Facing the Bridge

by Yoko Tawada

  Amo’s writings, especially On the Rights of the Moors in Europe, are thought to have influenced Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the poet and philosopher of the German Enlightenment who moved to Wolfenbüttel in 1770 to work as a librarian. This seems ironic in light of the fact that, like all Europeans, Lessing is a descendent of the “Bad Spirits” that surround Amo during his life in Europe. However, in “The Shadow Man,” European humanism means no more to Amo than it does to Tamao, who takes nationalistic pride in the cherry tree in front of Lessing’s house, blissfully unaware that most Germans certainly do not see it as a symbol of Japan. Whereas Amo finally finds a sense of identity through the painful discovery that he was brought to Europe on a slave ship, Tamao dreads being identified with other Asians, and even more so with Amo, despite his admiration for Michael Jackson: “When he watched Michael Jackson’s videos, every cell in Tamao’s body started to seethe: he even felt his appearance begin to change.” In this desire to dissociate himself from his own identity, Tamao has much in common with the Japanese of his generation, for whom “Asia” is a common tourist destination, and who are often shocked to find that many Americans still see Japan as the Oriento (“Orient” in Japanese), an “exotic Asia” that has never existed.

  When I read “The Shadow Man” with my students at a women’s university in Tokyo, many said they knew someone like Tamao—a budding scholar who aspires to academic success by following in his professor’s footsteps, who masks his insecurity with what he thinks are clever wisecracks, and to whom the idea of a female rival is particularly unbearable. Burdened with useless information provided by an older friend (sempai) who has advised him against studying abroad in the first place, Tamao is no more comfortable in Europe than Amo was nearly two centuries earlier. The enigmatic Manfred reminds him of this fact, irritating him all the more. Ironically, Manfred’s disappearance brings Tamao and Nana together. Through the physical act of running while in pursuit of Manfred, a new bond forms between them, much as Amo’s only connection with a European woman—his housekeeper’s daughter, Marguerite—was made through the dance they shared while putting on his coat. Yet whether or not Tamao and Nana’s truce will prove any more permanent than the tenuous “bridge” between Amo and Marguerite remains an open question.

  We can assume that Kazuko of “In Front of Trang Tien Bridge” attended university during the late ’60s or early ’70s, when protests against the Vietnam War were at their height. Resentment at Japan’s involvement in the war through the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and the presence of American military bases on Japanese soil fueled anti-American sentiment during this period. Antiwar slogans in a distinctive, angular style of calligraphy appeared on homemade signs and billboards on campuses across Japan, with students in jeans and helmets standing in front of the signs screaming through megaphones in voices so over-amplified they were often unintelligible. Perhaps to capture the cacophony of the student movement, Tawada has an androgynous figure shout a series of phonetic syllables at Kazuko that look as though they should mean something but are actually nonsensical. Rather than assigning them an arbitrary meaning in the translation, I have transcribed them, preserving the grammatical structure of the Japanese text.

  The photograph Kazuko observes in the War Remnants Museum (until recently called the Museum of American War Crimes) was taken by the Okinawan-born photographer Ishikawa Bunyo. It is one of the images in Harrell Fletcher's exhibition The American War (the Vietnamese name for what Americans call “The Vietnam War”), which toured the United States during 2006, and can now be viewed on Fletcher’s website (www.harrellfletcher.com/theamericanwar). Ishikawa says in his caption to the photo that the American GI “laughed satisfactorily while carrying a part of the body of a liberation soldier. …” I would like to believe Michael Kimmelmann when he suggests in his review of Fletcher’s exhibition that the soldier does not immediately appear to be laughing (“‘The American War’: Harrell Fletcher’s Vietnam Photographs at the White Columns,” in The New York Times, June 5, 2006), but this may be due to a last-ditch effort to convince myself that although Americans may be capable of such atrocities they would not laugh while committing them—a negative form, perhaps, of Kazuko’s “twisted pride” when she wants everyone in the museum to notice the photograph was taken by someone Japanese.

  Faced with the aftermath of the Vietnam (or American) War, Kazuko is suddenly aware of herself as a Japanese. Although she has been mistaken for a Vietnamese in both Berlin and Ho Chi Minh City, when she sees a lean, sinewy soldier emerge from a hole in the ground outside the Cu Chi Tunnels, she realizes that even though she is Asian her body doesn’t look Vietnamese after all. The weight of history intensifies her feeling of difference as the pride the Vietnamese obviously take in their victory leads her to reflect on the war that Japan lost to America. During the final months of that war, Japanese civilians were required to practice using bamboo spears in preparation for an anticipated American invasion, to be met with the “shattering of the jewel” (fight to the death) of the “million hearts that beat as one.” (This aspect of wartime experience is conspicuously absent from the National Showa Memorial Museum, the purpose of which is, according to the museum’s English pamphlet, to “convey the life of Japanese during and after the World War II.” Nor do any of the museum’s many exhibits mention the fact that for Japan, WWII began as a war of aggression in Asia.)

  Once inside the Cu Chi Tunnels, Kazuko is gripped with a terror so intense that she feels alienated from herself; with her sense of self about to disintegrate, the concept of national identity—Japanese or Vietnamese—becomes irrelevant. What saves her from total annihilation is the appearance out of nowhere of the words “all right,” which effectively dissolve the net of fear that has enveloped her. In Tawada’s writing, words broken down into their basic elements often have an almost mystical, spell-breaking power (the word daijobu, which I have translated as “all right” is written phonetically in the angular katakana script that is normally used to write foreign words and, often, onomatopoeia in manga). I am reminded here of a similar scene in the story “The Gotthard Railway” (published in The Bridegroom Was a Dog) in which the narrator feels that she has “gone blank” in the sheer whiteness of a snowy field, and is unable to move. Only by chanting “Göschenen,” the name of “the ugliest town in Switzerland,” which the narrator describes as “a word made of stone,” does she recover her lost self and begin to walk again.

  The final scene of “In Front of Trang Tien Bridge” reminds me of a haiku by the poet Nagata Koi: “Split into several selves I go my separate ways.” People often speak of traveling in order to find themselves, and in a sense, Kazuko has done just that as everyone on the tour bus is her. Throughout the story, it has been difficult to tell who is who. In Berlin, where many think “Asia is all in one place,” the Japanese use signs of conspicuous consumption, such as jewelry and brand-name handbags, to distinguish themselves from the Vietnamese. In Ho Chi Minh City, on the other hand, Kazuko discovers that though she looks Vietnamese, her guidebook identifies her as Japanese. Yet language is not an exclusive marker of national identity either, for she later meets James, a Japanese-speaking Caucasian who claims to be Japanese. When Kazuko asks him how this happened, he throws her question back at her: “What about you? How did you become Japanese?” Tellingly, both questions are left unanswered. If identity is this arbitrary, it is merely an illusion. And so is the idea that each person has a single self in the first place.

  The story “Saint George and the Translator” was originally called “The Wound in the Alphabet,” (Arufabetto no kizuguchi), which in turn is a translation of “Der Wunde Punkt im Alphabet,” the story by the German writer Anne Duden that the narrator of Tawada’s story is translating. To avoid confusion with Duden’s story, Tawada later changed the title to “Transplanting Letters” (Moji-ishoku). Nevertheless, the original title has interesting implications for Tawada’s text.

  Take, for instance, the “O’s” that cover the pa
ge the narrator is translating in the opening scene. Seemingly backed by a white wall she can’t break through, they frustrate her until she blackens all of them in. By filling in the “O’s,” the narrator has turned the white wall into a kind of tunnel, an entrance into the foreign language that allows her to pass each word over to the other side—in other words, to translate (übersetzen, the German word for translation, contains the meaning “to pass something over to the other side”). But then again, these blackened “O’s” might also be “wounds in the alphabet” that the narrator scratches out with the tip of her fountain pen. The Japanese verb kaku (“to write”) is homonymous with another verb that means “to scratch,” suggesting an etymological connection between the two. The Chinese character for “creation” can also mean “wound.” When Duden's wunde is translated into Japanese, it takes on an extra layer of meaning—to wound is also to create. And if writing itself began as an act of scratching figures, “creating wounds,” then translation is the process of inscribing those wounds into a foreign language.

  In “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin emphasizes the importance of “a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator.” The narrator of “Saint George and the Translator” follows his advice, sticking as closely as possible to the German syntax, breaking Duden's sentences into fragments, savoring the foreignness of each word as she carefully passes it over to the other side. While perhaps not the “pure language” Benjamin was aiming for, the jumble of words and phrases of her translation definitely have a poetic power that can best be appreciated when the text is read aloud.

  A fragmented style is perhaps most appropriate for translating the dragon, a creature composed of fragments from a wide variety of animal species. Dragons are also occasionally hermaphrodites, which poses a particular problem for the translator—which pronoun should she use? She finally decides to stick with “he,” which in Japanese is kare, a word that originally referred to things as well as people, and, until the early twentieth century, was a pronoun used for both men and women. The Chinese character for kare is also contained in words like kanata, which refers to a loosely defined, faraway place (“over there”) and higan, which literally means “the other side”: The dragon, who insists on violating all human taboos, is totally alien—a creature, we might say, from “the other side.”

  Like much of the Japanese language in use today, the word kare was created through translation after Japan was opened to the West in the nineteenth century. When intellectuals discovered that there were no equivalents in Japanese for Western pronouns or abstract concepts such as freedom, individuality, society, art, rights (as in human rights) or beauty (in the abstract sense), it appeared to them that the Japanese language was full of holes, which they immediately set about plugging up. They did this by inventing new words, or by assigning new meanings to old ones. In many cases, however, the new words didn’t fit precisely into the holes they were meant to fill, and a sense of incompatibility still lingers around these words. Now that their origin in translation has all but been forgotten, however, the words are, in a sense, dead. By connecting the pronoun kare to its older usage in words like kanata and higan, Tawada has not only made it more suitable for referring to the alien nature of the dragon. She has also dug kare out of its hole, creating another “wound in the alphabet,” and in the process, bringing the word back to life. It seems a shame to have to translate it back to “he.”

  The protagonist's translation that is imbedded in her own narration is composed of long flowing sentences without a single comma (in my translation I use commas only in the sections of dialogue). This style seems particularly well suited to Ei, the narrator’s translator-turned-novelist friend (“Ei” is pronounced like the letter “A” rather than the German word for “egg”), who advises the narrator to translate whole sentences in a single breath. Ei’s condescending attitude toward translation is, I fear, shared by many in the U.S., despite the recent boom in translation studies. If we can think of Ei as representing the demands of the market, and the narrator as the opposite extreme, aiming for Benjamin’s dream of a “pure language,” most literary translators are caught somewhere in between.

  Which brings me to my final point—the relationship between the narrator and “the author.” While the narrator is attracted to the author, the author seems to have little need for the narrator, and finally leaves her behind. This, it seems to me, is a fairly accurate depiction of the author-translator relationship. Translators need authors more than authors need translators. Yet Tawada’s position as a writer, intentionally placing herself on the border (or, as she herself puts it, “in the ravine”) between German and Japanese, is somewhat akin to the translator, who is always caught between two languages.

  At one point the nameless narrator looks at the author’s face and sees only an “O.” If this “O” is like one of the tunnels the narrator scratches out with her fountain pen, then the translator, while appearing subservient, is actually using the author as a means to enter a foreign language. And enter it she does, for with the appearance of multiple Saint Georges, the boundary between her life on the island and the work she has been translating collapses, and she finds herself trapped in the story, unable to go anywhere except into the sea. This open-ended conclusion lends an entirely new meaning to that old saw “lost in translation.” But then again, inside a text is probably where translators (and writers as well) really belong. I myself hope to stay “lost in translation” for some time to come.

  Copyright © 1993. 1998. 2000 by Yoko Tawada

  Copyrighr © 2007 by Margaret Mitsutani

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  “The Shadow Man” was originally published as “Kage otoko” in the book Futakurbiotoko (Kawade-shobo-shinsa. 1998); “In Front of Trang Tien Bridge” was originally published as “Chantien hashi no mae nite” in the book Ilikari to Zelacbin no Leipzig (Kodansha, 2000); “Saint George and the Translator” was originally published as “Arufabetto no Kizuguchi” in the book Arufabetto no kizuguchi (Kawade-shobo-shinsa. 1993)

  First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original (NDPI070) in 2007

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tawada. Yoko. 1960-

  Facing the bridge / Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani.

  p. cm

  ISBN: 978-0-811-22349-2 (e-book)

  I Tawada. Yoko. 1960—Translations into English. II. Mitsutani, Margaret.

  1953- III. Title

  PL.862.A85A6 2007

  895-6’35—dc22

  2007001148

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011