by Неизвестный
Watanabe’s study of François Rabelais was one of the most distinguished scholarly achievements of the Japanese intellectual world. When, as a student in prewar Paris, he told his academic supervisor about his ambition to translate Rabelais into Japanese, the eminent, elderly French scholar answered the young man with the phrase: “L’entreprise inouïe de la traduction de l’intraduisible Rabelais” (the unprecedented enterprise of translating into Japanese [the] untranslatable Rabelais). Another French scholar answered with blunt astonishment: “Belle entreprise Pantagruélique” (an admirably Pantagruelian undertaking). In spite of all this, not only did Watanabe accomplish his ambitious project in circumstances of great poverty during the war and the American occupation, but he also did his best to transplant into the confused and disoriented Japan of that time the life and thought of those French humanists who were the forerunners, contemporaries, and followers of Rabelais.
In both my life and writing I have been a pupil of Professor Watanabe’s. I was influenced by him in two crucial ways. One was in my method of writing novels. I learned concretely from his translation of Rabelais what Mikhail Bakhtin formulated as “the image system of grotesque realism or the culture of popular laughter”: the importance of material and physical principles; the correspondence between the cosmic, social, and physical elements; the overlapping of death and a passion for rebirth; and the laughter that subverts established hierarchical relationships.
The image system made it possible to seek literary methods of attaining the universal for someone like me, born and brought up in a peripheral, marginal, off-center region of a peripheral, marginal, off-center country. Coming from such a background, I do not represent Asia as a new economic power but Asia marked by everlasting poverty and a tumultuous fertility. By sharing old, familiar, yet living metaphors I align myself with writers like Kim Chi Ha of Korea, or Chon I and Mu Jen, both of China. For me the brotherhood of world literature consists of such relationships in positive, concrete terms. I once took part in a hunger strike for the political freedom of a gifted Korean poet. I am now deeply worried about the fate of those talented Chinese novelists who have been deprived of their freedom since the Tiananmen Square incident.
Another way in which Professor Watanabe has influenced me is in his idea of humanism. I take it to be the quintessence of Europe as a living entity. It is an idea that is also explicit in Milan Kundera’s definition of the novel. Based on his accurate reading of historical sources, Watanabe wrote critical biographies, with Rabelais at their center, of people from Erasmus to Sébastien Castellion, and of women connected with Henri IV from Queen Marguerite to Gabrielle d’Estrées. By doing so he hoped to teach the Japanese about humanism, about the importance of tolerance, about man’s vulnerability to his preconceptions and to the machinery of his own making. His sincerity led him to quote the remark by the Danish philologist Kristoffer Nyrop: “Those who do not protest against war are accomplices of war.” In his attempt to transplant into Japan humanism as the very basis of Western thought Watanabe was bravely venturing on both “l’entreprise inouïe” and the “belle entreprise Pantagruélique.”
As someone influenced by his thought, I wish my work as a novelist to help both those who express themselves in words and their readers to overcome their own sufferings and the sufferings of their time, and to cure their souls of their wounds. I have said that I am split between the opposite poles of an ambiguity characteristic of the Japanese. The pain this involves I have tried to remove by means of literature. I can only hope and pray that my fellow Japanese will in time recover from it too.
If you will allow me to mention him again, my son Hikari was awakened by the voices of birds to the music of Bach and Mozart, eventually composing his own works. The little pieces that he first produced had a radiant freshness and delight in them; they seemed like dew glittering on leaves of grass. The word “innocence” is composed of in and nocere, or “not to hurt.” Hikari’s music was in this sense a natural effusion of the composer’s own innocence.
As Hikari went on to produce more works, I began to hear in his music also “the voice of a crying and dark soul.” Handicapped though he was, his hard-won “habit of being”—composing—acquired a growing maturity of technique and a deepening of conception. That in turn enabled him to discover in the depth of his heart a mass of dark sorrow which until then he had been unable to express.
“The voice of a crying and dark soul” is beautiful, and the act of setting it to music cures him of this sorrow, becoming an act of recovery. His music, more-over, has been widely accepted as one that cures and restores other listeners as well. In this I find grounds for believing in the wondrous healing power of art.
There is no firm proof of this belief of mine, but “weak person” though I am, with the aid of this unverifiable belief, I would like to “suffer dully all the wrongs” accumulated throughout this century as a result of the uncontrolled development of inhuman technology. As one with a peripheral, marginal, off-center existence in the world, I would like to continue to seek—with what I hope is a modest, decent, humanistic contribution of my own—ways to be of some use in the cure and reconciliation of mankind.
* * *
1. Evidently a subtitle, this, along with the asterisk, is part of the poem. The title itself is taken, Itō told me, from the anthropologist Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski’s book of the same name.
1. The wig specified by the author is ichō-honke-binmushiri, the type of hairstyle popular among young yakuza during the latter half of the Edo period (1600–1868).
2. The Japanese here is tetsuzai-tonya (iron material wholesaler). The text indicates that Satsuki’s husband ran off with two people: “a fan” and “the mistress of a wholesale ironmonger” (hiiki-kyaku to Ryōgoku no tetsuzai-tonya-san no nigō to).
3. Oden is a traditional Japanese dish of cooked vegetables and fish. In performance, this could be replaced by sushi, a more widely known Japanese dish.
4. Kuchidate-keiko is a mode of rehearsal still practiced in the traditional popular theater, by which the lines and plot of the play are learned orally, without a written script, from the head of the troupe.
5. The Japanese here is shingeki (new theater), which is the Japanese counterpart of the legitimate theater in the West. The shingeki produces “serious” foreign and native plays by such authors as Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Beckett, or Abe Kōbō and Inoue Hisashi, and naturally allows plenty of time for rehearsal. For the relation among the traditional Japanese theater, kabuki, and the new theater, see A. Horie-Webber, “Modernisation of the Japanese Theatre: The Shingeki Movement,” in Modern Japan: Aspects of History, Literature, and Society, ed. William G. Beasley (London: Allen & Unwin, 1975).
6. The traditional syllabic rhythm of Japanese verse is 5/7 or 7/5, as in the thirty-one-syllable waka (5/7/5/7/7) and the seventeen-syllable haiku (5/7/5).
7. Ki is a traditional percussion instrument, which makes a sound by clapping together two hard rectangular pieces of wood. In the traditional theater, this sound is usually heard at the beginning and end of the performance.
8. Mie is a pose like those observed in a kabuki performance.
9. The Japanese here is Shio maitokure (Sprinkle some salt), meaning “Purify the bad atmosphere left by the man from the TBS.” Traditionally, salt has been one of the most common purifying agents used for ritual purposes. For example, before a sumo wrestling match (which is said to have been performed originally for the purpose of divination), the wrestlers still purify the ring by sprinkling salt on it.
10. Ohineri are paper-wrapped tips thrown onto the stage by the audience, still a common practice in the traditional popular theater.
11. The Japanese here is Yotsuya-Kaidan no Oiwa-san no yōna kao ni shiteokure (Make my face like that of Oiwa in Yotsuya-Kaidan). Yotsuya-Kaidan is a popular kabuki play by Tsuruya Nanboku (1755–1829), in which the heroine, Oiwa, being slowly poisoned to death by her husband, haunts him after her death, appearing with a horrif
ic face deformed by the effects of the poison.
12. The Japanese word is neko, a pun with the double meaning of “a sleeping child” and “a cat.” Hence, the last phrase of this lullaby is Yoku nita kani-nanoni, dōnimo neko-kusai (Though the crab’s been boiled thoroughly, it still stinks like a polecat). Because the pun cannot be conveyed in English, it is translated without any reference to a cat.
13. The Japanese here is nan aratamete, meaning “change, renew or reform one’s appearance” with regard to the hairstyle and the type of kimono worn. The phrase makes sense in the context of the Tokugawa period, when the kimono and hairstyle of the yakuza—even though they were townsmen (as distinct from members of the military or peasant classes)—were different from those of the katagi townsmen. Katagi ni onari means “become a katagi.” Katagi, the opposite of yakuza, refers to the law-abiding and correct way in which ordinary townsmen lived.
1. The old woman is reciting (with some mistakes) the lyrics to a popular children’s song written by Saijō Yaso (1892–1970). The lyrics were first published in Red Bird (Akai tori) 1, no. 5 (1918). They were later set to music by Narita Tameō (1893–1945). The translation is quite free. The original is as follows: uta o wasureta kanariya wa / ushiro no yama ni sutemasho ka / ie ie sore wa narimasenu. / uta o wasureta kanariya wa / sedo no koyabu ni ikemasho ka / ie ie sore wa narimasenu. / uta o wasureta kanariya wa / yanagi no muchi de buchimasho ka / ie ie sore wa narimasenu. / uta o wasureta kanariya wa / zōge no fune ni gin no kai / tsukiyo no umi ni ukabereba / wasureta uta o omoidasu.
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