The white horse continued to look for edible grasses.
He came upon a small building. It was the cow barn for a dairy herd. The door for the domestic-animal shed had been opened by the proprietor at the time of evacuation. So the cows—mothers and calves—had been given their freedom. The fact is that few were inside the shed, but often one or two were there. The cows used the shed as a base, freely wandering the nearby area, returning to the shed at regular intervals. They spent time inside the fence and outside the fence, on something of a fixed schedule. But one day there was a massive aftershock. At precisely that moment there was one female black cow (a mother) inside the shed, and the force of the level 5 aftershock closed the gate, locking the latch tight. If pulled from the inside, it is easily opened but a cow has no means to pull. Has no means, has no arms. So she fell into the dangerous state of being trapped. More than ten days passed. She was starving to death. Completely thin.
This is what the white horse found. He could sense another living being; even so, he did not run away. Perhaps out of simple curiosity, perhaps out of hope that a cow shed might hold food, he pushed on the door and entered.
He pushed on it. He pushed on it, and it opened. Quite simple.
And he met the eye of the cow.
The white horse understood that there was nothing to be had there and proceeded back outside. With that, the thin and emaciated cow tottered after. The white horse paid no attention and continued forward, walked steadily on. The cow followed after, in earnest, as hard as she could, toward the nearby embankment covered in bright green grass. The white horse began eating the grass; off to the side, and a little later, the cow, too, was eating.
All the grasses were gaining nourishment from the light. Light was falling, sunlight.
About three kilometers to the east of this is the shoreline. The seabirds are calling. But nothing is dying. Death definitely exists, but in this moment, death is not at work.
And at this point my essay ends, and begins.
Translator’s Afterword
FURUKAWA Hideo’s Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima (Umatachi yo, sore demo hikari wa muku de) was among the first major literary responses to the triple disasters—the earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear meltdown—that occurred in northeast Japan on March 11, 2011. The work was published in its entirety in the journal Shinchō in July 2011 and almost immediately thereafter in book form—four months, that is, after the earthquake/tsunami/meltdown known in Japan as 3.11. It has become a touchstone for discussion of literature in the aftermath. And, as those reading this afterword after reading the work now know, it is compelling and important for all the reasons that it can be exasperating and demanding. Horses, Horses is a sort of memoir, sort of fiction, sort of essay, something of a road trip; it can be chaotic and overwhelming.
While Furukawa bristles at being labeled a “Fukushima writer,” the fact that this work chronicles a return through the Fukushima prefectural towns of his childhood, where his family still lives, adds another dimension to the stories being told. It is hard to overstate the effect of the cataclysms marked by 3.11. It is also worth being reminded that March 11 marks only the beginning point of the disasters, not the end, as they are not contained. The effects of radiation and displacement, the disruption of lives, will continue for decades, for centuries. Horses, Horses reflects the fallout from the disasters: raw, sometimes confused, convoluted and multilayered, forceful, personal, just like the disasters and the responses of those caught up in them. It captures the sense that all the important things of a day before—all the major novels to be written, for example—were suddenly proved meaningless, ephemeral, and, somehow, devoid of importance. Further, Horses, Horses captures the sensibility that 3.11 marked a “before” or “after,” a feeling that has diminished considerably in the years since but seemed impossible to doubt in 2011.
Horses, Horses recounts the shock of the disasters, made the more distressing to the Furukawa narrator because he was not at home when they struck and therefore feels more keenly the tenuousness of communication and connections. Some phone calls got through and some did not; like everyone, he found himself unable to stop watching the scenes as they played across screens and monitors. On March 11, Furukawa’s farming family was in Fukushima prefecture when the disasters struck; Furukawa, who is based in Tokyo, was in Kyoto gathering materials for a novel. So this is not the tale of a Tohoku native who watched friends and neighbors, buildings, and everything else be washed out to sea only to then be haunted by real but invisible radiation: there are many of those. Rather, one of the important strains of this work is its recounting of the other common experience of contemporary Japan: living the surreal experience of physics-defying images unfolding across innumerable screens, being caught up in scenes that should not be: ships on roads, boats on schools, waves surging through rice fields. An early image of the novel replicates this: eyes that should close but cannot, will not. The work is haunted by guilt and paralysis; it is driven by a real-time record of coming to terms with the devastation. Further, it records the author’s compulsion from outside, beckoning and demanding, that he “go there,” but the path leading to the “there” is oblique, multidimensional, multivocal. This unspecified voice is consistent throughout: “go,” “see,” “write.” The “ground zero” of time is marked by the beginning point of a restart, a reboot.
Horses, Horses opens in media res of another Furukawa novel. Seikazoku (The holy family), the other novel (as it is often referred to), is a sprawling work that traces the convoluted story of two brothers as they meander through the Tohoku region, the same region, that is, of Furukawa’s family lineage and the 3.11 disasters, the “ ‘North’ plus ‘east’ [that] adds up to Tohoku.” Holy Family was completed and in print years before March 2011, but it was clearly still much on the mind of the author. The earlier novel is so insistent that the brothers of Seikazoku appear as characters in Horses, Horses; one shows up in the back seat of Furukawa’s car as he makes his way north from Tokyo to Tohoku. The brothers’ story simultaneously traces contours of Japan’s northeast, of Tohoku, both in Horses, Horses and in Seikazoku. This is one way that the atmosphere of Horses, Horses is thick with multiple voices and challenging perspectives. The work conflates temporalities and voices, time and space. It also reflects the fierce history of a rugged region in the shadow of the national, urban, controlling capital of Tokyo. The brothers’ story of disaster and mayhem, which overlaps with violent histories of the region, weaves depth into the experience of the 3.11 disasters and their relationship to this region.
Horses, Horses is also driven by the bloody tales the region has to tell of nonhuman actors, as the title leads us to expect. Horses, especially, but dogs, cows, and birds—like Furukawa’s family, like the brothers of Seikazoku—are all disrupted, all share histories and parallel stories, all have been pushed under or cut out by the centers of power. We encounter many of these varied characters in the opening scene: human beings, the narrator, the presence of extraterrestrials, the brothers from Seikazoku, the sense of place signified by Tohoku. Likewise, at the outset we encounter the concern for dates and calendars, for ancient tales, for alternate tellings, concern, that is, for ownership of one’s own history and narrative.
The fact that all of the electric output from the Fukushima Nuclear plant was destined for Tokyo—indeed, the power plant is administered not by any local entity but by Tokyo Electric Power Company, which means that the most insidious changes from the radiation, which affect every aspect of the living beings of Fukushima, are caused solely by and for Tokyo—becomes a touchstone for the entire work. It drives the sense of injustice; it drives the ferreting out of stories, for example, not just the histories of humans, but the histories of horses: Horses are historical actors and characters here; horses are constituent of the place names of this affected region; horses are evacuated following the disasters; horses are traumatized; horses are in temporary s
helters. The Furukawa narrator’s travel unearths the history of horses in community and of horses being slaughtered at the whims of central-governmental powers across the centuries. This, of course, parallels the histories of humans in the region. The disasters of 3.11 and the Furukawa narrator’s traveling through the region in the aftermath become the stimulus for those narratives. Such histories add an entirely different narrative line to the tale; it is another of the ways in which this is much more than a 3.11 narrative.
In terms of style, Furukawa’s long involvement in theater is evident in his forceful and engaging dramatic readings. Further, the effusive maximalist writing style (by which I mean more Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safran Foer than Ann Beattie or Silas House, to draw examples from my own bookshelf) seems designed to engage the range of human cognition. Furukawa and his writing are electric and multifocused. They bristle with energy; they unfold in multiple dimensions. He writes prolifically across genres. Science fiction, magical realism, fantasy, as well as oral storytelling traditions are all evident here, as are his concerns for the various regions and histories, the panoply of living creatures, and the variety of narratives from across Japan.
Furukawa has become particularly engaged with histories, memory work, and commemoration in the aftermath of 3.11. For example, while he was writing Horses, Horses, he was undertaking a rewrite and retelling,1 in theater and film, of Miyazawa Kenji’s Night on the Milky Way Railroad. Furukawa draws much from Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933), the elliptic, multilayered, hard-to-characterize poet and storyteller from Iwate Prefecture in northeastern Japan, who was born in the year of another great tsunami. Their shared regional base, and the experience of inundating waters, anchors a sense of common purpose and narrative ground. Furukawa’s rewrite of Miyazawa’s widely loved Night on the Milky Way Railroad provides the script for the Hontō no uta (True Songs) dramatic-reading-cum-theatrical-performance that has been staged throughout Japan and internationally.2 The use of literary activity as intervention is also evident in the workshop Furukawa organizes in Tohoku under the name of “A Drifting Classroom” (Tadayo manabiya). The classroom is designed for participants to explore, through “literature,” the individual narratives that have arisen in response to the disasters.3
All of which is to say that Furukawa is one of the most imaginative and prolific of contemporary Japanese writers. He was awarded the Mystery Writers of Japan Association Prize and the Japan SF Grand Prize for Tribes of the Arabian Nights (Arabia no yoru no shūzoku) in 2002 and the Mishima Yukio Prize for LOVE in 2004; he published the massive Seikazoku in 2008; Onnatachi no sanbyakunin no uragirusho (The book of the womens’ 300 betrayals; 2015) is a remix of the Tale of Genji, the thousand-year-old tale of exploits and affairs at court; and he is currently translating the Tale of Heike, that classic of medieval war tales, into contemporary Japanese.
NOTES
1. The “re-” prefix is important to Furukawa—rewrites are often remixes, reworkings, or reorganizations of the source text. They are also, as is especially evident in the case of Horses, Horses, to be understood as a restart, a reboot, a zero point that marks a new beginning.
2. The performance, which has been recorded in a documentary film, includes poet and translator Suga Keijirō, one of the forces behind the project; the musician Kojima Keitaney Love; and the translator Motoyuki Shibata. See http://milkyway-railway.com.
3. http://www.tadayoumanabiya.com/index.php#outline.
Translator’s Acknowledgments
FIRST, thanks go to Akiko Takenaka, who has been through every line, most more than once. Likewise, I am humbled by the careful reading and cogent feedback, again, on every line, by Rachel DiNitto, Davinder Bhowmik, and Shibata Motoyuki. I acknowledge the changes prompted by discussions with the students of JPN 421—too many to mention by name. I thank Suga Keijirō for being, in many ways, the impetus and catalyst for the project. Thanks go to Columbia University Press—especially to Jennifer Crewe, Jonathan Fiedler, and Michael Haskell—for their commitment to this project and the accelerated timeline. I also thank Furukawa Hideo for his enthusiasm and availability for the conundrums of the text, and Furukawa Chie for her support as well.
Excerpts, in different form, appeared in Words Without Borders as “Spirited Away: Hideo Furukawa’s ‘Horses, Horses, in the Innocence of Light,’ ” parts 1 and 2, March 11 and 12, 2015, http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/spirited-away-hideo-furukawas-horse-horses-in-the-innocence-of-light. An excerpt, in different form, appeared in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 13, issue 10, no. 3, March 16, 2015.
WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
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 Cindy 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, Anders Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall (2012)
O Chŏnghŭi, River of Fire and Other Stories, translated by Bruce Fulton 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)
Yuichi Seirai, Ground Zero, Nagasaki: Stories, translated by Paul Warham (2015)
History, Society, and Culture
Carol Gluck, Editor
Takeuchi Yoshimi, What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, edited and translated, with an introduction, by Richard F. Calichman (2005)
Contemporary Japanese Thought, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman (2005)
Overcoming Modernity, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman (2008)
Natsume Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, edited and translated by Michael Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy (2009)
Kojin Karatani, History and Repetition, edited by Seiji M. Lippit (2012)
The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, edited by Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko (2013)
Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People, translated by Ethan Mark
Ethnic Conflict and Protest in Tibet and Xinjiang: Unrest in China’s West, edited by Ben, Hillman and Gray Tuttle
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