TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
These two understated yet powerful novellas by Kimura Yūsuke do what the best fiction does: deftly portray humans in trying situations. They also do what other works have not done: grapple with the lives of animals and humans in the postdisaster reality of Japanese farming communities. For both, the backdrop is the triple disasters of March 11, 2011. These stories plot a number of social issues following the disasters of northern Japan.
Kimura Yūsuke (b. 1970) grew up in Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture, moving to Tokyo for university. On the northernmost tip of Japan’s main island, it is frigid in the winter, rugged in the summer, a place with a long history of fishing, particularly of squid. Many of his works are set in Hachinohe, often feature members of his family, and recount the landscape of his childhood and the stories and language of the region. One of his earliest of these, The Seagull Treehouse (Umineko tsurī hausu, 2009), won the thirty-third Subaru Prize. The tree house of the story is recognizable as the rambling series of structures that his older brother has built behind his workshop and coffee shop in Hachinohe; it is more like an art installation. Isa’s Deluge (Isa no hanran, 2012), which was shortlisted for the Mishima Yukio Prize, fills in sketchy details of an actual uncle. Sacred Cesium Ground (Seichi Cs, 2014), a finalist for the Noma Literary Prize, moves away from Hachinohe but adheres closely to a weekend of volunteer work that Kimura undertook on the Fukushima farm portrayed in it. His feature in the prestigious Shinchō journal, a two-hundred-thirty-page work titled “A Portrait of Stray Humans Going Up in Flames” (Norabitotachi no moeagaru shōzō), became available in book form at the end of 2016 and brings the reader to Tokyo and to homeless populations. His most recently published work is Kōfukuna suifu (The happy sailor, 2017), a creative volume of fiction that was featured in an exhibit at the Hachinohe Book Center; its setting returns to the town of his youth.
The two stories translated here are important because of their subject matter. Both works are set against the triple disasters that hit northern Japan on March 11, 2011: the massive earthquake, the tsunami it triggered, and the nuclear meltdowns that followed at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The nine-magnitude earthquake off the coast of northeastern Japan was the most powerful earthquake recorded in Japan and the fourth most powerful earthquake in the world since such records have been kept, starting in 1900. It shifted Japan 73 centimeters to the east; it shifted the earth on its axis by as much as 25 centimeters. It shook up everyone in the country, literally and figuratively, physically and emotionally, with disruptions around the globe. The tsunami waves that followed topped 30 meters in some places and wiped the landscape clean, literally, inexplicably, horrifically. After the disasters, eighteen thousand five hundred people were dead or missing, the single greatest loss of life in Japan since the atomic bombings of 1945. Photographs of the cityscapes are uncannily similar: in 2011 as in 1945 we see entire cityscapes scraped clean. The waves then inundated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and triggered the meltdown of three reactors. Two hundred thousand people were evacuated; there are still huge areas that are uninhabitable because of radiation. It is worth remembering that the radiation was uneven; radiation is not part of everyone’s disaster experience. Kimura’s stories here are not about the disasters, but they are motivated by the desire to articulate and represent life in their aftermaths. The physical and psychological magnitude of the disasters means that very little creative work produced in Japan during the past few years does not confront them in some way. At the same time, Kimura’s fiction contains a more critical stance than many others, viscerally angry at the official government handling of the people, animals, and environment of northern Japan.
Yet there are other compelling reasons these works are important: there importance lies in the stories that are being told and the manner in which they are written. Sacred Cesium Ground follows a woman from Tokyo as she travels to the affected region to volunteer at a cattle farm, known in the novella as Fortress of Hope. It closely aligns with an actual place and a cast of eccentric and fascinating characters whose activism and choices have been the source of extensive news coverage in Japan. Japanese readers will know the real-life corollary of this ranch, the Kibō no Bokujō (Hope Ranch), where Yoshizawa Masami, the charismatic cattle farmer, has set up a compound in defiance of government orders. This “compound” is nothing more than the farm where he continues to care for his livestock, ignoring government orders to evacuate and to slaughter his now “useless” animals. Thus, while much of the story details relationships among the human characters, one important story line is that of animals—human and nonhuman—in a nuclear landscape. For example, among the issues raised is one that comes in a challenge as the characters are gathered on a break: if these beef cattle were originally being raised to be slaughtered, why is there now resistance to kill them because they are “dangerous”? Aren’t they being killed in any case? The meaning of life and death is brought into sharp focus. The tale follows the everydayness of the narrator; after Fukushima, this means new concentration on the treatment of animals and humans, on the relationships between animals and their human counterparts, and our shared and interrelated histories.
The background is that in the days following the disasters, farmers such as Yoshizawa of Hope Ranch were told to evacuate the vicinity of the nuclear power plant. The actual Yoshizawa, like the Sendō of the novel, tends his cattle from pastures where he can see the plant’s cooling towers. Expecting to return in a few days after a short evacuation, they supplied extra food and water to their livestock. Days passed and they found that they had actually been forced to abandon their farms and animals; they were not allowed to return. Thus, even now, many years later, many farms in the region have cattle stalls containing the carcasses of chained animals that starved to death. It is heartbreaking. Farmers have committed suicide. Sendō, the farmer of Fortress of Hope in Sacred Cesium Ground, in his eccentric stubbornness and visceral distrust of the government refused to leave in the first place. He continued to feed his animals. Further, as time passed, he began to care for cattle that had escaped neighboring pastures and were looking for food. At every level, of course, we are discussing doomed, futile activity. Radiation levels are mortally high. Chernobyl is a constant point of reference. There is no economic return on these radiated cattle. Readers begin to wonder if the tale is one of horror: radiated cattle being fed radiated feed by radiated humans, with none knowing when, or how, or even if, it might end. Catastrophic explosions are as possible as horrible wasting disease. Or, nothing at all may happen for a very long time. The existential questions of how, and why, to persist in such conditions resonate with Camus’s Oran or Ōe’s Hiroshima.
Kimura’s telling represents the anger, frustration, and multiple responses to the disasters. We hear in the voices of these characters impatience and anger at the government; we also hear some of the criticisms leveled at the actual Yoshizawa, in the form of Jun Matsuo’s criticism of Sendō, in this work, for using the animals for his own political ends and agendas. Kimura’s telling, like the disasters themselves, highlight stress points in society, along the divisions of class and region, in a way that might remind American readers of Katrina: who gets care and who does not; who gets bailouts and who does not? There is violence at many levels. Kimura has given us much by adding the gendered aspects of societal violence, both in the workplace and in the home, as experienced by Nishino in Sacred Cesium Ground. Both are represented in the story Nishino has to tell here, of the stress of office work in a precarious time and of the stress of a bullying patriarchal husband.
It is not entirely clear what has motivated Nishino to make this trip and to take on the kind of physical farmwork with which she has no experience; it becomes slightly clearer in an important scene where we learn that conflicts and violence at home overlap with the threat of radiation following the disasters. She recounts a conversation with her husband on the night before she went to volunteer: “He seemed to
be in a relatively good mood, so I blurted out that I wanted to go to the Fortress of Hope. He heard me out, with a strange expression on his face, and began to laugh. ‘Give it up, give it up. What are you going to do there? You go someplace with that high level of radiation and, you realize, don’t you, that you will never be able to have children’ ” (29).
Frustration at home, a husband who lords over her, the lack of opportunities, and then this: she realizes that he associates her as “woman” with the ability to have children. Her response brings in history: “That’s the kind of bad science that has caused such pain to the people who live in that region. Think of the people who were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when those bombs were dropped: there is no proof that the radiation had any effect on their children” (29) His response is to lord over her as husband—hand raised and ready to strike: a responsibility to me, to our family, to the nation. Her response is to leave, which sets the story in motion. One of the results is, again, how the disasters highlight other stress points in present-day society; in this case, those of gender and power relations, the current societal malaise that accompanies a precarious workplace, and distrust of official handling of information about radiation and, therefore, most other official functions.
Another of her profound moments comes at the end of a physically demanding day of barn work among the other volunteers and the cows: she realizes that she has shared space with the cows all day, has breathed the same fetid air as the cows, has contributed to the air being fetid all day, in the same animal way as the cattle had; it is a profound experience, of shared animalness. “I felt that what was there were beings same as me that emit heat, that feel love and also fear and also pain, that were just trying to get on with the business of living” (26). Not a surprising realization, but one that gestures toward the shared experience of the human and the animal, of sentient experiences of the world, even though they are hardly equal.
Isa’s Deluge borrows from magical realism to narrate the experiences of a family of fishermen in Hachinohe. The “deluge” of the title is, of course, the tsunami, but it focuses on a crotchety old uncle—Isa—who seems to hold the key to family pain and trauma. Isa’s Deluge draws from local histories to provide a corollary explanation of the disasters and an understanding of the events that highlights the region’s rich, troubled historical experiences. We encounter these histories with the samurai of the narrator’s dreams and the teacherly conversations about the Emishi and Ainu, the indigenous peoples of the region, and the long history of colonization by Tokyo. But here again, and importantly, the material of the story is augmented by the style of its telling: not just the convoluted sense of time and relationships but also through the thick dialect of the region. The fabric comes from the weaving of narrative style, histories, and multiplicity of voices that draw from Gabriel García Márquez and Nakagami Kenji.
Further, local histories recounted as oral stories complicate the accessibility for a nonnative audience. The mysterious Uncle Isa and his experiences organize the tale. Through him comes a discovery of family lore and violence and the picture of a central figure who is unknown, whose dark forces seem to extend and embroil all in the bloodline. His trajectory also replicates the movement of migrant labor in twentieth-century Japan, from local fishing industries in decline to migrant labor, also in decline, to prisons and social structures and regional prejudices. The story itself develops in circles as it whirls around and pulls the reader deeper and deeper into the center maelstrom of the story, which erupts at the end by the deluge—the excess—of people, voices, creatures, and imagery. The force of the waves, yes, but also the forces of history are unleashed.
Both stories are profitably read with no reference to the disasters. In Isa’s case, that maelstrom may have nothing to do with earthquake or tsunami. It is equally a story of the precarious existence of a marginalized region. Isa’s story is one of violence and alcoholism, the inheritances of so many colonized, abused, extracted regions; found in the tales of many rugged mountainous regions (I think of the fierce tales that come from Appalachia, in the part of the United States where I live). Isa’s Deluge is a story of depression and suicidal thoughts; that story is also shared by the narrator and would seem to be one motivation for tracking down this history. Shōji is a compelling character as he flails in the navigation of his own self-inflicted violence, which seems to track with that of Isa’s, as does the experience of hearing voices, of a confused reality, of family madness. Like much of post-3/11 writing from Japan, particularly in writers from the region, the government’s heavy-handed and bungled responses quickly evoke the histories of repression. That is why the vision of horseback warriors is so provocative in the world of today. Furukawa Hideo comes to mind here.
One of the challenges of translating these works was the use of local dialect. Kimura’s reproduction of local rhythms and phrasings is one of the achievements of the works; it was with great pain that I realized I could not represent it but could only gesture at it, with limp phrasing such as “He reverted to dialect.…” Any attempt at representation of it by transcription proved amateurish and grating, when not downright condescending. A southern U.S. accent—one of the options closest at hand for me—carries very different subjective information about class, power, and economics that renders it unacceptable as a stand-in for a northern Japan accent. It not only did not match but also sent mixed messages and painted a confused picture. The confusion experienced by non-American speakers of English would doubtless have been great. A thoroughgoing attempt had to be jettisoned.
They are compelling tales. They intersect with post-3/11 disaster to be sure, but they will also be important—as so much artistic material in Japan in the aftermath—as touchstones in the examination of the human-animal divide (or nexus). They also highlight the tension of regions: the rugged remote areas of the north that have long been undervalued by, often sacrificed by, Tokyo. The works develop with an undertone of disaster that is subtly and deftly deployed through the backstories of the characters. There are many writings about the disasters. Many authors have found it hard to avoid the temptation of veering into diatribes; Kimura has crafted nuanced narrative as he teases out the issues.
WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA
WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
LITERATURE
DAVID DER-WEI WANG, EDITOR
Hiratsuka Raichō, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, translated by Teruko Craig (2006)
Zhu Wen, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China, translated by Julia Lovell (2007)
Kim Sowŏl, Azaleas: A Book of Poems, translated by David McCann (2007)
Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai, translated by Michael Berry with Susan Chan Egan (2008)
Ch’oe Yun, There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch’oe Yun, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2008)
Inoue Yasushi, The Blue Wolf: A Novel of the Life of Chinggis Khan, translated by Joshua A. Fogel (2009)
Anonymous, Courtesans and Opium: Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou, translated by Patrick Hanan (2009)
Cao Naiqian, There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night, translated by John Balcom (2009)
Park Wan-suh, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? An Autobiographical Novel, translated by Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein (2009)
Yi T’aejun, Eastern Sentiments, translated by Janet Poole (2009)
Hwang Sunwŏn, Lost Souls: Stories, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2009)
Kim Sŏk-pŏm, The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost, translated by Cindi Textor (2010)
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, edited by Xiaomei Chen (2011)
Qian Zhongshu, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays, edited by Christopher G. Rea, translated by Dennis T. Hu, Nathan K. Mao, Yiran Mao, Christopher G. Rea, and Philip F. Williams (2011)
Dung Kai-cheung, Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, translated by Dung Kai-cheung, Ande
rs Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall (2012)
O Chŏnghŭi, River of Fire and Other Stories, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2012)
Endō Shūsaku, Kiku’s Prayer: A Novel, translated by Van Gessel (2013)
Li Rui, Trees Without Wind: A Novel, translated by John Balcom (2013)
Abe Kōbō, The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Richard F. Calichman (2013)
Zhu Wen, The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan: More Stories of China, translated by Julia Lovell (2013)
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, Abridged Edition, edited by Xiaomei Chen (2013)
Natsume Sōseki, Light and Dark, translated by John Nathan (2013)
Seirai Yūichi, Ground Zero, Nagasaki: Stories, translated by Paul Warham (2015)
Hideo Furukawa, Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima, translated by Doug Slaymaker with Akiko Takenaka (2016)
Abe Kōbō, Beasts Head for Home: A Novel, translated by Richard F. Calichman (2017)
Yi Mun-yol, Meeting with My Brother: A Novella, translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl with Yoosup Chang (2017)
Ch’ae Manshik, Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader, edited and translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2017)
Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, In Black and White: A Novel, translated by Phyllis I. Lyons (2018)
Yi T’aejun, Dust and Other Stories, translated by Janet Poole (2018)
Tsering Döndrup, The Handsome Monk and Other Stories, translated by Christopher Peacock (2019)
Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa's Deluge Page 17