Queering Eriko: Trans Identity, Address, and Paratext in Two Indonesian Translations of Yoshimoto’s Kitchen
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24071/joll.v26i2.2056Keywords:
paratext, queer translation, trans identity, Japanese–Indonesian translationAbstract
Eriko, the trans woman who raises Yuichi Tanabe in Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, is portrayed with warmth and without pathology. In Indonesian, a language without grammatical gender, her identity must be rebuilt through address forms, kinship terms, labels, and the book’s packaging. This article compares the two Indonesian translations of Kitchen, Dewi Anggraeni’s 2009 edition from Penerbit KPG and Ribeka Ota’s 2021 edition from Penerbit Haru, with three objectives: to describe how each translation renders the resources that construct Eriko’s trans identity, to identify how each edition’s paratext presents that identity, and to relate both to each publisher’s position. The study is a qualitative comparison of the Japanese source text with both translations. Thirty-two aligned scenes featuring Eriko were coded for address, kinship, gender labels, voice, and queer vocabulary, and the paratexts as flagging, framing, or backgrounding queer content. Haru keeps the source’s honorific Eriko-san and loanword gay and turns its neutral “parent” into “mother”, but its cover and blurb leave Eriko’s trans identity unmentioned. KPG drops the honorifics, introduces Mama and Papa, absent from the source, renders queer references in clinical Indonesian, and names Eriko on its back cover as a transsexual woman who is “in essence” Yuichi’s father. Neither edition is uniformly affirming; each distributes affirming and attenuating choices across textual levels. In a genderless target language, address terms, kinship terms, and paratext carry the gendering work that pronouns perform elsewhere, and these are the points at which translators and editors can handle trans characters with care.
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