午夜剧场

It was during the hot summer while I was refining the translation of this book. Fumiko Nishizaki contributed an article about the BLM movement to the Asahi Shimbun, and Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Between the World and Me" was listed as one of the three books to read. This work (winner of the National Book Award) led Toni Morrison to call Coates "the successor to James Baldwin." My translation served as an introduction to Coates in Japan.

Also, in an article about white nationalism contributed by Yasushi Watanabe to the "Enzetsukan (Public Speaking Hall)" section of this magazine, there was the following sentence: "He [Trump] also frequently used code words such as 'the forgotten people' and 'law and order' that seemed intended to inspire white conservatives. The prominent Black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates described such a figure as 'America's first white president.'" "The First White President" was also the title of the article used as the epilogue of this book. Why he specifically calls him the *first* is revealed there.

This book is structured by chronologically arranging nine articles Coates contributed to "The Atlantic" (most of which were written during the Obama administration) and adding his own commentary to each article. Among them is "The Case for Reparations" (2014), which brought Coates various awards. Regarding these reparations: "The reparations Coates envisions must aim for something collective for 'all African Americans who experienced 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow, and 60 years of separate but equal'" (from the "Translator's Afterword").

This book is a collection of articles hand-picked by Coates himself. Hidetaka Namai, in a book review for the Asahi Shimbun, praised it, saying, "None of them feel dated, and they capture the hope, confusion, disappointment, and anger of each moment in a rare way." Please feel free to read from whichever chapter you like.

Coates is not a militant anti-racist. For that very reason, I want to take his message seriously: what Black people want is, "after all, the most important of all individual rights granted to Americans is the right to be mediocre, to be foolish, to be immature—in other words, the right to be human" (Chapter 1 of this book).

Toshiho Ikeda (Co-translator)

午夜剧场 Press

Vol. 1: 272 pages, Vol. 2: 240 pages, 2,500 yen each (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time this magazine was published.