Translator

by Nina Schuyler

  The event organizers appear.

  “My character had a beating heart—”

  One of the organizers tries to interrupt him.

  “Go home,” Hanne says finally.

  Go home? What does she mean by that? It sounds like a command to a feral creature, a creature following the scent of something, its ferocious instinct driving it onward. She needs a stick to beat it back. Go home.

  “Over a year I spent,” says Hanne. She feels herself finding her bearings. “I worked hard—”

  “Let me tell you something. You ruined my main character. Turned him into an asshole. A class-act jerk!”

  “Jiro?” she says. “You’re talking about Jiro?”

  Hanne smells his breath weighted with whiskey.

  “I am ashamed of what you did to my Jiro,” he says, the line between his brows deepening. “You should be ashamed.”

  Amaya is speaking into a walkie talkie.

  “If Moto read what you did, he’d hate it. That makes me ashamed. Deeply ashamed!”

  Moto? For a moment, she can’t think. Then she recalls Jiro was modeled after this man, Moto Okuro, the Noh actor.

  “If this Moto saw what I had to work with, he’d give me a medal,” says Hanne, filling with anger and his horrific accusation. She loved Jiro! She understood this character better than Kobayashi did himself. How can he be saying such things?

  The man’s face pinches. “You know nothing. If you knew Moto, you’d see.”

  A security guard approaches and tells Kobayashi he must leave. She watches the guard escort him to the door. Kobayashi’s shoulders are hunched, his head bowed. The room is quiet. With trembling hands, Hanne gathers her notes together. When she slips out a side door, into a dark hallway, she has no idea where she is.

  Chapter Seven

  She needs fresh air. If she could find her way across the busy street into the green. Green of a park with bare winter trees. The name escapes her, and for a moment she worries that her head injury has asserted itself again. Brought on by the public humiliation, no doubt. But then the name rushes at her. The Shinjuku Imperial Gardens, where, for the first time since she’s arrived, she hears birds—blue jays and brown sparrows fluttering tree to tree. It’s a relief. She and Brigitte used to escape the city on the weekends and drive across the Golden Gate Bridge to Bolinas Lagoon, where they’d wander the shoreline looking for birds. Tomas didn’t like bird watching, and so Hiro would stay home with him.

  That one Saturday, Hanne packed a picnic and as they ate, they saw four great blue herons, a flock of willets, and then Brigitte spotted a rare black-crowned night heron. They’d never seen one before, and she saw it along the shoreline in the tall reeds. Brigitte talked about it for weeks afterward and couldn’t wait to go again. She must have been ten, maybe eleven years old. Hanne offered to teach her bird calls, but Brigitte said she didn’t want to learn. “They seem so content,” she said, “I don’t want to disturb them.” She just wanted to sit and listen.

  Whenever Brigitte suggested they go, Hanne put everything aside. Let it wait. Everything could wait. By then, Brigitte had her own language teachers and didn’t need Hanne. Brigitte’s teachers were more blunt: it was best if Hanne didn’t interfere. “It’s hard to listen to more than one teacher,” they said. Brigitte was studying advanced German, French, and Japanese—and, Hanne found out later, Sanskrit. Bird watching was the one thing they still shared. And Hanne loved it as much as Brigitte, but more than that the long drive there and back, with its windy road that ushered in a meandering conversation. They talked about everything: her new favorite shoes, or what she was learning in school or why it is that every living thing must die. It was on one of these drives that Brigitte asked if Hanne could take her to church. The one near their house, a small white thing. She just felt the need to go.

  The next day, Hanne sat beside her daughter and watched her pray. The priest told the story of David and Goliath. A good enough story, thought Hanne. A clear moral, Hanne could see its mass appeal. David’s belief in something bigger than himself gave him a different view of Goliath. Not a giant after all; a measly mortal. Brigitte sat there transfixed. Which baffled Hanne; what was Brigitte hearing that Hanne wasn’t? As the sermon went on, Hanne’s mind wandered to the different translations of the Bible. The Septuagint, the Greek translation, which sometimes omitted entire verses. The King James, with its seventeenth-century English, the New International Version, with its modern-day English.

  The next Sunday, Brigitte wanted to go to church again. Hanne said she had too much work to do. What she didn’t tell Brigitte was that she found religion with its moral codes, rules, and promises of an afterlife far too easy. But more than that, too patronizing, too infantilizing. Life and its meaning were for you to decide, and she wasn’t going to turn that decision over to anyone or anything else. So Hiro went with Brigitte. Then they went to a different church. Brigitte kept going and another life ensued, one that took up the weekend with church activities, one that Hanne knew little about. She wishes now that she had accompanied Brigitte, if only to find out what she was learning. Tomas says it’s not technically correct to call the group she’s now with a cult, because Brigitte could leave at any time; she just chooses not to. Just as she chose to go to that little white church all those years ago.

  Now Hanne calls to a blue jay. It calls back. Back and forth. A handful of jays gather in the branches of a pine tree. She can see them, their dark blue feathers and black beaks. She remembers when she used to make Hiro laugh with her calls. “You are a very powerful woman,” he’d tell her. “You’re probably changing the migration of these birds.”

  She sits on a park bench, her mind still reeling. She doesn’t understand what has just happened. Jiro, an asshole? A class-act jerk? She doesn’t know what to make of it. Because the Jiro she put on the page is honorable and courageous, full of generosity and patience. Her Jiro is anything but a jerk. She smelled alcohol. Maybe Kobayashi was drunk. Maybe he said those things to get attention, though he doesn’t seem that type of man. Maybe his English is so bad, he didn’t understand her translation. What just happened seems almost dream-like, a bad dream. She knows she isn’t wrong. She knows Jiro.

  In her hotel room, the glass table is covered with bouquets of flowers and gift certificates—free sushi at the Imperial Hotel’s restaurant, free massage, a manicure, a trim. The conference organizers send their apologies.

  Amaya calls. “If there’s anything else we can do—”

  Maybe she’ll go meet this Moto Okuro. See for herself what kind of man he is. That’s exactly what she must do. “Do you know where I might meet the Noh actor Moto Okuro?”

  Amaya says she will find out immediately. She knows of him, remembers her parents going to see one of his performances and raving about him for days afterwards. “We apologize for the disturbance this morning. It was most unfortunate.”

  Mid-afternoon, Amaya calls. Moto lives in a small town called Kurashiki, about two hours from Tokyo by bullet train. “It’s quite beautiful,” says Amaya. “It wasn’t bombed during the war, so it retains its natural beauty.”

  She should have known. Kurashiki is where Kobayashi set his novel.

  Mr. Okuro, however, is not working right now, says Amaya.

  “You mean he’s not in a show?”

  “No. Not working. He is not with a theater company right now. Technically he’d be considered unemployed.”

  “What happened?”

  Amaya doesn’t know. She falls back into apologies. “We are so sorry for what happened this morning. We would like to make it up to you. Perhaps you’d like to visit Kurashiki?”

  Indeed she would. Amaya says she will secure a train ticket and find a hotel. Five minutes later, Amaya says she’s booked a seat on a train that leaves at 8:00 in the morning.

  “Thank you,” says Hanne. “That’s very kind.”

  She doesn’t doubt that she’ll find Moto Okuro; Kurashiki is a small town, and he’s probably
its biggest export. Hanne has one more night here. She finds it impossible to sleep. She decides a drink might help. The hotel bar is dimly lit with flickering candles on round tables, a counter where one can sit and talk to the bartender. She chooses a corner table and orders a brandy. What seems moments later a tall man, impeccably dressed in a good tweed coat, approaches her.

  “May I join you?” he says in Japanese.

  He has a foreign tinge to his Japanese—Danish, she guesses. Not appearing any age in particular, with his thick sandy-brown hair, and his eyes a beautiful ice-blue. His tan, slightly ravaged face suggests he plays golf or tennis or perhaps spends time sunning by a pool. Definitely Northern European, so many months spent in darkness, they develop an unquenchable craving for the sun.

  “Oh, I’m not here for very long,” she says, glancing across the room, willing the waitress not to come so she can get up and leave. But there she is, with Hanne’s drink on a tray, ice cubes tinkling against glass, and a complimentary plate of sushi. The waitress sets the drink in front of her, and he slides into the seat across from her and tells the waitress he’ll have whatever she’s having.

  In fact he is from Denmark. Copenhagen. He introduces himself as Jens Radmussen. Passing through, unable to sleep. Someone in the room next to his with a loud TV. “And you’re not from here either,” he says.

  She supposes they’ve reached that point in the conversation when she’s supposed to divulge her personal information. An awkward silence follows, and he’s looking at her, his eyes alert, glittery. “In fact I’ve spent years in Japan,” she says. Why is she inventing? She spent three years in this country, then her mother moved them to Germany, then to the United States. “My parents were missionaries. That’s how most Anglos and Europeans learn the language.”

  “And what do you do?” he says.

  Before she answers, before she gives herself over to a definition, a noun, she floats in the excitement of becoming something other than what she’s been. With the elevator music twinkling in the background and this man enjoying her, she feels another landscape, a different life running parallel to her existing one. “A surgeon,” she says, surprising herself.

  From the expression on his face, he is duly impressed. More than he’d be if she told him the truth of her profession.

  “A surgeon,” he repeats, his voice full of awe.

  “Cardiac pulmonary,” she says, then adding when she sees his puzzlement, “heart and lung.” What is she doing? If given the chance, if handed another hundred years, this is hardly what she’d choose. She can barely watch a nurse stick a needle in her arm to draw blood. Jens is watching her, his eyes bright, interested, his elbows on the table, leaning toward her. She asks, out of politeness, of his profession.

  “Sales. Software, networking,” he chortles. “Stuff I don’t really understand.”

  The waitress brings out his drink and Hanne scoots the plate of sushi over to him. “Please. Help yourself. I’m not that hungry.”

  He pops one in his mouth. “Have you ever saved anyone?”

  It’s becoming ridiculous. She should leave. “Maybe. Maybe not. But that’s not what interests me. It’s when in the face of tragedy there arises the divine in a human being. An almost pure selflessness. You don’t always see it, but when you do, it’s breathtaking.”

  They are both humbled by her statement. And she’s startled—where did that come from?

  The sushi is gone. The drink is too, gone straight to her head. She probably should not be drinking in her current neurological state, she realizes, too late.

  “I should do something else with my life,” he says, looking out across the tables, as if the answer lay on the other side of this room. “I travel too much. None of this is worth anything and I’m really out of shape.” He pats his stomach. For a moment, the mood feels gloomy. Then he smiles. “But if I didn’t travel, I wouldn’t meet interesting girls like you.”

  Girls. Does he not know the Japanese word for woman? She feels the small spark of desire flicker, fade. “I’ve got an early morning. It’s been a pleasure,” she says, standing, hearing the sound of silk as she uncrosses her legs. She extends her hand. His large hand envelops hers, sending a rush of unexpected heat through her, and she can’t suppress the accompanying thrill.

  “A pleasure to meet you,” he says with respect in his voice. He stands, smiling down upon her. “A real pleasure, doctor.”

  She can feel in his gaze a promised intimacy. For a moment, she flashes on their intertwined nakedness. How would his hands grip her? But then someone walks into the bar and the landscape of her fabricated life collapses, like a wilted flower, leaving her with herself again.

  Chapter Eight

  On the train she quickly falls asleep. Two hours later when they pull into the station, she stirs awake, blinks in confusion, and stretches her aching neck. On the window, water has created a lace-like pattern of loops and circles. She touches the cold frosty glass. Through the clarity of the small streams, she sees a platform, a newly shingled shack, where twenty or so Japanese in dark coats are huddled inside, as if waiting for a performance to begin. In the distance, the neon signs of McDonald’s, Burger King, The Gap, on and on—an eerie glow. She is in Kurashiki.

  Outside, standing on the platform, she sees more of the town. In addition to American fast food franchises and clothing chains, there are the shops with tables out front displaying the usual Japanese junk—fake fans and made-in-China teapots; postcards on a circular rack, kites with long tails. She was hoping otherwise, but it’s as she read in Kobayashi’s novel—flat, lifeless descriptions of a place he called true Japan, an amalgamation of Western and Eastern crap, leading to supreme crap. She remembers fiddling with that word—crap? Garbage? Shit? Kitsch? She eventually kept his word—crap.

  Hanne already knows what waits in the direction she is heading, down the narrow, squiggly alley dotted with small rice and tea and camera shops. And there they are, the rows of bone-white warehouses, hundreds of years old, adorned with shiny black tiles, which she translated as “looking like fancy party skirts, all dressed up with nowhere to go.” The warehouses, once used to store rice, with their steady determination stand erect along either side of a slow-moving canal. Kobayashi called it “murky,” and she was faithful to his word, but seeing it now, she prefers the more vivid “dark green” to contrast with the orange koi swishing by, breaking the smooth surface. With cars banished from the Bikan Historical Quarter, she can, as Kobayashi wrote, hear her hard-soled shoes click against cobblestone. She’s already spent hours and hours here in her mind. And he was right again, no overhead electrical wires net the sky, so it does resembles the look of the Meiji period.

  She heads across a stone bridge, and when she reaches the center she leans over the railing, watching the water flow underneath. Maybe “green,” she thinks, looking at her reflection, the water stretching her face twice as long as normal, turning it into something grave and austere and ghostly. She opens her mouth and it becomes a looming black hole.

  The other side of the canal is a mirror image of the side from which she came—the same warehouses, same cobblestone, same weeping willows dipping their branches into the dark green water, as if tentatively deciding whether to dive in.

  Not exactly how Kobayashi put it—the old part of town, a tourist trap. Shops selling high-priced trinkets to wide-eyed tourists, who wander the museums, quickly passing by the old men floating in nostalgia. A dead place. Listen closely, you can hear tormented ghosts. Of course, that’s going too far. Like any place pinned to a particular era, this part of town has its charm, a quaintness from another world, lulling you into believing time’s flow has stopped and tomorrow’s mistakes and misfortune can be averted if you just stay put.

  She yawns. Staring at buildings was her husband’s passion, never hers. Hiro could wander inside a building for hours, looking at the squared beams supporting the roof, admiring how they were mortised one into another and put in place with wood dowels.
After a while, she’d find a bench and pull out her book, telling him to come back and get her when he was done. Besides, all of this, every bit of it is known to her. She must concede, begrudgingly, Kobayashi got the setting right.

  She wanders into a gift shop and looks at the ceramics. She circles back to the front counter and asks the pock-faced shop clerk if Moto Okuro is from this town.

  “Oh, yes,” she says, smiling. “The great Noh actor. He’s really handsome.”

  Hanne asks if she knows where she might see him. “Does he live in town?”

  The woman doesn’t know.

  Hanne asks in a couple more shops. He comes to town now and then, usually for dinner or drinks, Hanne is told; no, he doesn’t live in the center of Kurashiki. Somewhere in the countryside at the family’s house. Hungry, Hanne steps into a small sushi shop, barely a slit in between two buildings. The building is old, including the window pane, which lets in a pinkish light, accentuating streams of floating dust. Only three tables, empty. She tries to imagine what it’s like to live here. The willows along the canal, the cobblestone roads, probably wonderfully quiet at night. If she lived here. . . . Ah, the power of the conditional, how easily language lets you walk away from a past, she thinks.

  A waitress wearing a dark blue kimono brings Hanne a pot of tea and a menu.

  “Excuse me,” says Hanne. She asks the waitress if she knows Moto Okuro.

  “He grew up here,” says the woman proudly. “He recently moved back.”

  “I’d love to meet him. I admire his work so much. It would be a great honor.” It’s not exactly a lie, she thinks. She would love to meet him. And she’s sure it will be an honor.

  A thin man with crooked teeth comes over to the table. He introduces himself as the proprietor. Hanne explains she is a translator of Japanese literature. She just finished speaking at a conference and thought she’d spend more time in the countryside, especially the hometown of Moto Okuro. She’s fascinated with the Japanese culture and in particular Noh theater.