Fear and Trembling
ABOUT
THE BOOK
According to ancient Japanese protocol, foreigners deigning to approach the emperor were to adopt a tone of fear and trembling. Terror and self-abasement conveyed respect. Amélie, well-intentioned, eager, young and Western goes to Japan to spend a year working at the Yumimoto Corporation. Returning to the land where she was born is the fulfilment of a dream for Amélie: working there turns into a comic nightmare.
Poor Amélie can do nothing right. She starts at the bottom of the corporate ladder and immediately reveals a genius for working her way down. She delivers mail, serves tea, updates calendars, photocopies the same pages a thousand times; her job description, fluid at best, runs relentlessly downstream. But of Amélie’s many failings and ill-advised breaches of protocol, the worst by far is becoming infatuated with her immediate superior, the beautiful, impeccable, and implacable Miss Mori.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Adriana
Hunter
Adriana Hunter is an award-winning translator of French. Since “discovering” the first book she was to translate in 1998, she has translated more than 80 books, mostly works of literary fiction. She has won the Scott-Moncrieff prize and the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation translation prize, and was shortlisted twice for the Independent foreign fiction prize (now the Man Booker international prize). In 2013, she won the 27th Annual Translation Prize founded by the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation for her translation of Electrico W by Hervé Le Tellier (2013). She is also a contributor to Words Without Borders. She lives in Kent, England.
Adriana Hunter is an award-winning translator of French. Since “discovering” the first book she was to translate in 1998, she has translated more than 80 books, mostly works of literary fiction. She has won the Scott-Moncrieff prize and the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation translation prize, and was shortlisted twice for the Independent foreign fiction prize (now the Man Booker international prize). In 2013, she won the 27th Annual Translation Prize founded by the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation for her translation of Electrico W by Hervé Le Tellier (2013). She is also a contributor to Words Without Borders. She lives in Kent, England.