Translator

by Nina Schuyler

  “But we couldn’t have children and I didn’t think we could move beyond it. It’s what she wanted more than anything. For years we tried.”

  It’s her turn to say she is sorry.

  “I had to let her go,” he says. “She didn’t want to part ways, but I insisted.”

  Like Jiro. Moto sent his wife away. He had to, if he wanted to do the right thing.

  “Two years she’s been gone. She met someone who could give her what she wants. She’s forty years old and eight months pregnant.”

  He rubs his eyelids.

  “How generous of you,” she says, her voice quiet. “Not everyone could do that.”

  “Not that generous. It feels as if part of me is off doing something else,” he says, “and I’m left waiting until she comes back.”

  “She’ll fade, by the by. The dimensions of the pain will contract. You’ll forget about her.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “It’s our nature to forget.”

  “Not my nature. Besides, I couldn’t bear it.”

  “But wouldn’t that make it easier? Happiness is often about forgetting.”

  “Maybe. But I’m not able to do that.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “No. I’m not. I am who I am today because of her. She’s threaded through every fiber of my being.”

  “Is this something that’s particularly Japanese?”

  He slows the car down and turns to look at her. “No. It’s something human. You haven’t forgotten your husband, have you? Even though it’s been years?”

  Hanne stiffens. “Well, I’m sure Midori or someone else has helped you move on.”

  “No.”

  “So Midori means nothing to you?”

  “I didn’t say that. She’s kind, and kindness goes a long way these days.” He talks some more about her, how she puts a little bright light into his otherwise gray day. He doesn’t mention love of Midori, how she, or anyone else has swept him up and hurtled him back into life. No mention of how passion has made him new again. How in the years since his wife’s absence, he’s put one foot in front of the other and walked away from tragedy.

  They drive by a dilapidated white barn, part of the side caved in, threatening to take the other side down. She tries to smooth the wrinkles from her skirt. A shiver runs from her scalp, down her arms, her legs, as if a cold wind just blew over her. Her skin feels like ice, and all her warmth has rushed out of her. She glances at Moto. He looks tired, a deep sadness in his eyes.

  Jiro wanted to live, let the past drift away like a stick in the current so he could go on with the living. A year after his wife was placed in an institution, Jiro, her Jiro, was in the full embrace of another life, another woman. Or that’s how she translated it. She remembers this line: He was tired of feeling waterlogged with sadness. She sensed in him an insatiable thirst for life. A refusal to be confined to the narrow space of loss. Didn’t she translate the line: He wanted to use himself up before he died? Those dreary, melancholy sections of darkened windows and corridors, tear-stained pillows, she didn’t give those to Jiro; she gave that messy malaise to Jiro’s wife. But now she has a seed of doubt.

  “Do you know an author named Yuri Kobayashi?” She can barely keep her voice steady.

  “Sure. Years ago my ex-wife hired him to do a commercial. I can’t remember what it was for. He became a good friend of mine.”

  “He said he based the main character of his latest novel on you.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “You haven’t read it?”

  “No.”

  She recites a passage to him: Sunlight streams in through the bedroom window and he becomes aware of vast acreage in his mind that is wonderfully uninhabited. Where just yesterday it was populated by worry, anxiety, and vigilance, there is now a small country of nothingness. He wasn’t even conscious of how much of his mind was devoted to, no, obsessed with her well-being. He feels a funny little smile on his face. He is a free man.

  She studies him closely, trying to gauge his response. His face remains blank. “Does that sound like you at all? Since your wife left? Have you ever felt this way?”

  “Some days. But most days, I can’t do anything but stare at a damn wall. I’ve spent enough days like that to describe the way my blood feels coursing through my veins. Every day I miss her. Every day I wonder if I did the right thing. If I should have let her go. That’s the truth of it. Maybe we could have made it work.”

  She’s sinking into a mood she can only describe as unfamiliar. “The other night when we danced, you said ‘Let’s not speak.’ Do you remember? It’s a scene straight from his novel. That scene ends quite happily, on an upbeat, but you, you wept.”

  “My wife. She loved to dance. I was remembering the times we’d open up our living room and dining room, just like we did the other night, and turn on the music and dance. After a long day at work, we’d set aside time and dance. It was such a wonderful way of finding each other again. When we were first a couple, we went dancing all the time. She looked radiant on those nights, so happy and full of laughter. What’s this all about?”

  “I translated Kobayashi’s book into English. I was the translator. And he accused me of mistranslating it. Of turning Jiro, of turning you, into a heartless man.”

  A pause. “I don’t get it. You’ve come here to prove to yourself you’re right?”

  To have it put that way, so crass, so boorish. “I wanted to meet you. If I’ve offended you—”

  “Oh, come on. You must know by now that’s pretty hard to do.” He slaps his hand against the steering wheel. “Hanne the sleuth! Slinking around, gathering facts for your case! Who’d have thought.”

  Moto puts on the blinker and pulls into the parking lot of a modern five-story office building with dark, reflective windows.

  “We would all like things to be simpler,” he says, opening his car door. “But we humans are complicated. Even you, Hanne.”

  A man with a white silk handkerchief in his front suit coat pocket greets them, bowing low to Moto. “We are so honored you are doing our commercial,” he says.

  Hanne excuses herself, saying she needs to run some errands. Under the heavy clouds, she heads down the street. She feels as if a block of ice has been dropped down her throat, straight into her stomach. People pass by with folded black umbrellas, the tips poking and stabbing the sidewalk. The world is huddled in on itself. Sad people. Everywhere, gray or black coats, faces blank. She remembers this about living here—the pervasive decorum and politeness seemed to stifle and kill off more than rudeness; something far more vital. And everyone seems resigned to this state of affairs. The constant refrain, Shikata ga nai, there’s no way out.

  One time, riding the train home from school, Hanne had sat across from an old lady who was slumped across from her, asleep, her head bowed, as if it grew straight out of her chest. That day Hanne intentionally had put on a hot pink blouse and bright robin’s-egg-blue pants, a leopard scarf around her neck, because she wanted someone to say something, anything about it, about her—too loud, too ugly, too much—so she could spit something back. “Go to hell!” But the woman slept on and the people around her stared straight ahead or buried their faces in newspapers. When Hanne’s stop came, she stepped hard on the old woman’s toe. And the woman finally woke up and shrieked, “Barbarian! Foreigner!” The entire trainload of people sat up startled. Hanne was delighted, and for days afterward, she heard that shout bounce around in her head—anything but the polite “Sumimasen,” or the girlish giggles or the way the women spoke in high-pitched voices, pretending to be dolls.

  But now look at her, her black hair, her black coat, her perfect Japanese, she blends right in. What has she become? But more importantly, what will become of her? If she made a mistake. A grave error of enormous magnitude. What then?

  Hanne enters the department store and the two greeters by the door call out “Irasshaimasu!” Come in! We are ready to serv
e! The polite imperative, she thinks, said with just the right amount of cheer so you almost believe it.

  She mindlessly picks up a miniature plastic hamster. It turns out not to be a toy, but an eraser. And the bag of cookies? They contain some herb that supposedly enlarges your breasts. Nothing is as it appears, she thinks. She makes a pencil mark on a piece of sample paper. As she erases it with the hamster, a possible scenario comes to her: Moto said he knows Kobayashi. A good friend. Couldn’t Kobayashi have called Moto and told him about their blow-up in Tokyo? She’s probably coming your way. Look out! She’s an intense woman, convinced she did a superior job on that translation. Have a little fun with her—for my sake.

  Moto gets a good laugh out of this—sure, he’ll play along. Why not? Couldn’t this be what happened? He’s an actor, after all, and knowing what she’s up to, he finds every opportunity to toy with her, trip her up, make her doubt herself over and over. “Keep her guessing,” she imagines Kobayashi counseling Moto. No wonder Moto seemed wholly unsurprised to meet her that first day—he’d been expecting her. Probably rubbing his hands together in delight. Moto tells Renzo to extend a generous invitation—stay as long as you like. And Renzo, happy Moto is interested in some form of acting, willingly obliges. His role? Simple, refuse to be pinned down or turned into a type, especially the character she translated. Moto doesn’t miss acting because he’s acting right now! Perhaps that was it. She wasn’t wrong. She was being toyed with.

  She buys the hamsters for her granddaughters, skips the cookies, buys toothpaste, coffee, shampoo, and three bottles of sake as gifts to replenish the dwindling supply. When she returns, she finds Moto inside a small recording booth, eating an apple. The businessmen stand and bow as she enters the room. One of the men finds her a chair. Over the speaker system, she can hear Moto making every possible sound.

  He stretches his mouth wide open, as if he’s going to shout, then snaps it shut. Over and over, and with his flowing hair, he looks like a tiger about to devour its prey. Now he’s a frog, his tongue out, holding his mouth open wide. Next, he’s wiggling his lower jaw side to side, an old man having trouble with his false teeth. Finally, after warming up his voice with scales, he reads in a beautifully rich, commanding voice, “For relief of acid indigestion, heartburn, and sour stomach, try Stomach Guard.”

  The businessmen murmur and nod their approval.

  Moto reads it again in a lower tone. The businessmen ask for more rhythm, then more seriousness, compassion, spunk, humor, and finally they murmur “Soo desu ne. Totemo yokatta,” very good.

  Yes, he can be so many things. The man who can so easily disguise himself, become someone else, even an emotion. She feels the first stirrings of fury. An hour later, Moto emerges, looking the same as when he entered, as if the entire session has taken nothing from him.

  Outside, it’s torrential rain. She covers her head with her shopping bag and runs for the car. When she’s inside, soaked to the bone, she turns to him. “No wonder Renzo is concerned. It requires so little of you.”

  “It’s all I’ve got in me these days.”

  “How much do you know about me?” she says, her tone wintry.

  He takes a towel and rubs his hair. “What?”

  “What do you know about me?”

  “Only what you’ve told me.”

  “That other night at dinner, all those arguments about Japan. A heart, no heart. One minute you’re hung over, barely awake; the next, you’re ready to swim. You say you don’t want to forget your wife, but you’re with Midori. But she’s not your girlfriend, you say. And so you’re with me. You seem to be everything.”

  “And?”

  “Are you toying with me? Deceiving me?”

  He turns and looks at her.

  “Did your good friend Kobayashi call you and tell you to do this to me? To put on a grand performance and twist and turn in the wind, never allowing yourself to be pinned down to any defining trait? You are everything, so you defy description? Especially my description?”

  She glares at him.

  When he says nothing, she goes on. “You are performing beautifully, probably your best acting ever. Bravo.”

  “You’re not a very trusting woman, Hanne Schubert,” he says, switching to rapid-fire Japanese. “Not trusting at all.”

  “It seems highly coincidental that every time I think I understand you, you act in a way that undermines my understanding.”

  He throws the towel on the back seat. “Have you ever considered that you got your translation wrong? Completely wrong? To even accuse me of somehow putting on a ruse shows how little you understand me. What vanity! To think I’d go to such lengths to turn your world upside down. That’s too much work for me. Lazy old me, wasting myself with commercials. I hear the judgment in your voice.”

  “I didn’t judge—”

  “I guess you’ve never met someone who doesn’t fit neatly into one of your labels. Or maybe you’ve never really understood anyone because I don’t think any human being fits neatly into one of your damn labels. It’s a simple way of viewing the world. And you are the worse for it because what doesn’t fit the label is blocked out.”

  She’s about to say something, but he puts up his hand. “Please. Don’t.”

  They drive the rest of the way in heavy silence.

  By the time they get home, Renzo has returned and prepared supper for them, but Moto grabs a bottle of whiskey and pounds up the stairs to his room.

  She hears a door slam.

  “Must have gone poorly,” says Renzo. “Good. Maybe he’ll give it up.”

  She sits with Renzo, who has prepared udon, but she can barely eat. He chatters about his day. Something about an elderly woman with a bird cage. She fell and broke her ankle. A new couple planting trees.

  She realizes she’s waiting for Moto to come downstairs. Then what?

  Renzo asks about the voice-over. “Was it horrible to listen to?”

  “He’s very good at it. Very good.”

  “I don’t think I could stand to hear it. Even if it was good.”

  Hanne hears music coming from upstairs—Frank Sinatra’s syrupy voice sliding over “Fly Me to the Moon.” Renzo invites her to join him and walk the dog. She says she’s too tired. It’s been a long day. After he leaves, she washes the dishes, then heads out to the cottage.

  She picks up her play, but can’t seem to get beyond the first sentence. She remembers what Brigitte once said to her. It was not long after Hiro died. Tomas was away at college and it was just the two of them, living in the high-rise apartment. They were eating dinner and Hanne can’t remember how it came up, but Brigitte asked her if she believed in an afterlife. This was their first serious conversation in a long time.

  “I’m sorry to say I don’t. Life doesn’t care one iota about you,” she told Brigitte. “It is neutral. Nothingness. It just is. You live, you die, it doesn’t care.”

  When Brigitte said nothing, Hanne went on about Albert Camus’s short story “The Guest.” A schoolteacher who was given the assignment of delivering a prisoner to the police. But he could have easily led the prisoner to freedom, which was the teacher’s preferred choice. Instead, the teacher did nothing and the prisoner walked himself right into prison.

  Brigitte said she’d read it at school and hated the ending. “The schoolmaster should have done something,” Brigitte said. “He could have chased after the man when he saw he’d made the wrong choice. He could have led the man to freedom. Why didn’t he help? He just turned his back and walked away.”

  “But that’s the point of the story. And though it doesn’t seem like it, it’s actually good news. You get to create the purpose and the meaning of your life. The schoolmaster starkly refuses to do so, and look where he ends up—miserable—but of his own choice and making.”

  Brigitte violently shook her head. “There was the moment the schoolmaster could have done something. He could have saved the man. It’s not human, what he did.”

  H
anne took a deep breath and began again, explaining that Camus wanted the reader to feel the nothingness, the bleak, dismal, condemned nothingness of life.

  “It’s not nothing. Since Dad died, so many people have been so kind to me,” said Brigitte, looking at Hanne with what Hanne remembers now as pitying eyes. “I feel like I’ve seen the very best part of people.”

  “Well, I’ve found few agents of sympathy,” Hanne said. “People see me and turn the other way, like I have the plague. I’ve had to do this all alone. To fend for myself, and none of it has been easy.”

  Brigitte stared at her plate. “You don’t trust anyone, that’s why,” she whispered, still seeking refuge with her plate. “How can anyone get close to you? You don’t trust anyone. You think no one is capable, at least not as capable as you. Not even me.”

  Now Hanne stares at her play. Komachi has been thrown out of the palace, banished to a poor rural village, fifteen kilometers from the capital, Kyoto, but it might as well be thousands. Outside the city walls, the peasants work fifteen, twenty-hour days, subsisting on rice and vegetable broth, suffering from diseases unheard of within the court’s walls. Death comes easily to children, to women, to men. No one has time for poetry. No one cares. In the end, Komachi is left with a talent no one wants, a talent that’s the sole reason she wants to live another day.

  Hanne rests her forehead on her hands. She wishes she hadn’t barked back at Brigitte. “What’s there to trust? Half the time you’re truant, and when you do show up to class, your homework is not done, you’re failing two classes. Oh, I know about that, young lady, and I catch you here alone with some young man. Tell me, what is there to trust?” She wishes when Brigitte began to cry, saying she missed Dad, she missed him so much, that she’d gone to her and held her, that she’d broken down with her and said how much she missed him too, how her heart, too, cried out for him. How, twelve years after he died, she still has not found someone whom she loved as much as Hiro. But instead, Hanne silently cleared the table, then put the leftovers in plastic containers in the refrigerator.

  How easy it is to become this Komachi. The one tossed out. Forgotten. Komachi who tries to talk with the villagers, but the villagers back away, treating her like a foreigner. She hears the gossip: that strange woman uses strange words and phrases, and her proper, courtly way. Who does she think she is? Did you see how soft her hands are? Has she ever worked a day in her life?