Translator (11 page)

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.

“You will have to see a Noh play while you're here.”

“I want to.” She's raving about something she's never seen—of course she knows about Noh, the oldest surviving form of Japanese theater from the fourteenth century. It continues in much the same form, with many of the same plays performed today, plays filled with uncanny things, gods, ghosts, demons—but it's painfully slow and hours long. She's never wanted to make the time.

“I am honored to say that Moto comes to my restaurant for dinner,” says the proprietor, smiling broadly, turning his face into a fan of wrinkles. His older brother eats here, too. “Moto comes here because we serve the freshest fish.”

Hanne smiles and orders sashimi. The owner is right; the fish is wonderful. She tells him she'll be back for dinner.

It's not Moto who shows up, but his older brother, who must be in his mid-sixties.

The proprietor makes the introductions, telling this man, whose name is Renzo, that Hanne is a well-known translator who is a big fan of Noh, and particularly his brother.

“You've traveled so far to meet my brother,” says Renzo, whose voice is reedy thin, like his body. He smiles, showing off his tea-stained teeth. He's a dapper dresser, decked out in a warm gray suit and crisp white shirt. “He will be quite honored. He loves Americans.”

“I'm sorry to disappoint you,” she says. “I'm not American. I come from Europe first, Germany, to be precise. Only lately has it been America.”

“Oh, he loves all foreigners.”

The proprietor shows them to a table by the window.

“You speak Japanese so well,” he says. “You must be a very great translator.”

She spares him the story of her fall down the stairs, and the lecture that knowing a language is only a fraction of what makes a good translator. “Thank you.”

Over dinner, Renzo turns out to be a chatty fellow, telling her Moto is considered a master of Noh. He began training when he was just a boy, around age three. That's not unusual, mind you, but he showed talent even then. It's clear from Renzo's bright eyes that he loves his brother.

“So young,” she says, thinking of Jiro, who began playing the violin when he was five years old. Jiro demanded an adult-size violin, and once he began to play, it became his passion. Except, of course, during that difficult year with his wife. What's happened to Moto that caused him to no longer act? Did his wife fall ill too? She supposes she'll find out soon enough.

The Okuro family has produced six generations of superb Noh actors, Renzo tells her. Hanne probably knows about Bon, the annual ceremony, which is one of Japan's most important rituals to honor one's ancestors. Loyalty to one's family has deep roots in Japan, going way back to the samurai. “That's all changing now. But my generation was raised to honor our ancestors, to honor our family name and legacy.”

Hence the legacy of the family tradition of Noh, thinks Hanne. The similarities between Jiro and Moto are striking. Jiro also inherited a family tradition. At least seven generations of males played some instrument in a symphony or for the imperial court.

“I had a dose of that, too,” says Hanne. She remembers sitting with her mother at the kitchen table, conjugating German verbs. To speak, speaking, spoken, have spoken. A rigorous schedule instituted by her mother and never questioned by Hanne because she wanted to earn the praise of her mother. She lapped it up, her mother's “Good, good,” which came rarely, but just enough to feel earned and urge her on. That Hanne would in some way specialize in languages was never questioned. Looking back, Hanne is glad her mother prodded and pushed; she approves of knowledge handed down through the generations. Though she has no idea what Brigitte would say about that. Does she even use her languages now? Renzo is still talking about his family legacy.

“I was supposed to become a Noh actor, but I was no good at any of it,” says Renzo. When Moto came along and could dance and sing and act, he was promoted to the role of eldest. Renzo's name was changed from Ichiro, first son, to Renzo, or third son. He laughs. “I know what you're wondering—but there's only two of you, why third son?”

There's Moto, then the character Moto plays in the Noh play. “I come after that,” says Renzo, smiling. “He had talent and it's what our family has done. What the Okuro family has contributed to Japan.”

Hanne wants to ask what the Okuro family is contributing now that Moto is unemployed. Renzo tells her he used to own an antique shop, and he still dabbles in buying and selling antiques.

Hanne pays for the dinner. “My treat.”

“I can't accept.”

“You must,” says Hanne handing the proprietor her credit card.

Renzo insists on picking her up tomorrow around 6:00
p.m.
for dinner at their house. “We would be honored.”

“I'm looking forward to it.”

She's never been to this part of Japan. The buildings dwindle, vanish, and then acres of open fields of greenery, with grazing brown cows, barns, stables, tractors, a few houses with dirt driveways dotting the horizon. She thought by now the whole island had been mastered, cultivated, roped in and scraped away for houses, buildings and shopping malls, hotels, golf courses, and driving ranges. But here large swatches of arable, fertile land, growing what—wheat? Corn? Alfalfa? Pastoral, she thinks. Or maybe bucolic. In the hills, a ring around the valley, there are real trees, an actual forest. They drive through a small village—only a grocery store, a pharmacy—and Renzo points to a lone house on a small hill in the distance. “You can see it from here.”

The glossy black roof tiles gleam like dark water. A traditional Japanese house, it looks huge. He parks the car by the iron gate. In the front yard, a large stone Buddha with a big belly greets them with a big smile. Someone has planted a bonsai garden of dwarf pine trees, but she's drawn to the rock garden next to it, with five big gray boulders. The huge rocks are surrounded by a sea of gray, white, and black pebbles, neatly raked, the tongs making flawless lines that never cross, never touch. Such order, she thinks, and precision.

Inside they remove their shoes, setting them beside a jumble of men's black dress shoes, brown, sneakers, boots, slippers, moccasins; it looks like five men live here, not two. A wooden bodhisattva stands by the shoes, as if guarding them. This one's smile almost seems smug, as if it knows something you don't. The house is still, only the occasional sound of a twig or pine cone pinging the roof. It's freezing and it's so quiet. Too quiet. Is the great Moto even here? She buttons her coat to her chin and pulls on her gloves again.

Renzo takes the stairs two at a time. She hears him above her, opening doors, closing them. A big drafty house. He calls out, “Make yourself at home!”

Wearing her socks, she pads into the first room, a long stretch of golden tatami mats, and two Buddhas, side by side. In front of both Buddhas are incense holders, a line of stubby white candles, and two mandarin oranges. Shrines to Renzo's deceased parents, most likely. Another Buddha, this one larger than the others, sits like a sentry in the corner. It, too, has candles, incense, oranges, and also apples in front of it. Probably offerings to the beloved ancestors.

She slides open a shoji paper wall; nothing but a fish tank with goldfish and a dark wood table hovering over a square recessed area in the floor. The room could be called empty, but she doesn't feel a lonely vacancy, only an essential elegant beauty, everything subtracted except that which appeals to the eye. She's always felt comfortable in Japanese-style homes. When she lived with her mother in Tokyo, they decorated their apartment like this, with tatami mats made of stiff rice-straw, paper walls from the inner bark of mulberry trees.

She slips her legs underneath the table and, leaning under, finds the knob to the kerosene space heater. The coils glow orange with a hint of rose.

Renzo finally joins her. “He said he'd be here.” His face is creased with worry.

“Maybe he stepped out,” she offers.

He sighs deeply.

“Or something came up,” she said, hoping her tone doesn't sound too disappointed. Did she come all this way for nothing?

“I'm sorry to tell you this.” He hesitates. “Moto has not been himself lately.” He looks down at the table, as if embarrassed, then excuses himself and steps into the kitchen.

An actor. She can conjure up the handful of actors whom she's met. Performers, entertainers, solitude makes them lonely, and private love is a pale version of what they really want—the unwavering love of an audience. With their expanded presence, they make you feel part of something larger, somehow exalted, more vast, playing a bigger role than you ever imagined—but not necessarily the role you would have chosen. He's probably very charming. And now he's out of work. Maybe Renzo invited her so he'd have a new member of his impromptu audience. But, out of practice, he didn't feel ready, so he skips out on dinner.