UMN Language Instructor Marnie Jorenby on Japanese, Authorship, and Finding the Positivity in People
Photo by Caroline Miltich, CLA student
When Marnie Jorenby signed up for her first Japanese language course, she could not have anticipated writing and successfully publishing novels entirely in the language. What began as a small interest has now grown into a lifelong dedication, and her commitment to the language shines through in the praise she has received for her works, many saying they read like that of the work of a native speaker. The senior lecturer and director of language instruction for Japanese has now published three novels, ばいばい、バッグ・レディ「Bye-bye Bag Lady」, こんばんは、太陽の塔 「Good Evening, Sun Tower」, and 物理学者の心「The Physicist’s Heart」, and she plans on writing more. From her unique perspective on language learning, living full-time in Japanese, and finding inspiration in everyday life, Jorenby reflects on the impact that the Japanese language has had on her both as an author and an instructor.
The Building Blocks
Jorenby recalls discovering her fondness for Japanese unintentionally. “I took Japanese rather by chance. My boyfriend at the time was taking the class, and I thought it would be fun to spend more time with him, so I decided to take it, too.” Despite this, she quickly found that learning Japanese was an exciting new experience, and she was hungry for more. “I just really took to the language. It seemed to me, it was not as difficult to me as it was for the other students. It was almost like I had an affinity for the language.”
One of the most captivating aspects of the language was the characters that Japanese utilizes. The language is composed of three separate character sets called Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji, and Jorenby found endless possibilities of expression within them. “I was always fascinated with the characters,” she says. “They’re a lot more elegant than the English alphabet. The calligraphy surrounding them is a lot more complex.” Considering she was an art major, she wonders if the artistic nature of writing in the language was part of what grabbed her attention so immediately, “It was more like drawing a picture than just drawing the alphabet.” Learning to use that new alphabet was like opening up a whole new world, and she found she could express herself in new and different ways. “You really have this sensation of starting over from the absolute beginning, where you don’t know how to write even one thing,” she says. “I really enjoyed that.”
From Passion to Project
Her devotion to the language and interest in the writing process brought about a serendipitous chain of events that led to a very interesting career. “I think what made me able to write was that I then devoted my life to Japanese.” She not only changed the way she wrote, but she began to make a huge shift in what kind of content she was consuming in order to truly master the language. “Half the time, I really live in Japanese. I read Japanese things. I talk to Japanese people. So it’s not strange that after years of that, you might become able to write something, right?”
When bringing her stories to life, Jorenby says that she had “somewhat kind of serendipitous good fortune,” in getting her first novel, ばいばい、バッグ・レディ「Bye-bye Bag Lady」, published. “I became acquainted with a novelist and a critic and they agreed to read my work, and that was very lucky for me.” She worked with Tatsuro Murakami, who headed the literary agency Boiled Eggs LTD, until his passing in October 2024. His daughter, Kaoru Mori, has since stepped into his place and has worked with Jorenby since, largely on her third novel.
Jorenby’s third novel, 物理学者の心「The Physicist’s Heart」, is a completely fictional work, though she makes references to her own life and relationships. “It’s kind of a cross between my relationship with my spouse and also my relationship with Japan,” she says. It’s not unusual for her to find inspiration from her own life. For example, the main character in ばいばい、バッグ・レディ「Bye-bye Bag Lady」was inspired by her former teacher and mentor. “I got the idea from the fact that I had a sensei in Japan who always carried about a bunch of bags. And for a while she carried about my manuscripts too and showed them to people.”
While she has drawn inspiration from her experiences, she also finds stories in everyday life, and incorporates them into her dedicated daily practice of writing. From newspapers to everyday household items, she believes that there is always a story worth telling. “Every day, I naturally think of stories. Maybe a lamp, I might think of a really short story about it. So it’s not hard to find ideas. They will come to me, and sometimes, if I like them, I will write them down, and maybe five years later I will come back and write a little bit more about it.”
As Heard on MPR
Jorenby was interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio when her first novel came out.
The Process and Purpose
Jorenby’s writing process is one she describes as slow yet constant. “I think it’s very important to write every day. It’s very important to be consistent, but I also rarely suffer from writer’s block because I’m not picky about what I put down on the paper.” Her stories go through countless versions and revisions in order to get the result she wants. Her secret to getting it just right? Understanding that writing is a process that takes time, and perfection is a myth. “I’ll just write as much as I can of a chapter, and it probably won’t look very good, but then I go back to it day after day and kind of comb through it while telling myself that, until I’m done with it, it doesn’t have to be great, right?”
Aside from getting her story just right, she also has the added challenge of writing in her second language. While being able to use three separate alphabets in the process of writing is exciting, it also poses some challenges. “One has to balance those [alphabets]. There are a lot of choices that happen when you write a Japanese sentence that just don’t happen in English. For instance, you can choose which alphabet you use to write which character, and that can affect the quality of your sentence a lot.” The process of having her stories edited and published has proved as a learning experience in the realm of her Japanese education, “When I write a manuscript, it’s not easy. It’s not always easy to know which of those to use. Before I started publishing novels, I wasn’t really aware of the differences between them, but because an editor is always looking at my manuscripts, I’ve gained a lot of knowledge through that.”
Between the writer, her agent, and her publishing company, a manuscript goes through many versions before it can become a published novel. While this process is a long one, she’s able to take her time to craft beautiful stories that reflect on her view of the world. “I intend my stories to be positive about people. I like to go deep into the human mind, and I find a lot of people’s personalities to be positive. I want people to read my stories and get a warm feeling about human beings, and some of the human beings I write about are a little strange, but I want people to be able to get into the minds of people who are very different, and realize the beauty and interest of those people.”
From Student to Teacher
While the process of learning the language has been a long and vigorous one, Jorenby uses that experience as leverage in teaching her Japanese language students here at the University of Minnesota. “I have a bit of an advantage in that, some of the mistakes the students make, I made the same mistakes, so it’s easier for me to explain to them.” She also uses English in her classroom in order to give her students a solid foundation for understanding the structure of Japanese. She explains that understanding how Japanese is organized is vital for being able to speak it, as it is such an intricate and complicated language. “[I emphasize] those rules so that in the future, when they encounter a new piece of writing or speech, they are better able to deduce what it could mean.”
The complicated nature of the language made it a difficult one to learn how to teach, and she reflects on the effort it took to learn how to do so effectively. “Just because you speak a language doesn’t make you a teacher of it, right? At the beginning, I was a very poor teacher.” Despite the challenges, Jorenby persevered in her dedication to the language, and kept applying herself as a student of Japanese, even while teaching others. “I taught at a Japanese academy for girls for a couple years, and one of the teachers who had a background in language pedagogy gave me a lot of hints. She really helped me.” Nowadays, though, you can find Jorenby in Folwell Hall teaching her students—at least, when she’s not busy working on her next book.
The Next Chapter
Jorenby has many stories in the works at any given time, though most recently she has finished a manuscript inspired by a letter that had been taken from the pocket of a Kamikaze pilot during World War II. An article detailing the first half of that story has been published in the December issue of a popular Japanese literary magazine, Bungakukai. She is not planning on slowing down any time soon, and is excited to continue to use the language she loves to tell her stories.
Dive Deeper
This story was written by Caroline Miltich, an undergraduate student in CLA.
