Lost in Translation: The Passages Yayoi Kusama's American Readers Never Saw

In 2011, English-language readers got a softer version of Yayoi Kusama's memoir than the one Japan received in 2002. Nine years later, the missing passages resurfaced, and a museum had to answer for what got left out.

Someone always decides what survives a translation. When Yayoi Kusama's 2002 memoir Infinity Net came out in English in 2011, a handful of sentences didn't make the trip. They described her old Greenwich Village neighborhood using racist language about the Black residents who lived there. Those lines sat out of the English edition for over a decade, until 2023, when journalist Dexter Thomas pulled them back into view for Hyperallergic, days before Kusama's Infinite Love show opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

What followed wasn't a simple scandal. It was a case study in what happens when an institution has spent decades polishing an artist's myth, then has to explain the parts of the story nobody translated.

Kusama apologized. SFMOMA kept the show open. The questions stuck around longer than the news cycle did.

The Sentences That Didn't Cross the Pacific

The passages in question describe Kusama's own account of moving into a declining Greenwich Village in the 1960s. In the original Japanese text, she wrote that property values were falling because of Black people and homeless people in the area, language reproduced in Thomas's reporting and missing from the 2011 English edition. Other passages, also documented in that reporting, made dehumanizing claims about Black people's bodies and behavior. Her earlier fiction wasn't cleaner: a 1971 play featured a Black character described in explicitly racist terms, and a short story leaned on stereotypes about a Black sex worker.

None of that is ambiguous. What's worth sitting with is the gap itself. Thirteen years in which English-language readers, critics, and curators built their picture of Kusama on a text that had already been quietly edited, with no note that anything was missing.

One wrinkle worth flagging: a widely cited New York Times report initially attributed the phrase "primitive, hyper-sexualized beings" to Kusama directly. A May 2024 correction clarified it was Hyperallergic's characterization of her writing, not something she said herself. That doesn't soften the underlying record. It just means the story needed a second round of care that it didn't get the first time.

The Apology, and What It Didn't Undo

Kusama's statement, issued through SFMOMA on October 13, 2023, one day before Infinite Love opened, was direct enough: she said she deeply regretted using hurtful and offensive language, and framed her life's work as one of love, hope, and respect for all people.

Museums have gotten practiced at extracting and publishing this kind of statement. What it doesn't resolve is the timing. The apology came decades after the original Japanese publication, years after an English translation quietly smoothed the record, and a day before a museum needed the story contained ahead of a ticketed opening. Whether contrition on that schedule counts as accountability or just well-timed crisis management is a judgment call, and honestly the source material doesn't settle it either way. I lean skeptical of any apology that lands the day before box office opens, but I'll admit that's a cynical read and not the only reasonable one.

An Institution Answering for a Text It Didn't Write

SFMOMA's response is its own document, worth reading closely. Director Christopher Bedford said the museum stood firmly against anti-Black sentiment and framed the institution's task as presenting artists "holistically and truthfully," acknowledging that visionary work and personal bias can sit in the same biography. Elsewhere he put it more bluntly: the goal wasn't to delete, edit, or cancel the artist, but to reckon with her fully.

That language didn't come from nowhere. A group of community members had spent months pressing the museum by email and letter to contextualize the exhibition, eventually landing a video call with museum officials that included activists Catherine Cusic, Rodney Ewing, Spike Kahn, and Leticia Hernandez. Their ask went past a wall label. They wanted proceeds from a sold-out show redirected toward local Black artists, and a museum that was actually more responsive to curators and artists of color going forward. SFMOMA announced a spring 2024 symposium on reconciling an artist's biography with their output, which at minimum admits a plaque wasn't going to cut it.

It wasn't the museum's first go-round on this either. In 2020, longtime curator Gary Garrels resigned after being quoted saying the museum would "definitely continue to collect white artists." That same year, former director Neal Benezra apologized for removing critical comments from an Instagram post after the murder of George Floyd. The Kusama controversy landed on an institution that was already mid-conversation about whose work it collects and how it takes criticism.

The Interview That Reads Differently Now

Six years before the apology, Dexter Thomas, the same journalist who later broke the Hyperallergic story, wrote for Vice about getting banned from Kusama's studio after interviewing her. He wondered, carefully, whether his race played some part in that decision, while also noting her fragile health and her habit of cutting interviews short. In 2017 that piece read like an ambiguous anecdote about access. In 2023 it reads like an early data point nobody had connected yet.

That's usually how these things go. The evidence doesn't show up all at once. It sits scattered in places nobody thought to cross-reference until something forces the comparison.

Two Minutes Inside the Mirror Room

There's a specific irony in Infinite Love itself. The show's main draw, Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms, limited to two minutes per visitor at $30 a ticket (prices raised $10 for this show specifically), sells an experience of dissolving into a mirrored, borderless universe. It's art about erasing the line between self and everything else. The controversy asked SFMOMA to do the opposite: hold a line, get specific, stop letting the spectacle stand in for a fuller account of who made it.

Some critics figured the apology, however sincere the wording, came too late to be anything but reputation management timed to a ticketed opening. SFMOMA's own framing, reckoning instead of deleting, is one answer to that. It's not obviously the only one.

What the Gap Leaves Behind

Most English-speaking audiences got a version of Kusama that was, quite literally, edited. Not invented, just edited. A memoir missing certain sentences, a translation that made a complicated person easier to love without saying so out loud. That's not a Kusama-specific problem. It's what happens any time an institution builds a global brand around a persona faster than it does the work of full disclosure.

The mirror rooms will keep selling out. The apology stays on the record. What's left is a harder question than either one answers: how much of any celebrated artist's story has already been quietly translated for our comfort, and who got to decide which sentences didn't need to make the trip.