by Shion Miura
Though surrounded by a mountain of books, I am alone. This is my reward for having failed for so long to take action, yielding to my fear that I might not be able to communicate my feelings. At this rate I will end my days without ever having had a heart-to-heart conversation with anyone, without ever engaging deeply with them, without learning their thoughts and sharing mine. And in the end I am incapable even of truly savoring the joy that books can bring. This is how I have belatedly come to perceive my plight. Yet something within me cries out vehemently,
Nishioka: That’s pretty cool. Is the next one in Chinese, too?2
Kishibe: Yes. It’s from a poem by Natsume Soseki. The professor’s version is “My eyes take in writing of East and West,/My heart embraces regrets old and new.” In other words, “I have learned to read books written in the writing systems of the East and the West, yet my mind is now filled with a melancholy surpassing time and space.”
Nishioka: He’s regretting that he hung back, afraid to convey his feelings for fear she might not understand, yet here he is firing off Chinese poetry. That’s Majime for you.
Kishibe: He might at least have provided some kind of annotation.
Nishioka: Don’t look now, here comes another one!3
“No! This must not be.”
I shall pluck up my courage.
In the world there is nothing to fret over.
White clouds only float and drift.3
Whether I can attain that state of mind, I do not know. It all depends on my efforts and your response.4 If you respond to me, I swear that for the rest of my life I will devote all my strength to engaging in sincere good faith and honesty with the hearts and minds of others, especially you.
Since knowing of your existence, I feel that for the first time I have truly come to life. Until now I have been as good as dead. Though my eyes perused letters of the alphabet and Chinese characters, their meaning eluded me; though I breathed in and out, I was not alive. Kishibe: This is from the end of that same Soseki poem. “People get nowhere by worrying. White clouds naturally fluff up and float.”
Nishioka: You’re kidding, right?
Kishibe: Sorry. That was my own free translation. Anyway, I think he’s saying, “Let’s relax and take things slow and easy.”
Nishioka: That’s up to Kaguya. Whoa. Isn’t he getting a little intimidating here? “It all depends on your response.”4
Kishibe: It’s all right, I think. With all that Chinese poetry flying around, she couldn’t read between the lines, so any tone of intimidation must have gone right by her.
There is the example in the ancient tale of a radiant princess named Kaguya (Shining Night) who descended to Earth from the moon, and indeed from the night I first encountered you I have felt such pain in my chest and found breathing so difficult that it is as if I myself were living on the moon. And yet, I can say that I am truly alive! How strange, how marvelous. You have given me life.
If I had a poetic turn of mind, here I would offer you a poem of my own making, but in the sadness of mediocrity I can only gaze sighing at the radiant moon. Let me instead borrow the celebrated words of an ancient poet.
In the sea of heaven,
cloud waves rise
and the moon boat rows
into the star forest
to be seen no more.5
Does this poem not seem as if it were written just for you? Nishioka: This really is one hell of a love letter.
Kishibe: Next is an eighth-century Japanese poem from the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, by Kakinomoto Hitomaro, the great poet of that era.5
Nishioka: This one I can get, even without a paraphrase. It’s kind of like a scene from a science-fiction movie. Notice the way every character she uses to write her name occurs in the text. Way to go, Majime.
Kishibe: You’re right! He’s giving it all he’s got now, isn’t he?
I like this poem. It has a beautiful grandeur and imparts a sense of calm majesty. At the same time it strikes me as lonely, filled with intense yearning for the unobtainable and a keen, penetrating awareness of the trifling nature of one’s own existence. Did people of old live burdened with the same sense of loneliness that I feel? I am enticed into such imaginings. It is a poem overflowing with beauty and power, using the sense of aloneness to tie our hearts to the universe and beyond; to the human heart, surpassing time and space.
As you know, I am engaged in the work of lexicography. I am editing a dictionary to be called The Great Passage.
[omission]6
And so the path of lexicography is extremely steep, and I often feel discouraged. I hasten to add that I am not asking for your cooperation or dedication in the least. I seek no such thing. All I ask would be to walk my path sensing your gaze upon me. And if I might be allowed to do so, I would want nothing more than to watch over you from the shadows 7as you pursue the steep path of cuisine. Nishioka: Hey, what’s with the omission?6I thought this was going to be the whole thing!
Kishibe: The letter’s just too darn long. Really. In the part that got left out, he goes on about how he feels about lexicography and kind of sums up his resume. You really want to read it?
Nishioka: Um, no, come to think of it.
The spring silkworm dies; only then does its thread end.
The candle turns to ash; only then do its tears dry.8
Both lexicography and cuisine are disciplines with no end. Nor is there any end to my longing. I am a silkworm who will continue producing the silken thread of yearning till I die. I will show you that from my candle’s melted wax, fire will rise anew. Have no fear. My feelings are a perpetual motion machine. I am applying for a patent! 9
And yet, you may say, I must need some sort of fuel. Do not worry. Since I am a perpetual motion machine, even without fuel my heart is continually on fire. I guarantee that I will spin on and on until my cocoon of silk grows enormous, bigger than Tokyo Dome. And I speak not only of the fire within my soul but of physical combustion, for I believe that I can survive well on the simplest of diets. I of course am happy to eat fine food when it is available, but I could go for a week eating Nupporo Ichiban ramen noodles morning, noon, and night without any grumbling from either my stomach or my taste buds. I would do my utmost not to impose any burden on you. Nishioka: Now he’s getting scary.7
Kishibe: Kind of stalker-ish, yes, or like some kind of guiding spirit. The next Chinese poem is part of a seven-character quatrain by the Tang-dynasty poet Li Shangyin.8 “Spring silkworms die and only then cease spinning their strands./The candle turns to ash and for the first time ceases shedding tears of love.” It’s a declaration of love that only death can end.
Nishioka: Pretty intense. Whoa. Calm down, Majime.9
Forgive me. What I just wrote was posturing. I made it sound as if I ask nothing whatsoever. That is not true. Sensing your presence, every night I toss and turn. How could I have known that living under the same roof could bring such sweet despair!
Times to see each other are hard, parting, too, is hard.10
How true this is! Since we live our lives in such different stretches of time, it is difficult to meet, and on those occasions when you have the night shift and can enjoy a relaxed morning, I am in danger of developing a phobia about leaving for work myself. Yet I cannot give in to such temptation but must remind myself the dictionary is waiting for me and drag myself from the doorstep in tears. On such days my thoughts scatter far and wide, and the order of the kana syllabary changes from “
a ka sa ta na ha ma ya ra wa” to “a ka sa ta na ha ri ma o ya.” 11I cannot help feeling anxious about whether the entries in The Great Passage will appear in the correct order.12 Kishibe: The next one is by the same poet.10It’s the first line of the silkworm poem.
“It is hard to meet, yet harder still to part.” Wait, doesn’t that sound as if it’s referring to two people already in a relationship?”
Nishioka: Never mind, let it go. What’s this got to do with silkworms and candles, though?
Kishibe: Chi
nese poetry is dynamic.
Kishibe: Uh-oh, now he wrote something off-the-wall again.11
If I were to write my present feelings in plain terms, I would sum them up this way: “Kaguya Kaguya, what shall I do with you?” Or perhaps I should say this:
Chang’e regrets having stolen the elixir.
Jade sea blue sky night after night in her heart.13
Chang’e is the Chinese moon goddess, a woman who drank a magic potion and flew off to live on the moon, much like Princess Kaguya in the Japanese folktale. Some say the poet had in mind a woman who had abandoned him and disappeared, that he was likening her to that remote moon goddess and wrote these lines in bitterness and longing. I concur. These lines are exactly expressive of my state of mind.
If only she had not drunk the forbidden potion, she would not have had to spend her nights picturing the same human face in fierce yearning!
I yearn. The expression “to want something so much a hand reaches from the throat to grasp it” must surely refer to what I feel as I burn with great intensity. I yearn for radiance. For beautiful beams of light. And yet for so many years, I never even knew that I lived in total darkness.
This is all I have to say. Or no, this is not all I want to say, but if I tried to say it all, even if I lived 150 years it wouldn’t be enough, and I would use up so much paper they would need to cut down every tree in the rain forest, so I will rest my pen here.
I would be very grateful if after reading this you would let me know what you think. Whatever your response, I am prepared. I will take it solemnly to heart.
Do take care of yourself.
To Kaguya Hayashi
from Mitsuya Majime
November 20xx Nishioka: Really, this is getting to be . . .
Kishibe: Hang in there, Nishioka. 12
Kishibe: This is the last Chinese poem.13Another seven-character quatrain by Li Shangyin, called “Chang’e.” I guess Majime really likes his poetry. It means “Chang’e must regret stealing the elixir of life and drinking it/as night after night she casts her gaze from the lonely moon world onto the cold azure seas.” It describes extreme loneliness in the void.
Nishioka: You know, I have to say, on rereading this thing, it seems to me that Majime is actually being pretty straightforward with his declaration of love. No real curveballs.
Kishibe: You think so? I think it’s pretty hard to follow. Plus his calligraphy is just too good. It takes away something, makes this seem like a letter from an old man.
Nishioka: Ouch. Poor Majime.
Kishibe: But in the end he and Kaguya got together, so all’s well that ends well.
Nishioka: True. Damn it. Majime, you sly fox! All right, we’re through here!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DICTIONARIES CITED
Kojien (Wide Garden of Words) and Iwanami kokugo jiten (Iwanami Japanese Dictionary), Iwanami Shoten.
Nihonkokugo daijiten (Great Dictionary of the Japanese Language), Shogakukan.
Daijirin (Great Forest of Words) and Shin meikai kokugo jiten (The New Clear Dictionary of Japanese), Sanseido.
Daigenkai (Great Sea of Words), Fuzanbo.
REFERENCES
Kurashima, Tokihisa. Jisho to Nihongo: Kokugo jiten o kaibou suru (Dictionaries and Japanese: Dissecting Japanese Dictionaries). Kobunsha Shinsho, 2002.
Matsui, Eiichi. Deatta Nihongo 50mango: Jishozukuri sandai no kiseki (Encounters with 500,000 Words: Three Generations of Dictionary Making). Sanseido, 2002.
Ishiyama, Morio. Urayomi fukayomi kokugo jisho (Reading Between the Lines, Reading Too Much into Things: Japanese Dictionaries). Soshisha, 2001.
Shibata, Takeshi and Yasushi Muto, eds. Meikai monogatari (The Story of Meikai Dictionaries). Sanseido, 2001.
Matsui, Eiichi. Kokugo jiten wa koshite tsukuru: Riso no jisho o mezashite (This Is How Japanese Dictionaries Are Made: Seeking the Ideal Dictionary). Minato No Hito, 2005.
Yamada, Toshio. Nihongo to jisho (Japanese and Dictionaries). Chuko Shinsho, 1978.
Okimori, Takuya, ed. Zusetsu Nihon no jisho (Dictionaries of Japan: Illustrated). Ohfu, 2008.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the following in the writing of this book. Any deviation from fact in the book, intentional or otherwise, is the author’s sole responsibility.
Iwanami Shoten, Dictionary Editorial Department
Shogakukan, Inc., Japanese Dictionary Editing Department
Oji F-Tex Co., Ltd.
Yasunari Hiraki, Yuriko Moriwaki
Hiroshi Sato, Kenichi Matsunaka, Yoshiko Kagawa, Junko Kusumoto, Hisayo Kobayashi
Taro Soma, Satoshi Kusuzawa
Haruko Kumota, Nobuko Okubo
Toru Kato, Hiroo Ito, Hideo Takahashi
Hiroshi Suzuki, Maki Mitsufusa, Kaori Okawa, Tetsuo Fujino
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © Hiroyuki Matsukage
Shion Miura, the daughter of a well-known Japanese classics scholar, started an online book-review column before she graduated from Waseda University. In 2000, she made her fiction debut with Kakuto suru mono ni mar (A Passing Grade for Those Who Fight), a novel based in part on her own experiences during her job hunt. In 2006, she won the Naoki Prize for her linked-story collection Mahoro ekimae Tada Benriken (The Handymen in Mahoro Town). Her other prominent novels include Kaze ga tsuyoku fuiteiru (The Wind Blows Hard), Kogure-so monogatari (The Kogure Apartments), and Ano ie ni kurasu yonin no onna (The Four Women Living in That House). Fune o amu (The Great Passage) received the Booksellers Award in Japan in 2012 and was developed into a major motion picture. She has also published more than fifteen collections of essays and is a manga aficionado.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © 2014 Toyota Horiguchi
Juliet Winters Carpenter attended the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. Her first translated book, Kobo Abe’s Mikkai (Secret Rendezvous), received the Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. In 2014, more than three decades later, Honkaku shosetsu (A True Novel), by Minae Mizumura, received the same award, as well as the Lewis Galantière Prize of the American Translators Association. Carpenter’s other translations—more than fifty—include nearly every genre of fiction and nonfiction, as well as film subtitles and song lyrics. A professor at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts in Kyoto, Carpenter has lived in Japan since 1975. She’s licensed to teach the Japanese instruments koto and shamisen and sings alto in the Kyoto City Philharmonic Chorus. She and her husband divide their time between Kyoto and Whidbey Island, Washington.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
A Love Letter from Majime to Kaguya (The Complete Edition)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
