Translating Finnegans Wake into Japanese

Any Japanese translator of Finnegans Wake faces a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: whereas the Latin script is used by over 1,800 different languages around the world (including English), the Japanese script is used only by Japanese. This means that words written in the Latin script can pun across multiple languages much more effortlessly compared to words written in the Japanese script. Given this difference, is there a way to plausibly translate the multilingual prose of Finnegans Wake into Japanese?

A New Translation of Book I, Chapter 2 was published on Finnegans Web last October. Compared to previous Japanese translations of the Wake, the New Translation distinguishes itself by recreating all of the major textual features of Joyce's prose, including multilingualism, within the constraints of the Japanese script. On Tuesday, 5 May 2026 at 6:30pm, translator and Finnegans Web co-founder Kenji Hayakawa will present a detailed and beginner-friendly overview of how that was done. This talk will focus on Book I, Chapter 2 and will likely reveal a number of surprising facts about the Wake as well as the Japanese language.

Kenji Hayakawa is a translator and interpreter based in Dublin, Ireland. Working with the English-Japanese pair, he has translated a wide range of material including books by Yoko Tawada, Noam Chomsky, Dipesh Chakrabarty and others. He is the founder and host of Reading Finnegans Wake, a Japanese-language weekly livestream programme endorsed by the Embassy of Ireland in Japan, the James Joyce Centre and the Blooms & Barnacles Podcast. Currently, he is working on a new Japanese translation of Finnegans Wake.

The event is free but booking is essential. Doors open at 6pm.

The James Joyce Centre is supported by the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport.

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