I am often asked, “Why did you need to translate Anne of Green Gables, even though there was already an excellent Japanese translation by Hanako Muraoka?” Everyone from Japanese readers to L.M. Montgomery’s own granddaughter, Kate Macdonald Butler, has been puzzled by this. I would like to answer this question and, in doing so, explore changes in the understanding of Montgomery’s work in Japan from the 1950s to the 2020s.

In the course of my thirty-six-year writing career, I have published about fifty books, and some of my works have been translated and published in other countries, including South Korea, China, and Italy. Along the way, I have also translated the Anne books into Japanese, complete with annotations, and written ten books about Montgomery and the Anne novels. (See Appendix.)

Why I Translated Anne of Green Gables into Japanese

It was 1977 when I first read Anne of Green Gables as translated by Hanako Muraoka (1893–1968).1 I was fourteen years old, a junior high-school student, and I grew enchanted by Montgomery’s style: her beautiful descriptions of Prince Edward Island’s four seasons, the awkward and heartwarming love fostered between Anne and the Cuthbert siblings, and Anne’s romantic and inspiring lifestyle. I also loved Muraoka’s old-fashioned and warm writing style. I read Muraoka’s translations of the Anne series again and again to the point that I memorized many passages. Years passed; beginning in 1987, I became a professional novelist and wrote and published several bestselling books.

One day in 1991, the Japanese publishing company Shueisha—one of the world’s largest publishing companies—asked me to translate Anne of Green Gables. I told them, “I appreciate your kind offer. However, I’ve passionately loved Hanako Muraoka’s translations for years. I don’t need to translate it. I’d like to keep writing my creative works.”

But on the way home after the meeting, I realized that I had never read Anne of Green Gables in English, so I purchased it. From the moment I opened the book, I was so surprised. For one, I discovered that it has an epigraph by Robert Browning: “Good stars met in your horoscope, / Made you of spirit, fire and dew.” After I finished reading the book, I realized that many other parts of the original book—about five hundred parts in all—were omitted from Muraoka’s translation. For example, the scene in chapter 12 featuring Anne and Diana’s vow of eternal friendship, the mention in chapter 37 of Matthew’s mother as having come from Scotland, and Mrs. Lynde’s line in chapter 38 that Gilbert gave up his teaching position at Avonlea school to Anne were omitted. An even more substantial abridgment occurred in chapter 37. The underlined parts in the passage that follows were omitted in Muraoka’s translation:

In the night she awakened, with the stillness and the darkness about her, and the recollection of the day came over her like a wave of sorrow. She could see Matthew’s face smiling at her as he had smiled when they parted at the gate that last evening—she could hear his voice saying, “My girl—my girl that I’m proud of.” Then the tears came and Anne wept her heart out. Marilla heard her and crept in to comfort her.

“There—there—don’t cry so, dearie. It can’t bring him back. It—it—isn’t right to cry so. I knew that today, but I couldn’t help it then. He’d always been such a good, kind brother to me—but God knows best.”

“Oh, just let me cry, Marilla,” sobbed Anne. “The tears don’t hurt me like that ache did. Stay here for a little while with me and keep your arm round me—so. I couldn’t have Diana stay, she’s good and kind and sweet—but it’s not her sorrow—she’s outside of it and she couldn’t come close enough to my heart to help me. It’s our sorrow—yours and mine. Oh, Marilla, what will we do without him?”

“We’ve got each other, Anne. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here—if you’d never come. Oh, Anne, I know I’ve been kind of strict and harsh with you maybe—but you mustn’t think I didn’t love you as well as Matthew did, for all that. I want to tell you now when I can. It’s never been easy for me to say things out of my heart, but at times like this it’s easier. I love you as dear as if you were my own flesh and blood and you’ve been my joy and comfort ever since you came to Green Gables.”

Two days afterward they carried Matthew Cuthbert over his homestead threshold and away from the fields he had tilled and the orchards he had loved and the trees he had planted.2

In this scene, Marilla is able to express her affection to Anne honestly for the first time, five years after adopting Anne. This is an important scene of Anne of Green Gables because it shows us how Marilla has matured as a human through bringing up Anne. It is also a moving scene that tells us that Marilla and Anne have become like a real mother and daughter. Without this scene, the reader cannot know of Marilla’s emotional maturation nor of the deepening love between Anne and Marilla. As a result, in Japan, Marilla was often thought to be a cold old woman who was strict when disciplining children and unable to express tender feelings.3

There were many alterations in Muraoka’s text as well as omissions. While some flowers, food, and clothes were omitted, others were changed to comparable Asian ones that would be more familiar to Japanese readers than the Western examples. For instance, Montgomery’s reference to mayflowers was changed to hawthorns, raspberry cordial to strawberry cordial, currant wine to grape wine, and a cotton warp knitted quilt to a quilted Sashiko Futon. Some of these alterations matter. For example, Montgomery may have chosen the mayflower because it can be a symbol of affection. Anne suggests in chapter 20 of Anne of Green Gables that Gilbert has attempted to give her mayflowers, and because she understands their meaning, she has flatly rejected them. In chapter 20 of the third book of the series, Anne of the Island, Gilbert finally succeeds in giving Anne mayflowers when proposing marriage.

Moreover, Muraoka’s experience as a writer of children’s stories for Japanese audiences is evident in her translation of Anne. She simplified Montgomery’s original long sentences by removing some words. Because Montgomery’s style seemed literary and flowery, but profound, Muraoka cut decorative words so that young Japanese readers could more easily understand and enjoy the story. What follows is an example from chapter 38 of Anne of Green Gables, with Anne talking to Marilla. Again, the underlined words represent text missing from Muraoka’s translation:

“I shall give life here my best, and I believe it will give its best to me in return. When I left Queen’s my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own, that bend, Marilla. I wonder how the road beyond it goes—what there is of green glory and soft, checkered light and shadows—what new landscapes—what new beauties—what curves and hills and valleys further on.”4

This passage can be understood as a metaphor for life’s experience. I analyze its possible meaning in the annotation of my translation for Bungeishunju in 2019: “green glory” suggests fresh joy of youth, “soft checkered light and shadows” suggest small joys and sorrows in everyday life, “new landscapes” suggest new places and experiences, “new beauties” suggest beauties of the new world and people’s minds, and “hills and valleys” suggest the ups and downs of life. This is a moving passage that tells us the spiritual and emotional growth of sixteen-year-old Anne. Omitting these words makes it easier for young readers to understand the passage but at the expense of reducing its emotional weight.

Montgomery references many lines from English literature for Anne of Green Gables’s chapter titles, most of which Muraoka changed. For instance, chapter 31, “Where the Brook and River Meet,” was renamed “Where Two Streams Meet.” In the annotation of my translation, I note that the original title is a quotation from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Maidenhood” and explain, “In the poem, this line is followed by ‘Womanhood and childhood fleet!’ It means that where the brook and river meet is where childhood and womanhood meet. It is suggested that Anne is growing up from girlhood to womanhood mentally and physically in this chapter.”5 This metaphorical meaning is not conveyed by Muraoka’s alteration of the title.

The title of chapter 37, “The Reaper Whose Name is Death,” was likewise changed, in this instance to “The Advent of Death,” in Muraoka’s translation. I note in my annotation that Montgomery’s original title is from Longfellow’s poem “Reapers and Flowers.” I write:

A reaper is a person who harvests a crop and the Grim Reaper with a long scythe. This Longfellow poem (1839) begins with this stanza: “There is a Reaper whose name is Death, / And, with his sickle keen, / He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, / And the flowers that grow between.” As the bearded grain (which is a metaphor for an old and mature man with a long white beard) was reaped at a breath, Matthew’s death was sudden and commanded by the divine Being.6

There were many other Japanese translations of Anne of Green Gables after Muraoka, but they all followed her example: they were all abridged versions with many changes. For example, Muraoka and all the translators that followed omitted Montgomery’s epigraphs to the Anne books that quote the poems of Browning; Longfellow; John Greenleaf Whittier; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Rupert Brooke; and Virna Sheard.7

Four Reasons for Alterations and Omissions in Japanese Translations of Anne

There are, in my opinion, four major reasons that Anne was translated with alterations and omissions. First, Japan is an East Asian country with many fundamental differences from Canada, including language, diet, vegetation, landscape, homes, clothes, religion, and human relations. The modern Japanese lifestyle is relatively Westernized today, but when Muraoka’s Anne of Green Gables was published in 1952, it was after the devastating defeat in the Second World War, and Japanese people were poor and knew very little of Western culture. Complete translations were not so commonplace in Japan, with the exception of literary works by male authors that were considered world masterpieces, such as William Shakespeare’s plays or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s works. Between the 1860s, when Japan ended its national seclusion and opened itself up to the Western world, and the 1970s, the job of most Japanese translators was to edit and shorten long Western novels and to domesticate them by converting Western elements to Asian ones for their Japanese audience. From that standpoint, Muraoka, born in the 1890s, was very good at the type of translations sought in the 1950s. Muraoka’s achievement in the first translations of the Anne books is greatly appreciated. I love her beautiful style, reminiscent of an older, classical Japanese style, and even today I am a big fan of the warmth of her writing.8

The second reason for the alterations and omissions to early Anne translations was a lack of understanding of Christianity among Japanese readers. Raised in a Presbyterian household, Montgomery wrote Anne when engaged to a Presbyterian minister, so it is not surprising that the novel includes many passages from the Bible as well as stories related to the quest for the Holy Grail, the most important being James Russell Lowell’s poem “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” quoted in chapter 2. This poem’s theme is charity—love for one’s neighbours. Sir Launfal, one of the Knights of the Round Table, helps a beggar and then realizes that, by practising charity, he has rescued not only the tramp but also himself through God’s love. This ties in with practising charity in Anne of Green Gables as illustrated by the Cuthbert siblings’ adoption of Anne instead of a farm boy. Matthew and Marilla rescue Anne, and in turn, she and God help them.

In Japan, Christians make up only about one per cent of the population, and Japanese people have very limited knowledge of Christianity. Presumably, for this reason, Muraoka, who was a Methodist, removed from her translation many phrases or passages from the Bible. References such as “Job’s comforting,” “the iron has entered into my soul,” “I’ve put my hand to the plow and I won’t look back,” and “heaping coals of fire on my head” are all biblical allusions that Montgomery makes in Anne of Green Gables but which Muraoka omits.9

The third reason for the alterations and omissions is similar: Japanese people lack much understanding of Canada (just as the majority of Canadians likely know little about Japan). For example, most Japanese readers do not know that Canada is and has long been a multi-ethnic country. Montgomery wrote the Cuthberts as having Scottish ancestors—and of other characters having Irish, English, or French—but their ethnicity went unmentioned in all Japanese translations prior to mine.

The fourth and final reason for so many alterations and omissions in the early translations was a general prejudice against female authors and against novels with young female protagonists. In twentieth-century Japan, works by female authors were simply not valued as highly as those by males. Until the 1990s, works by women were defined as Joryu Bungaku—“women’s literature”—and segregated to their own section of Japanese bookstores. I myself was constantly labelled “an author of women’s literature” in interviews and articles in the 1980s and was always careful to correct that to just “an author.”

Female authors’ works with young female protagonists were particularly unappreciated—and doubly discriminated against—in Japan. For instance, whereas Mark Twain’s novels with young male protagonists were praised as masterpieces and studied in the Department of English and American Literature, Faculty of Letters, at the University of Tokyo, Japan’s leading university, works such as Montgomery’s were studied mainly in children’s literature courses in women’s colleges and almost never in co-educational universities. Previous translators did not necessarily discriminate against novels with girl protagonists written by women. However, it can be assumed that the editors-in-chief of Japanese publishers from the 1950s to the 1970s were men who had not read Anne of Green Gables in English, had a prejudice that such works had little literary value, and saw no problem in publishing it as an abridged version without any complete ones.

In the atmosphere of great economic prosperity during 1980s Japan, a movement was born for the translation of entire, unabridged works.10 Many world classics, such as Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, were translated in full, published, and studied. Since the 1980s, many Canadian novels have been translated, including the works of Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Katherine Govier, Alistair MacLeod, and his son, Alexander MacLeod. (I love their profound works and had the pleasure of meeting Atwood, Govier, and Alexander MacLeod at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo.) Because of such authors’ works, Japan has developed a deepened awareness of Canadian culture and society, and Montgomery in turn is gradually becoming respected as a literary author.11

My Translating and Annotating of Anne of Green Gables

Having realized that there were only Japanese translations of an abridged Anne of Green Gables, I decided to translate it in its entirety. It was the beginning of my long—and ongoing—journey to study Montgomery’s works.

I began in 1991 and soon realized that my translation should be an annotated one. There were many phrases in the texts that were obviously lines from classic poetry or plays. I identified seven hundred of them—written in a literary style and seemingly allusions—and began to research their origins and meaning. There was no Internet at the time, so I had to use analog media. I purchased a 3,000-page quotation dictionary, The Macmillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Famous Phrases, from the United States to assist me. It helped me locate the source of some allusions, such as within Shakespeare’s plays. In 1989, I had already joined the digital world and through AOL (America Online) could access every word of Shakespeare’s works. Still, research in those days was not straightforward: I had to download the plays on to thirty-seven floppy disks and search them individually. I later purchased several imported CDs containing texts of many famous works of English and American literature and several English Bibles—including the King James Version, which Montgomery read. With such resources, I tracked down eighty of Montgomery’s allusions.

By the time my translation of Anne of Green Gables was published in 1993, it included 117 annotations—not only locating allusions but also explaining a wide range of Canadian political, historical, ethnic, religious, domestic, and botanical topics. This was the world’s first annotated Anne of Green Gables.12 My translation received good reviews and a welcome reception, going through eighteen hardcover printings.

Meanwhile, I continued to track down the origins of quotations in Anne for a planned paperback edition. In the mid-1990s, I drew up a long list of books and poems that Montgomery mentioned in her books and journals, took trips to the Harvard University Library and the British Library, and returned home with suitcases filled with photocopies of the books. I then scanned these pages using OCR (optical character recognition) software and made a digital text database of English, Scottish, and American literature. I also began doing online research, finding other references to classic texts and elaborating on their meanings and Montgomery’s use of them.13

It was only in 1997 that I learned that a Canadian scholar had already produced, in English, a project in the same spirit as mine: Rea Wilmshurst’s “L.M. Montgomery’s Use of Quotations and Allusions in the ‘Anne’ Books,” which had been published in Canadian Children’s Literature in 1989. I was very grateful to learn of this important work and drew many valuable suggestions from Wilmshurst’s research lists (and corrected a few of what seemed to me to be small errors by her). I also continued my own research. By the time my Anne translation was republished, in paperback, by Shueisha in 2000, it had 294 annotations. My research also gave me the knowledge to begin writing books about Montgomery and her works. (See the Appendix.)

The Influence of My Anne of Green Gables Translation in Japan

I have been fortunate: my translations and commentaries on Anne have been influential in Japan. For one thing, they have helped me advance the study of Montgomery in the academic world. In 2002 and again in 2007, I was invited to Keio University and gave lectures on English literature and on Celtic culture in Anne of Green Gables and the other Montgomery works. Using my translations and other books, some students and scholars wrote on Anne for their theses and papers in Japanese and English.14

My work also sparked interest in Anne of Green Gables by national public broadcaster NHK’s educational channel. NHK asked me to help produce an English-learning and documentary television series about Montgomery and Anne and to appear in it. I wrote the scripts for thirteen episodes and travelled with a famous Japanese actress, Keiko Matsuzaka, and a camera crew to Prince Edward Island and Ontario to film the series. The program aired in Japan throughout the spring of 2008 and was tremendously popular; the April issue of the program’s monthly magazine sold 400,000 copies within a month. The series was reshown later that year and was released as a DVD the following year. This was the first Japanese television program to introduce Montgomery’s original text of Anne and its complete Japanese translation.

Because of my experience, some Japanese readers asked to visit Montgomery sites in Canada with me. In 2008, I organized an itinerary through four Canadian provinces, including the PEI settings of the Anne books; the Halifax, Nova Scotia, sites of Anne of the Island; and houses where Montgomery had lived in Leaskdale and Norval, Ontario. We also met several descendants of the author.15 This first trip was so successful that I have since led twenty-one tours, bringing some five hundred Japanese readers of Anne to Canada; I resumed this tradition after COVID-19.

My New Translation Project of the Anne Books

In the 2010s, Shueisha closed its translation department, and I returned to writing my own works, including a critical biographical novel, Fireflies in Love, or Tomie Yamazaki and Osamu Dazai, which won the Nitta Jiro Literary Award in 2010. Also, having spent so long learning about Canada’s history, I decided I wanted to learn more about Japan’s. In 1867—the same year Canada was founded as a country—Japanese political power moved from the Tokugawa shogunate to the emperor, and civil war broke out. I resolved to write a novel set in this period, which became Burning Island, or Oki Incident.16

In 2008, translator Mie Muraoka began work on restoring some of the omissions of her grandmother Hanako Muraoka’s abridged translations of Anne of Green Gables through Rilla of Ingleside. Still, the new versions were not full translations, either; many alterations and omissions remained. For example, approximately 280 words or phrases from the English original of Anne of Ingleside were omitted or altered from Mie Muraoka’s translation. Similarly, there were 200 words or phrases omitted or altered from the translation of Rainbow Valley. There were still no complete translations of the Anne series in Japan.17

Fortunately, in 2018, a long-established literary publisher, Bungeishunju, decided to publish my translations of what will be the first complete Japanese version of the entire Anne series. I felt much better prepared to do so at this stage of my career, having visited Canada and Europe many times for research purposes, and with the Internet allowing me to do so much research at home. All this made for better, more fully annotated Japanese translations. I thoroughly revised my Anne of Green Gables translation, increasing the number of annotations to 353, and published it in 2019; it recently went through its tenth printing. I also published new translations of Anne of Avonlea (with 256 annotations and nine photos) and Anne of the Island (with 328 annotations and fourteen photos) in the same year. Anne of Windy Willows (with 380 annotations and twelve photos), Anne’s House of Dreams (with 397 and twelve photos), and Anne of Ingleside (with 530 and eleven photos) were published in subsequent years. Rainbow Valley (with 397 annotations and ten photos) was published in 2022. Rilla of Ingleside (with 585 annotations, two maps, ten photos, and a timeline of the events of the First World War mentioned in the text) appeared in December 2023. Some of my commentary books on Anne of Green Gables have recently been translated and published in South Korea; a true appreciation of Montgomery’s writing is spreading throughout Asia.

I continue to be fascinated by Montgomery and her writing. Currently, I am researching the influence of Celtic Christianity, St. Cuthbert, and Arthurian legends in the Anne books. Thirty years ago, there were few Montgomery scholars in Japan. But today, many professors and students—even men—are researching her works from many different viewpoints. I am honoured whenever my translations and annotations are cited and proud that they have helped in some small way to advance the field of Montgomery studies in Japan.

I have now been translating and researching the Anne series since 1991, when I was twenty-eight years old. It has been one of the great joys of my life to translate the series, which I have loved reading since I was a teenage girl. It is also my great pleasure to know that my work has helped Japanese readers deepen their understanding of Montgomery’s literature and Canada. Above all, translating has renewed my appreciation and respect for the translators who came before me.

Acknowledgements: I would like to express my special thanks to Alan MacEachern and Lesley Clement for editing my paper and giving me an opportunity to publish it. Rachel Howard and Rae Yeats gave me a lot of useful advice in writing my original text. I heartily appreciate their cooperation and kindness. In closing, I would like to thank Hanako Muraoka who, through her unforgettable translations, invited me to the delightful and enchanting Anne’s world.

About the Author: Yuko Matsumoto is a Japanese author and translator. She majored in international politics at the University of Tsukuba. She was an executive director of PEN Japan from 2007 to 2019. Her novel For an Over-Eating Girl, The Dawn Never Comes won the Subaru Literary Award in 1987, and her critical biographical novel Fireflies in Love, or Tomie Yamazaki and Osamu Dazai won the Nitta Jiro Literary Award in 2010. She has published fifty books in Japan. Since 1991, she has translated and studied the Anne of Green Gables series of books and through research in libraries worldwide has identified many of the books’ allusions. She has travelled to Canada twenty-six times to follow in Montgomery’s footsteps. Matsumoto has also written a series of books about Montgomery and the Anne books. Her recent works—the first complete, unabridged Japanese translations of the Anne books, with annotations—are currently being published and are being well received. Her translation of Rilla of Ingleside, the first unabridged Japanese translation with annotations, was issued in 2023.

Her bibliography in English: http://office-matsumoto.world.coocan.jp/profile_e.htm

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Banner Image: Photo by Yuko Matsumoto