Takami Nieda on translating the quiet force of Yusuke Norishiro’s *Traveling Practice*

A novel built from walking, writing, and restraint

Yusuke Norishiro’s *Traveling Practice* has arrived in translation as a novel of movement that is, paradoxically, also a novel of stillness. Set along the Tone River, it follows an author and his young, athletic niece during a six-day journey in which writing and walking become parallel acts of discipline, observation, and remembrance. In a conversation about the book, translator Takami Nieda said the novel’s quietness is not emptiness but a form of attention: to landscape, to companionship, and to what is left unsaid.

The novel’s premise is deceptively simple. The narrator, himself a writer, accompanies his niece as both continue their own practices, and the trip becomes an occasion for reflection on craft as much as family. Nieda said the book’s unhurried movement was already present in the Japanese text, requiring translation that preserved its leisurely pace rather than trying to heighten it. Norishiro’s own relationship to the material also shaped the work: the journey closely mirrors a real six-day trip he took along the Tone River during the early days of the pandemic, carrying a Moleskine and a soccer ball and recording the landscapes later echoed in the novel.

Translating a literary inheritance

Nieda described *Traveling Practice* as a book that draws on a broad Japanese literary and cultural archive, even when readers do not know every reference in advance. Figures such as Naoya Shiga, Nobuo Kojima, and Kunio Yanagita appear in the novel, and Nieda said some research was necessary to place them in context. Shiga’s writing, with its clarity and precision, aligns with the novel’s interest in direct observation, while Yanagita’s role in Japanese folklore studies helps illuminate how the novel treats rivers, mountains, and rural paths as sites of memory rather than neutral scenery.

That attention to place, Nieda suggested, is one of the book’s strongest connections to Japanese literary tradition. He pointed to the way Japanese temples, shrines, and hiking trails are often marked with plaques and signs that embed legends, histories, and local knowledge into the landscape itself. *Traveling Practice*, he said, captures that feeling of “verticality” in which a place is also a layered record of people who have come before.

Football history also enters the conversation around the novel. Nieda said he was drawn into learning more about Zico and the early days of Japan’s J. League, including Zico’s revered status at Kashima Antlers and the larger growth of Japanese football since then. That detail matters because the novel, too, treats public memory as something accumulated over time, not fixed in a single moment.

The power of silence

If the novel is attentive to historical and physical layers, it is equally attentive to what remains unspoken between people. Nieda emphasized that one of the central tasks of translating the book was preserving its silences and allowing readers room to infer feeling from omission. He described Japanese literary reading as often requiring close attention to subtext, where the choice not to say something can carry as much meaning as speech itself.

That principle shapes the relationship between the narrator and Abi, his niece. Nieda said he deliberately resisted softening passages in which the narrator comes across as blunt or even slightly overbearing. He felt the roughness needed to remain, because it gives the book emotional tension and helps make the later expressions of affection more affecting. Much of the narrator’s love for Abi is held back until near the end, when he finally states that he wants to remain worthy of her affection. For Nieda, that delayed clarity is part of the novel’s force.

Multiple voices, one emotional arc

The translator also had to balance several distinct voices: the narrator’s reflective and slightly sorrowful tone, Abi’s exuberance, the measured voice of Midori-san, and the more observational language of the journal passages. Nieda said he was initially concerned that Abi could become too exaggerated, especially because she speaks with so much enthusiasm. But he came to see her voice as part of the narrator’s act of memorialization, a way of preserving the qualities he remembers fondly rather than reducing her to the tragedy that later shadows the story.

That concern also shaped how he approached the novel’s ending. Nieda said he did not notice the foreshadowing on a first reading, but once he returned to the book, the signs of its tragic destination became much more apparent. In translation, he tried not to make that anticipation too heavy or obvious. One passage that became especially delicate involved the word *nintai*, which he noted can carry meanings including patience, forbearance, tolerance, and endurance. The difficulty of that term underscores the broader challenge of the book: to render not only what the narrator says, but the emotional pressure inside what he cannot quite say.

For readers, the translated novel offers more than a story of a river journey. It also presents a model of literary attention in which craft is inseparable from memory, and where translation must preserve both the visible landscape and the spaces around it. In that sense, *Traveling Practice* is less about arriving at an answer than about learning how to look, and how to let silence do part of the work.