer.”
And the experience has clearly stayed with him.
Four Seasons in Japan is out now, published by Transworld, a division of Penguin Random House.