We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation)
Page 28
Perhaps it is more accurate to think of this dynamic in Hoshino’s literary vision less as impossible transformation and more as non-linear transformation. His stories follow a logic of what if—what if I were human, what if I were not? What if I were a cat? A fish? A bird? But, as I have said, the transformations that result from these conditional premises (if I were Japanese, I would do this; if I were a guerrilla, I would do that) are left incomplete—there is always the possibility, or maybe even the necessity, of never staying for long within the parameters of the new condition. Rather, Hoshino keeps multiple incompatible possibilities open within his narratives (I am Japanese, I am a guerrilla, I am a Chino), resisting the kind of narrative closure that would leave his characters (and readers) in one place or another. The medium of fiction allows for this open-endedness, this wavering movement between mutually exclusive what ifs. It is, perhaps, the true basis of change, of revolution, for him: this space between incompatible possibilities, between conditions. It is a space of the unconditional, where possibility emerges at its purest.
To inhabit this space is to be neither fish nor fowl—a bird swimming through air, a fish flying through water. Benjamin’s theory of translation again resonates, providing a key for understanding Hoshino’s interest in allusion and adaptation as a mode of creating this space of pure possibility. The “pure language” Benjamin speaks of is similarly unconditional, a fleetingly glimpsed realm where the conditions imposed by two languages melt away and the meaning that emerges belongs to neither, yet both. The desire to inhabit this space drives Hoshino’s fictional production and defines its political potential, as it is impossible to remain in the space of the majority while filled with such desire. It drives toward constant multiplicity, constant flight into the endlessly proliferating minor worlds excluded by the parameters of the major. In each instance, of course, this flight is fraught with anxiety and an acknowledgment of the impossibility of completely overcoming one’s origins. But the desire persists, like a phantom limb or phantasmatic phallus (or tiny wedge?), opening up the everyday and allowing for an experience of otherness that leads to an inability to return to the previous status quo. And at its most successful, Hoshino’s fiction produces a similar complex of revolutionary desire in the reader as well.
Brian Bergstrom
July 2011
1 Karatani Kōjin, “Kindai bungaku no owari (The End of Modern Literature),” Waseda Bungaku (May 2004), 4–29. Translation of this and other passages is mine unless otherwise noted.
2 Waseda Bungaku, 158.
3 He keeps a blog at hoshinot.asablo.jp/blog/, posts from which have been translated into English by Shiori Yamazaki, Brent Lue, Adrienne Carey Hurley, Francis Guérin, and myself for publication on the PM Press website (www.pmpress.org).
4 Waseda Bungaku, 158.
5 Waseda Bungaku, 7.
6 For a good history of the Japanese immigration to the Dominican Republic, see Oscar Horst and Katsuhiro Asagiri, “The Odyssey of Japanese Colonists in the Dominican Republic,” Geographical Review 90, no. 3, (July 2000): 335–58.
7 Bungei, (Kawade Shobō, Spring 2006), 58–59.
8 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael
9 See Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, (New York: Dover, 1968).
10 See Yoji Hasegawa, A Walk in Kumamoto: The Life and Times of Setsu Koizumi, Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Wife, (Kent: Global Oriental, 1997); this text includes a translation of Koizumi’s memoir, Reminiscences.
11 From Oscar Lewis’s introduction to Kwaidan, xii. W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 261.
12 Bungei, 54–55.
13 This version of the tale is translated as “Urashima the Fisherman” by Royall Tyler in his Japanese Tales (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 154–56.
Acknowledgments
Brian Bergstrom
I would like to thank Thomas Lamarre, Anne McKnight, Norma Field, Christine Lamarre, Maria Krasinski, Ramsey Kanaan, the endlessly vivacious ATJ Team (Brent Lue, Olivier Marin, Vinci Ting, Jayda Fogel, Irene Kim) and, above all, Adrienne Carey Hurley, who introduced me to Hoshino and his works and helped facilitate this project from conception to publication. I would also like to offer special thanks to Angela Covalt, who allowed me to consult her previous partial translation of “Sand Planet” during my work on that novella; any errors are, of course, mine alone.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this translation project to Cheryl Rudd, Akira “Ron” Takemoto, and the memory of Steve Rumsey.
Lucy Fraser
My translation was originally published online by the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion Center, which provides wonderful opportunities for emerging translators. I would like to thank Alfred Birnbaum and Elizabeth Floyd for their inspiring and insightful editing.
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