For many years, Khurram Sohail has held an affinity for Japanese culture and literature. He fell in love with Tokyo upon his first visit to Japan. The busy metropolitan hub with its eccentricities and myriad offerings in Khurram’s opinion, is the best city in the world.

So many bookstores are dotted across many of the bigger cities in Japan. They offer books on British pop culture to European photography and even on obscure anime. There amongst many such options, Khurram was surprised to find that many of the greats of Urdu literature were also translated into the Japanese language. From there, a seed of an idea was sown in Khurram’s mind and he began to work on translating Japanese literature into Urdu.

Khurram who is a journalist, broadcaster, researcher and film critic eventually put together the Pakistan-Japan Literature forum and from its platform created a comingling of the two cultures and its many literature offerings.

This month, The Tale of Genji’s Urdu translation was released. Written originally a thousand years ago by Japanese novelist Murasaki Shikbu, the tale has often been dubbed as the ‘world’s first novel’. Khurram, who served at the helm of this translation project, worked tirelessly for over five years to ensure this book was available to an Urdu audience.

‘The Tale of Genji’ chronicles typical aristocratic life in Japan during the Heian period. Ivan Morris, the great scholar of Japanese culture once wrote that, despite the influence of Buddhism, “Heian society was on the whole governed by style rather than by any moral principles, and good looks tended to take the place of virtue.” Similar is the case when it comes to story about the fictional Prince Genji who marries his first wife at the age of twelve and then proceeds to a series of affairs that leave him unfulfilled and bored.

The Express Tribune sat with Khurram to discuss the novel and learn more about importance of reading books from other parts of the world. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ET: You have been working with Japanese literature for some time. What specifically drew you to this work?

KS: I have been working with Japanese literature for about ten to 11 years particularly with their Japanese fiction translations and history of fiction in Urdu.

ET: How did you begin this journey of working with Japanese Literature?

KS: When I travelled to Japan for the first time, I noticed how properly Urdu literature has been translated, published and made available to people in Japan. After that, when I came back, I created a literature forum and through that forum, we decided that we’ll work on translating Japanese literature in Urdu here in Pakistan and we’re going to create an awareness [here in Pakistan] about all the work that is being done on Urdu literature in Japan.

ET: You are referring to the Pakistan-Japan Literature Forum you founded. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

KS: I created Pakistan-Japan Literature Forum about five years ago. Through this platform, we do a reading session every month at the culture centre inside the Japanese consulate. In those reading sessions, we read Japanese literature in Urdu.

The theme of this forum is to read Japanese literature in Urdu. So there are two dimensions of the work that we do: one is to promote Japanese literature in Pakistan and the other is to promote Urdu literature in Japan. There are many Pakistani authors whose work has been translated into Japanese language and made available in Japan. This includes the poetry of prominent classic Urdu poets such as Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz as well as other contemporary poets. In prose, fiction and short story writing the work of Saadat Hasan Manto and Shaukat Siddiqui has also been translated.

ET: Specifically referring to the novel you recently translated, The Tale of Genji’, what drew you to translating this book?

KS: When I first came across The Tale of Genji and I read it in English, I was extremely amazed that this novel, which is essentially the world’s first novel, has never been translated in Urdu. I tried really had to find an Urdu translation of this book. I frequent Japan quite often too and over there, I found a short, rather incomplete summary of this book in Urdu. A Mr Hasrat Hisham Hussain from India had done this translation but it wasn’t complete. However, this was the only reference I was able to find where someone had attempted to translate this into Urdu. Then I decided to undertake the project myself however, I was extremely busy at the time and approached Baqar Naqvi, who was one of Pakistan’s few prominent and professional translators. He had previously also translated the French novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. So that [translation work] was extremely impressive in my opinion and thus, I approached him about translating this book.

Naqvi used to at the time live in London and was a retired insurance man. I convinced him to work on this book not on the basis that this is a Japanese novel but rather from this perspective that this is the world’s first novel and we should make this available for our Urdu readership so they can benefit from reading this work.

ET: How long did it take for him to work on this?

KS: It took him about two and half years to prepare the first draft of this translation. In any translation, the first draft is extremely valuable because it is the core essence which is used to improve and better. Moreover, the first draft is also the hardest to put together.

Soon after he completed the first draft, he was diagnosed with throat cancer. Naqvi was in extremely good health but he was over the age of 80 years. The cancer was at its last stage when it was diagnosed and within months, he passed away.

ET: How did you continue this project after his untimely death?

KS: For me this situation was a lot like flying a plane where your senior co-pilot dies mid-flight and you’re a junior pilot who has no choice but to fly the plane since you’re in the air. You have no choice but to complete the journey and land safely. Many of the Japanese [who were part of the forum] felt that we now also owed it to Baqar Naqvi to complete this project. The only way to do it was if I completed it myself or I found someone else to translate it. However, to find someone who would be able to translate this was next to impossible. In any translation, it important that it is not just the content that needs to be translated but the cultural aspects of the book also need to be translated.

Baqar Naqvi and I had decided that he would conduct the translations and I’d look over and take care of the cultural nuances that need to be highlighted and included into the work. A huge part of the translation work was still left as on average, there are several translations that are conducted during such a project however, I took under the translation work of this project too. It took me an additional two to two and a half years to translate this work. It took me some time to translate this work because I decided to also write the footnotes of this novel, which is not necessarily a common practice. This work has previously been translated into 32 languages however, none of those translations have included such detailed foot notes, even in the English translation.

I treated this extremely academically and wrote about 821 refences and footnotes for this book.

ET: How has the forum helped to promote this book?

KS: It has been published and disseminated through the Pakistan-Japan Literature Forum. Moreover, the Japanese Embassy in Islamabad and the Japanese consulate in Karachi have both officially inaugurated this book.

ET: Why do you think this story is important for the Pakistani readership?

KS: There is no direct link of this story to Pakistan. The only connection that it makes to Pakistan is that right now the age of information that we currently live in and so much is being translated across the world, so what is considered to be the world’s first novel should also be available in Urdu. We have literature students, those who study Urdu Literature or do a Masters in Literature, or even the general Urdu readership in Pakistan, which is quite high, they should have access to this book.