Ian M. MacDonald, Kyoko Nakajima
For Granta Japan online, we will be featuring excerpts from the magazine alongside notes from the translators of the work on the challenges they faced when bringing stories from Japanese into English.
Translator’s Note: Ian M. MacDonald
Most of the information in Nakajima’s deceptively simple prose about the characters’ lives, personalities, experiences and relationships is revealed indirectly through a series of dialogues that alternate between the present day, and the period immediately following the Second World War. This dialogue is often spoken without any attribution as to the speaker, a general characteristic of Japanese writing, but one that is especially pronounced in this story.
In Japanese, the age and gender of a speaker are indicated through verbal clues such as their word choice, sentence structure and context. Because these cannot easily be rendered into English, one difficulty was how to make the relationships between speakers clear to the English reader without inserting extraneous information not in the original. For example, the main character, Masaru, reflecting on his childhood, mentions that he and his mother and brother went to stay with ‘a family friend’ at the end of the war. In the wartime scenes, this ‘friend’ turns out to be an old lady (obāsan, literally ‘grandmother’) who runs a sort of boarding house, but the exact nature of their relationship is never spelled out. Is she really a friend, or is that simply the explanation told to Masaru by his mother, who has no job and no place to live, to spare her children from unnecessary anxiety? Nakajima keeps it deliberately vague. I translated obāsan as ‘old lady’ when she is being described, and as ‘you’ when used as a form of address, although neither adequately captures the flavour of the original. Alternatively, using ‘gran’ or ‘aunt’ as a form of address (as one might in English with an elderly family friend) might have been confusing to the reader, especially as the old lady’s real granddaughter appears as a character later in the story.
Inevitably in Japanese writing, one encounters expressions that are simply untranslatable and one has to find equivalent expressions that do not sound out of place in a Japanese context. In another of the scenes that take place in the past, the old lady and Tomiyo are discussing a job announcement that sounds ‘too good to be true’. The old lady warns her to be careful, using the expression mayu-tsuba (literally, ‘eyebrow spit’). In response, Tomiyo licks her finger and rubs her eyebrows. This alludes to a folk superstition, whereby to avoid being duped by tricksters such as foxes and badgers (which can assume a human form) one should rub saliva on one’s eyebrows. In English, I wrote that the job ‘smelled fishy’ and that Tomiyo ‘pinched her nose’.
Takashi set off, leading his little brother by the hand.
At the end of the narrow alley lined with flowerpots, they came to the grassy expanse alongside the Sumida River. To their left they could see the huge Kachidoki Drawbridge opening and closing.
Beyond it, across the river, stood the hospital requisitioned by the Occupation Army and Hongan-ji with its Indian-style main temple hall. Straight ahead, across Mihara Bridge, stood the old clock tower building in Ginza that now served as the military PX. Takashi, who was eight, and Masaru, who was three, had heard that there were lots of American GIs there who handed out chocolates and chewing gum to children. But their mother had warned them: ‘Don’t go near the drawbridge or the GIs will grab you and line you up for target practice.’ So they had never crossed the river.
The bridge was used by American soldiers going to the PX or GHQ from their barracks in Harumi, on the east side of Tsukishima (‘where the World’s Fair would’ve been if it hadn’t been for the war’, people muttered), and was said to be teeming with drunk GIs who caused all kinds of trouble. So whenever Takashi’s mother suggested he take Masaru outside, they headed either west to the river to stare off toward Ginza, or north across the scorched grassland that Tsukuda had become, to sit at the foot of Aioi Bridge.
As Takashi and Masaru returned to their neighbourhood dotted with the skeletons of burnt-out houses, a sudden gust of wind knocked over the washboard and bucket that had been left out to dry. The bucket came hurtling toward the smaller boy. Takashi jerked his brother out of the way, and Masaru spun, pivoting on one foot with his arm above his head like a young woman in a dance hall twirling in the arms of her beau.
Masaru was wearing baggy trousers, hand-me-downs from his big brother. Takashi’s were too short and had been worn for so long they were tattered and threadbare.
‘Back so soon?’ said the old lady who lived on the first floor, peering over spectacles perched on her nose. ‘Well, come in and sit with me, boys. Your ma’s not home yet.’
Takashi nodded, urging his little brother forward, and together they went in and plopped themselves down in a corner of the small sitting room.
The old lady turned to the gasman who had come about a leaky valve. ‘You lied to me last month,’ she said.
‘How so?’ replied the man, fiddling with the rubber hose.
‘You said since Japan surrendered “unconditionally”, the Americans wouldn’t take our land or force Japan to pay reparations. Because it was “unconditional”. That’s what you said. Now look at all that land across the river they’ve gone and taken.’
‘It hasn’t been taken,’ said the man, who was in his late fifties. ‘It’s just been requisitioned.’
The old lady tilted her head to one side, repeating rek-we-zish-und under her breath. She didn’t understand the meaning of the word any more than she knew what ‘unconditional surrender’ meant, and in truth the gasman didn’t either. He replaced the old gas hose with a new one and left the old lady frowning at the receipt.
‘My,’ she said, clicking her tongue, ‘what things cost these days!’
No sooner had the gasman left than the boys’ young mother slid open the front door.
‘How’d it go?’ asked the old lady.
‘Bad – really bad,’ Tomiyo replied, waving her hand emphatically over her head. ‘It wasn’t what I expected at all. I couldn’t believe it.’
‘In what way?’
‘In every way. I was completely floored.’
Kneeling down on the tatami, Tomiyo reached over and gave each of her sons a pat on the head. ‘Did you two behave yourselves?’ she asked. ‘I’ll steam some sweet potatoes for you later.’
‘This is what I went to see about,’ she said, seating herself on a cushion at the low dining table and smoothing the curled edges of something she’d cut out from the newspaper. She read aloud to the old lady:
URGENTLY SEEKING QUALIFIED FEMALE STAFF
Excellent pay and benefits – food, clothing and lodging provided; salary payable in advance upon request. Will reimburse applicants’ travel expenses from anywhere in Japan.
‘Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, when I told them I had two kids they told me this work was unsuitable for married women.’
‘Smells fishy if you ask me,’ said the old lady.
‘Yeah, real fishy!’ Tomiyo replied, pinching her nose. ‘I should’ve consulted you before going. Want to know what they asked me? “Are you prepared to serve as a sexual breakwater to protect and nurture the purity of our race for the next hundred years?” Imagine!’
The old lady – comprehending this even less than she understood ‘unconditional surrender’ – gave the younger woman the blank look of a Noh mask.
Tomiyo frowned and shook her head. ‘In other words, you know. . .’ She paused and glanced at her two boys. ‘Doing it – with American GIs. Can you believe it? I was in shock. I ran straight out of there.’
‘Did they pay your travel expenses at least?’
Tomiyo shook her head again. Just then she noticed a small child with a runny nose standing outside the front door.
‘Who’s that boy?’
‘No idea. He’s been hanging around since morning.’
‘Looks about the same age as Masaru.’ ■
Translated from the Japanese by Ian M. MacDonald.
This is an extract from Kyoko Nakajima's 'Things Remembered and Things Forgotten', featured in Granta 127: Japan. To read the full story, pre-order the issue or subscribe to the magazine.
Illustration by Takahiro Suganuma