Polly Barton’s debut novel, What Am I, A Deer? opens at a school talent show with a twelve-year-old girl singing a Céline Dion ballad – a cappella and in French – while dressed in her mother’s gold satin negligée, a scene that is somehow at once funny, viscerally humiliating, and transcendent. I spoke with Polly before the novel had been published, when she was just finishing the last round of edits, so the manuscript was very much on her mind, which may be why our conversation touches on some of the issues at the heart of the novel without revealing much about what happens in it.
We spoke in May of 2025 while Polly was in New York for the release of her translations of The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa and A Hundred Years and a Day by Tomoka Shibasaki. Her translations have met with great critical and commercial success, including Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai, Butter by Asako Yuzuki and Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, which was longlisted for both the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award for translation. She is also the author of two extraordinary works of non-fiction, Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History, and now the remarkable novel, What Am I, A Deer?, all published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
– Eric Ozawa, September 2026
Eric Ozawa (EO): How are you managing your schedule?
Polly Barton (PB): Badly. [laughs]
EO: You’re very in demand, I imagine. People are pitching you books.
PB: That’s nice of you to say, but I don’t think it’s limited to me: a lot of Japanese translators that I know are in demand at the moment because the demand for Japanese books is just so high. The whole landscape is just so different from when I started out, when you had to find books yourself and then pitch them. Now editors are constantly acquiring new stuff, and then they come to me, and so sometimes these dream projects like Hunchback land on my doorstep without me having to do anything. That’s a wonderful thing, obviously. But I also sometimes have a little bit of – I don’t know if guilt is the right word? But the sense that I’ve maybe become more passive than I used to be. With There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, I had heard from people that I trusted that Tsumura’s prose was really great, and I might like it, so I looked her up and read that book and then cold pitched it. In the end, it was published by Bloomsbury, and that felt like a really big and nice thing to happen. I’m doing less of that now. But maybe that’s okay. I mean, this wave can’t last forever, right?
EO: How many books are you doing a year now? You squeezed an 18,000-word book into your schedule.
PB: Actually, there’ve been a couple of slightly shorter ones. I’ve got the new Matsuda Aoko collection coming out [The Woman Dies] later this year, which is not hugely long, and I had translated some of those stories already. But in total I’m doing about five a year.
EO: Five a year is a lot.
PB: Quite a lot. Then a bit of my own writing.
EO: A bit. That sounds like a very British way of putting it – or else very Japanese. I guess there are people who do more, but I don’t understand how. How do you handle five books a year plus your own writing? Are you finishing one book and then starting the next, or are you doing it all simultaneously?
PB: I do most simultaneously. It’s only I’d say the last couple of years that I’ve got to the stage where almost all the translation I do is literary translation. Until quite recently I was doing quite a lot of “commercial” translation, which in my case, at least latterly, meant art essays and catalogues, and I really enjoyed that variation. I think that the books I’m drawn to tend to be quite intense. So actually, breaking it up and moving between voices is a way of giving myself a bit of fresh air. So, I do enjoy that. I’ve now got to the stage where I’ll be working on two or three things simultaneously. I’ll then also have other projects that I’ll have handed in already, but they’re in various stages of editing.
EO: It’s not done done. It’s still coming back at you.
PB: Sometimes I can be moving between seven different books, and that’s maybe too much.
EO: I’m sweating just hearing that.
PB: But with respect to the staying fresh principle, the nice thing about doing multiple projects simultaneously is that I can do one draft of a project and then leave it for a significant chunk of time. You know, I can do a month on one book and then move on to the next one and then move back. And that works for me.
EO: I am curious how you find ways to cope with all of those books in your head. And what do you find is the kind of the break you need from it? The antidote?
PB: It’s interesting, isn’t it? I remember when I was translating the three books that have just come out in the U.S. at the same time. The Place of Shells [by Mai Ishizawa], Hunchback, and A Hundred Years and a Day – such radically different books. But then I think that the fact that they were radically different was helpful because there was no room for blurring them, because they were too distinct.
My antidotes? I walk all the time. I need a couple of hours walking a day. Ideally. Being away from things and moving, being in my body. And I think this applies to writing, but I’m noticing it also applies to translation. Often I’ll be kind of really wrestling with a problem and not know how to deal with it and just not find a solution. And then I’ll go for a walk or a run, and it’ll come to me within 20 minutes. There’s something about sort of releasing the grip and putting it on the back burner, which I think is really helpful for me. I have recently restarted playing the piano. I played it a bit growing up, but I mostly played the saxophone.
EO: You played the saxophone?
PB: Yeah. And then I had to do the piano as well, and it was a chore, nothing but a chore. But recently I’ve been listening obsessively to Philip Glass’s Piano Études as I work, and I got taken by the idea of really wanting to learn how to play them.
EO: And have you?
PB: I’m on my way. They’re really hard. But that’s what I’m working on. But anyway, coming back after twenty-five years . . . the last time, when I left off, piano was a chore, and now it’s become this pure joy. I think that’s a similar thing – doing something very physical and sort of shutting off the thinking part. It’s a really good antidote.
EO: That’s really interesting. I noticed that your response to the question at the end of the 2023 MONKEY [‘What role, if any, does music play in your translation process?’] was that you cannot translate with music on. But you used to listen to Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Which are two of my favorites.
PB: I kind of come and go with the music, actually. I was a hard no for a while, and then I kind of slipped back. I think it depends on what I’m doing.
EO: The Place of Shells and Philip Glass. Does that work?
PB: [laughing] Yeah. It’s a good combo.
EO: Just last night I was reading the playlist – the Multimedia Mixtape to Fifty Sounds. Was that something you had always thought about doing or was it a last-minute addition?
PB: That was actually the editor’s suggestion, because the book is littered with musical references. I’ve just finished work on a novel [What Am I, a Deer?], and the elevator pitch is that it’s about karaoke and violent crushes. In place of chapter headings, it has song lyrics. We’re figuring out what to do about the playlist for that one. But yes, all of which it to say: music is important.
EO: That sounds great. Like one entry for the ending will have a book that you translated: There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, but also a song. ‘Oetsu to Kanki no Nanoriuta’ by Tenniscoats. There’s a kind of joy in the variety of things you can put in there. Roald Dahl’s The Witches, and then a film, right after Devo. Very nice. So you’re doing something similar for the novel, you have a playlist?
PB: It’s unclear at this stage whether we’ll include it or not – but the idea is to use lyrics to break up the text, kind of in lieu of chapter headings. Lyrics formatted so that they look a bit like they’re on a karaoke screen. But getting permission for lyrics is really hard and expensive. Even the shortest lyrics require permission, so it’s all very complex.
Coming back to that, and what you were saying about the freedom of it: that was one of the exciting things about writing this book, I think. Having to write fifty essays about onomatopoetic words somehow opened up enormous freedom, inside that quite rigid constraint. Also, it helps that my publisher has been so brilliant – they are very anything goes. It’s him who suggested doing the list. He’s really into lists like this.
EO: For the proposal that won the essay prize from Fitzcarraldo, how much of the book [Fifty Sounds] had you written?
PB: Barely anything! Maybe three or four essays. And I didn’t know what a lot of the sounds were going to be. So figuring that out, and getting the right combination, and in the right order, narrowing it down – all of that was quite difficult. For a long time I had a wall covered in post-it notes, where I was trying to figure out which sounds to include, and how I should explain them, and in what order. And I think about this a lot because I really, really believe that if I hadn’t had that contract, I’d have abandoned the project. Because I’d have just thought, I can’t do it. You know? I thought it was a good idea, and actually maybe it was a bad idea. [laughing] But because I had this freaking contract, I was compelled to make it work. And then it’s just a question of problem solving. You solve enough of the problems, and you end up with a finished product.
EO: Before I read Fifty Sounds, I imagined the book would be about linguistics, Japanese culture – things like that. I did not anticipate how autobiographical it is, but that became what fascinated me the most. And the freedom of the form itself. In some ways it kind of brings us back to Tomoka Shibasaki’s A Hundred Years and a Day, which you just translated. You only get the form at the second or third piece. But how do you sustain that? There’s an endless creativity within the constraint, and there are these through-lines that create a cumulative effect.
PB: That’s a parallel that I hadn’t drawn, but it’s a really good one. My book is linked essays, I suppose, and there’s something of the same snapshot aspect as in the Shibasaki stories, right? It’s like you are beginning again each time, and yet simultaneously building on what is already there. I found it a really freeing way of working, stylistically as well, because I had this sense that the publisher trusted me. I was able to go into quite hardcore linguistic theory or philosophy, while the other bits are basically prose poems, or me talking about weird sex I had or whatever. It’s all kind of there, and it was all okay to do. So that was nice.
EO: Now that we’re talking about it, I can see a parallel in the structural conceit with Porn: An Oral History. We also have a frame. And each chapter is going to fit within that frame. But you’re not going to know what the next one’s going to be. There’s variety within the structure. There’s also a sense within the conversation that you’re not quite sure where it’s going to veer, and we’re also getting these oblique glimpses of a longer arc in your own life.
PB: I’m interested in having multiple chronologies happening at the same time. When I started the porn project, I wrote down a series of themes that I thought I wanted to cover or that should be covered. And, you know, I was obviously terrified before the first interview and had prepared some starter questions. But I think over time I realised that, if this was going to work and if the conversations were going to go the way that I wanted them to go, I had to be in them – not be outside, thinking, Oh, what am I going to ask next? You know? Just to sit within the arc of it, wherever that ended up leading.
Some of them are very cyclical, and some are quite contradictory. I’d forgotten this, but something that worried me before I published the book was this sense that although I’m the throughline in these conversations, I’m quite different in all of them. Expressing different opinions and maybe seeming a bit hypocritical, or without a backbone. That was very worrying to me. But then I also think it presents a truth about the way that we interact as humans and, particularly with a topic like this which has so many different sides. I think probably – to the extent that you have thoughts and feelings about something like porn – they will differ depending on the specific context you’re in. You know, if you’re down at the pub with your friends or if you’re at an academic lecture, probably what you’re thinking about porn is different. I think that is shown through the different conversations.
EO: When I was reading Porn before our interview, I was very conscious of you as an interviewer, and your approach to these delicate conversations that you’re asking people to engage in with you – on the record, though anonymous. One thing that struck me was that you’re very generous, and you’re there to listen and draw people out a little bit. And you’ll also confide in them – things that you might not confide in other situations, depending on the conversation. You share things with people. The book reminded me a little bit of some of the work of an author you mention in Fifty Sounds, Rachel Cusk.
Her novel Outline is structured around ten conversations, and so much of it is the narrator listening to other people reveal themselves to her. Except I would say Cusk has this almost terrifying intelligence, an x-ray vision into people. She can see all of their weaknesses and illusions and failings, and it becomes very clear as they talk that they’re revealing all these things. Whereas in your case, in Porn, you are very generous with the people you talk to. You invite them to share things, but the x-ray vision about failings is reserved for yourself. You do it in Fifty Sounds too: you expose all these things in yourself, and you give people space in doing that. And sometimes that invites people in a little bit – that you’ll share something with them.
PB: I mean, I would love to be terrifyingly intelligent and have that kind of cold, exacting approach to things, but that’s not ever who I’m gonna be. And I think that a lot of the impression of that terrifying intelligence in Cusk’s work is inextricably linked to the fact that she doesn’t share much about herself, right? Because as soon as you do start sharing and giving opinions, your own fallibility emerges. I was conscious that, with a book like Porn, it would have been very different if I were an academic or an expert in that field.
But because I was coming to it from a place of total ignorance on various levels, I felt like the only thing that I could offer that was of any value was vulnerability. Being vulnerable along with other people. And if they were, like you said, going on the record talking about this quite personal stuff, I also had to share something. In fact, I shared more in those conversations. which was redacted for the book because I have my name on the cover. And there are certain things that I think you just can’t reveal – or I should rather say, I didn’t want to reveal. But certainly in terms of the power dynamic and listening dynamic, I felt like I really didn’t want to be the interviewer on high. I wanted, if anything, for it to be like conversations, or porn chats, as I came to call them. Something about the equality of it felt really important to me.
EO: How did you find the people first?
PB: Well, pretty much all of them were people I knew already. And that was part of the deal, for a similar reason. I felt like if I didn’t know them, then it would have to be an interview. Whereas if it was someone I did know, then it could be much more like a chat. It was a funny thing. I was doing it mid-pandemic, and so we couldn’t meet inside a lot of the time. A lot of them happened in parks.
EO: Really? Wow. That’s what I wanted to ask. You and I are sitting here in my tucked-away office a few feet away from each other. I was wondering, what was the blocking for these scenes, and that just changes everything. You’re sitting on a park bench, a dog’s running by.
PB: Honestly, there were so many dog interruptions because sometimes we’d be having a picnic, and a dog would come over, and later I would be transcribing it, and suddenly I’d hear, Oh, hello! Which I always loved, listening back.
EO: We need the director’s cut with the dogs.
PB: Yeah, exactly. They weren’t all outside, and actually a couple of them were on Zoom because some people were in different countries.
EO: It makes sense to think of it happening in the pandemic era of separation, and the feeling of deprivation we experienced – to have something that’s about sensuality or desire, something that explores the space of fantasy.
PB: I also think the pandemic was really key in another way for me, which is that I don’t think I could have found the courage to make that book outside of that context. Back then it felt like the world was going to hell in a handcart. At the same time there was a kind of optimism, at least at the beginning, like: maybe this is a chance for us to look at the fundamental principles of our society and kind of reshape them, and question things. I think it came out of those two potentially opposing forces.
EO: It’s a good thing we took care of all that. [laughs]
PB: Yeah, I know, right? [laughing] Thank goodness, so much better now, this world. God, it feels sort of laughable, doesn’t it? To look back on that optimism.
EO: I think there’s also a kind of countervailing force to that generosity. I wanted to ask about a line on page 153, ‘I think I’m driven to have the conversations that feel awkward because of their very awkwardness. Whereas I think you tend to avoid them more.’
PB: [laughs] I think this is true. It’s true of my kind of conversational, personal style, but I also think I’ve come to understand that for me, it’s true of writing – and translation to a certain extent – but all my good writing comes out of a sense of emotional urgency. And that emotional urgency is usually felt around things that I feel should not be spoken about. Or that there’s some element of risk. I was releasing this novel and I thought, This is my third book. It’ll get easier every time. But this time it’s a novel, and I feel just as terrified again. You know, each time it feels like, Oh no, this is the really scary one. You know, with Fifty Sounds it was because it’s a memoir. Then Porn, well, because it’s porn. And now it’s like, Well no, because it’s a novel, and it’s so personal. There’s always a different thing.
I have come to understand that it’s part of the process. That if I wasn’t feeling like this, it would be a bad sign about what the work meant to me. That if I was saying, Yeah, well, fine, release it, whatever – that would indicate a certain sort of detachment that would probably speak to there not being enough of a connection and not going deep enough.
EO: That’s interesting. There’s a certain perversity that’s generative, a desire to go against the grain – to go at what you’re not supposed to. That’s part of the long arc narrative of Fifty Sounds. The joy in saying something you’re not supposed to say in Japanese and in not doing the right thing. It makes Porn seem like a rebound after the kind of closed-in-ness of Japan. There’s the dialogue with Y where you keep saying ‘kimi’ [masculine word for you] right? And then there’s that flash in his eye. And that seems tied into the porn kind of impulse that’s behind that book.
PB: It’s funny hearing you say that ’cause it’s a hundred percent right. And it also seems so infantile, right? It’s basically a kid wanting to be naughty.
EO: But the way it leads to literature is the magic of it, right? It’s not just drawing obscene graffiti on the blackboard.
PB: As you’re saying that, I’m thinking over the authors that I really love and like translating. You know, Matsuda Aoko’s work and Hunchback are transgressive in kind of challenging ways. I feel like that challenging-ness is an important part of it for me. Especially knowing that not everything will get translated – well, these days maybe everything will get translated! But I started out with this burning sense that not everything will be translated and so as translators we have some sort of responsibility that comes from choosing, right? I’m thinking what should be available in English and wanting to put my weight behind books that feel like they are working for good in the long run.
EO: And the transgression and the working for good are tied together?
PB: Well, it’s transgressive because it’s pushing against the patriarchy in Matsuda Aoko’s work, and Hunchback is pushing against all these ableist parts of society.
EO: It reminds me of a line on the next page [p.154] of Porn: ‘There’s some dreadful secret at the heart of everything, and I know what the secret is, and yet it still remains there.’
PB: I think about that a lot, because that conversation is with a close friend of mine. Sometimes when you really get into a conversation with a friend, you find yourself saying stuff that you would not be able to articulate to yourself if you were alone. And it’s like, wow, I do really feel that and I really believe it, but I can’t believe that these words are coming out of my mouth. In a way I feel like Porn was, in the heart of the pandemic, a paean to the wonder of human conversation and what can come of it. Because I do feel like it opens up spaces that can’t be accessed by text. It’s a physical thing, and you are processing things in a different way when you’re speaking them out loud. This is the principle on which therapy is based, right?
EO: I was going to say, that moment feels like a kind of therapeutic breakthrough. We were talking earlier about Nuar Alsadir’s book, Animal Joy, which is also built around transgressive behavior. The things that you push down.
PB: One of the reasons I love that book – and I love that book for so many different reasons – but one of the reasons I loved it was because I feel like laughter and humor has been so important to me, in my writing life, but also just in my life, as a child. I grew up in a house that really values humor and silliness. Thinking that through from a psychoanalytic perspective was really interesting to me. And then bringing it together with this transgressive sense.
EO: Were you conscious of that therapeutic framework in some of these conversations, or as the book was coming together? It’s not the kind of structure where there’s one person trying to be healed. It’s a different therapeutic model.
PB: I don’t know if I was that conscious of it, but it’s really interesting to think about it like that. When I started on that project, I didn’t plan to publish them as transcripts. I thought I would work them up into something more like Fifty Sounds. More like polished essays.
EO: It was research that would feed into something.
PB: Yeah. And I would talk about my process and my journey and everything. It was when I started transcribing them that I was like, Okay, no. The duality within the singular conversations – and also the range of voices – I think is really important to this project. This also comes down to an ethical issue. I didn’t want to subsume all of those people’s perspectives into my own. I wanted them to have their own space on the page, you know?
EO: Which echoes what we were talking about with Shibasaki – the egalitarian spirit – that it’s not me, taking what I find interesting and using it, but that you commit not just to the original format but also to that egalitarian spirit.
PB: Yeah. Although my name is on the front cover and those people’s names are not. [laughs] I’m so egalitarian, but I’m claiming all the credit.
EO: Do you feel that now, with your extremely busy translation schedule – five books a year, and these last three that are so different all right up against each other – that writing your own work feels like a kind of antidote space? Or, since it’s the same chair, the same computer, is it the same? Translating is writing as well, so maybe it’s not that different?
PB: I think it can feel like an antidote space. I think it can also feel like the opposite. There were times with this last book when I thought, This is hell. Why am I choosing to do this, to drag myself through the sewer? And those days I just translate. I mean translating has its more difficult aspects, and it can be really emotionally challenging, but it’s a different level I think with your own writing.
EO: It’s a different kind of bounded freedom.
PB: I struggle with combining the two. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. I feel like they work according to quite different timeframes. With translating, I can pretty much predict how long the translation is going to take me. I can do three hours a day or ten hours a day or whatever. And as soon as I open up the text, I’m almost immediately in it. Whereas with writing, I feel like, ideally, I would have a month at least with nothing else on, and I would not even look at emails. And even then, it would take me three or four days before I was there. It’s really hard to reconcile those two different ways of being.
EO: That’s true for me too. The momentum of the book is already there in a translation. You just come back into it. But you’re generating the momentum for your own book, and so you need to be in that space. And you need to be cleared of all those other demands on your attention. Translation deadlines can also compete with that. But you’ve made it through.
PB: I made it through.
EO: Do you see any connection to the form of the novel that you’ve written and Fifty Sounds and Porn?
PB: It’s less of a framed structure, I think. There are definitely some crossovers. I think it’s formally quite strange, so maybe that’s similar. It does a fair bit of jumping in time.
EO: Which these books do. How do you see it in relation to “Alice,” the novel you were writing before? You mentioned in Fifty Sounds, that it had a character named Alice living in Japan.
PB: Do I say that in Fifty Sounds? Did I mention Alice? I’d forgotten that! Do I see a relationship between that and the new stuff? No. But you know, when I was writing all of these bad novels in my twenties, I had a very fixed idea of what I felt fiction could be. And I think that, although Fifty Sounds is classified as non-fiction and the novel is classified as a novel, there’s a great degree of similarity between them, you know?
And I think that’s been quite freeing for me – to realize that you can write fiction that’s about form. Not about the content. That’s been freeing. I think with Fifty Sounds, I felt like finally I was writing as myself, and so this new one has been like an experiment in writing as myself, but within the fiction space. It’s third person, so it’s not me but the voice still feels like me.
That’s markedly different to the Alice stuff, which felt very much like writing what I thought fiction should be, you know?
EO: And now in a kind of rebellion, pushing back against that form, you’ve found a voice that can capture your experiences, rather than creating an alter ego Alice who’s going through the steps of a normal novel.
PB: Yeah, exactly that. It’s definitely not normal, but I think it is also about being normal and not. If that makes sense.
Polly Barton’s first novel, What Am I, A Deer? was published by Fitzcarraldo in April 2026. It was shortlisted for the 2026 Goldsmiths Prize. She is the Tolka 2026 translator-in-residence.
Eric Ozawa is a writer and translator. His writing has been published in Granta, Electric Literature, and The Nation where he covered the aftermath of the 3/11 disaster, interviewing authors such as Hideo Furukawa, Banana Yoshimoto, and Koji Suzuki. He has translated four novels by Satoshi Yagisawa, including the international bestseller Days at the Morisaki Bookshop which was short-listed for the British Book Award for Debut Book of the Year. He lives in New York, where he teaches at New York University. His book, Enemy, Alien will be published by W. W. Norton.