When I published all the translation of Finnegans Wake in Japanese, most readers including myself felt a difficulty to read through it. So I made a new book which used my previous translations to adapt to the original pages selected by Anthony Burgess in A Shorter Finnegans Wake (1967, Viking Press). Burgess's selection included about 1/3 of the original, and I found the selection was very reasonable. Most interesting and important original pages were included in Burgess's book. This time I added brief Japanese summaries at the beginnings of each chapter, so that readers would be more easily able to understand the plot-like progress of the story. My another trial was that at the end of the translation I made the citation indexes in the original pages about names, books or key matters which had been in James Joyce' brain at his creation time. The index items became 119; the largest citation numbers was on Swift (26) and the second Wilde (18), which suggests, for example, that Joyce had been very interested in the affairs of these Irish authors. My close friend said this book became much more understandable in comparison to the previous whole translation. I thought that Finnegans Wake was a story of five members (HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun and Issy) of a Dublin pub family who were worried, quarreled and sought the origin (god) of the coordinate axes of time and space in a night world, and that the book has been casting fundamental, metaphysical questions for us like Dostoyevsky's novels and Heidegger's philosophy.
