Biography

Wrote about process of his novel's adaptation into Cloud Atlas (2012), in which he also makes a cameo appearance, in Sept. 30, 2012 issue of NY Times Magazine.

He and Japanese-born wife KA Yoshida have an autistic child, and in 2013 they translated a book written by an autistic, 13-year-old Japanese boy into English.

I believed that 'Cloud Atlas' would never be made into a movie. I was half right. It has now been adapted to the screen, but as a sort of pointillist mosaic. We stay in each of the six worlds just long enough for the hook to be sunk in, and from then on the film darts from world to world at the speed of a plate-spinner, revisiting each narrative long enough to propel it forward.

Suggestiveness in novels becomes exactitude in film. Too much detail clogs text like cholesterol clogs arteries, and three sentences of description per roof/landscape/face are normally ample. The trick is to 'stroke' the reader's imagination into life and get it to work for you. In a film, however, detail cannot be suggested: it is either shown or it isn't.

All roads lead to closure. The unwritten contract between author and reader does not contain a clause saying 'I, the author, do faithfully promise to reveal the fates of the major characters', but films do, which is why so few of the films with four or five stars from the review of posterity end in uncertain futures for the principle players.

Adaptation is a form of translation, and all acts of translation have to deal with untranslatable spots. Sometimes late at night I'll get an email from a translator asking for permission to change a pun in one of my novels, or to substitute an idiomatic phrase with something plainer. My response is usually the same: you are the one with the knowledge of the 'into' language so do what works. During the adaptation of 'Cloud Atlas' the filmmakers speak fluent film language, and they've done what works.

I'm basically not a novelist. I'm a writer of novellas, and that's my optimum form: 70 to 100 pages. Meaty enough to get going and form emotional attachments; short enough, hopefully, to not get boring.