What happens if you're possessed by a fox spirit?

In Spirit of the Fox by Matthew O'Connell, a brief Prologue shows a family is being driving out of their remote, rural Japanese village in 1945. The unnamed point-of-view character is a young girl who has a younger brother. She has no idea where they are going, but any place would be better than where she's been.

Jump to present-day Tokyo. Meiko Wright has just finished her undergraduate degree in psychology at UC Santa Barbara, is taking a year off before deciding what she wants to study in graduate school, and has come to Japan with her father David to spend a year teaching English. David is a professor of anthropology with a special interest in folklore, who will be teaching in a Japanese university for a year. Meiko's  mother, Chieko, is Japanese and a successful Tokyo psychologist. Chieko divorced David nine years earlier and returned to Japan, abandoning Meiko, at least in Meiko's eyes.

The story really gets going when Meiko goes to Kyoto for a weekend on her own. She visits the Fushimi Inari Shrine, a real place famous for its tunnel of red torii gates. Inari is the god of rice, fertility, sake, tea, and prosperity. The god's messenger or avatar is the fox and every one of the more than three thousand Inari shrines in Japan has one or more statues of a fox. The Fushimi Inari Shrine parent shrine of all Japanese Inari shrines.

Walking alone in the woods near the shrine, Meiko sees a fox, falls, and hits her head. When she wakes up, she has no memory of who or where she is (although she can still speak Japanese and English). She has no purse, no cell phone, no wallet, nothing to identify her. A priest from the shrine assists her, gives her his card, a prepaid cell phone, ¥50,000 so that she can eat and find a place to stay, a good luck charm to wear, and a special tea blend she should drink regularly to calm herself. The priest gives her a name, Hana, and sends her off to a nearby soba restaurant for a meal.

In short order, Hana, who radiates pure sexual desirability and erotic opportunity, has seduced the married restaurant owner and persuaded him to buy her sexy lingerie; expensive, brand-name clothing; and put her up in a hotel.

Back in Tokyo, David grows concerned when Meiko does not return to their apartment and does not answer her cell phone. Because he is not fluent in Japanese, he has to join forces with his ex-wife, who is after all a native. They contact the Kyoto police, who are not particularly concerned about a young foreign woman who may be shacking up with an attractive man and is not answering her phone.

The police however are interested in a soba restaurant owner who kills himself by jumping off a building. A handwritten note in his pocket says, " . . .My life is ruined. If I had never met you, Hana, would my life be better? . . . Now that I can't be with you, what's the point of living? . . ." We readers know that Meiko/Hana has moved on to another target. Could it be that Meiko has been taken over by a fox spirit? Would that explain the fox tattoo on the dead man's ankle? What has happened to Meiko? She herself does not know.

David, the anthropologist, wants to keep an open mind about the possibility of spirit possession. Her mother, the psychologist, has no sympathy for spirits, shamans, or fox possession. Chieko's mother, Aiko, has her own ideas. And the Kyoto detectives are on the trail of a seductive young woman who is leaving a trail of death and destruction and Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Chanel boxes behind her.

Spirit of the Fox is an interesting story that incorporates Japanese folklore and culture in a mystery for which I was willing to suspend my instinctive disbelief. I do have some quibbles. O'Connell devotes an entire chapter to a class David gives at the international division of Waseda University in Tokyo. While the material is interesting for itself, it has little relevance to the main thrust of the book and slows things down.

On the other hand, a Shinto priest says, "People have a need to believe in something beyond themselves. I would say that it is fundamental to our being. I believe this small omamori [good-luck charm, amulet] is more than an attractive piece of silk and wood. I believe that it helps protect me and guide me along a purer path. Can I prove that? Is there scientific evidence to confirm it? No, of course not. But does that make it any less powerful to me? Again, the answer is no." Here the priest's words do help to move the story along.

By putting every chapter into the point of view of the central character—David, Chieko, Aiko, Meiko, Hana, Detective Nomura—the action for the most part does move along briskly. I found Spirit of the Fox a diverting mystery that held my interest.

Something we can't do in English

In a Japanese short story my conversation partner and I are currently translating, I came across something I don't think we can do.

A young father is taking his four-year-old son to nursery school and the boy asks why his mother isn't taking him and has gone off to work. Because, the father says, "Papa's company has gone bankrupt." I.e,:

「パパの会社は倒産しました。」　("Papa no kaisha wa tousan shimasita.")

The kid responds by asking, "Bankrupt?" I.e,:

「トウサンって？」　("Tousan tte?")

Why, I asked, did the author write "tousan"—bankrupt—in kanji when the father spoke and in katakana when the child responded?

It's because a four-year-old would not know the kanji for the word. By four years old he might know the two syllabaries, katakana and hiragana, but would not know the kanji. By writing the kid's dialogue in katakana, the author indicates visually that it's a child speaking.

I don't know how you'd accomplish the same effect in English.

Polite Lies: How Japan is different from America

Kyoko Mori has interesting qualifications to compare and contrast Japanese culture and society with American. She is a Japanese woman who grew up in Kobe, moved to America to attend Rockford College in Illinois and the University of Wisconsin. She published her first novel, Shizuko's Daughter, a New York Times Notable Book, in 1993 and published Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures in 1997 when she was teaching creative writing at St. Norbert's College in De Pere, Wisconsin.

She says that when she wrote Polite Lies her life was split neatly half: twenty years in Japan, twenty years in the American midwest. The book consists of a dozen essays titled Language, Family, Secrets, Rituals, A Woman's Place, Bodies, Symbols, School, Tears, Lies, Safety, and Home. And by page 5 she's pointed out bilingual announcements on a plane take twice as long in Japanese as in English because "every Japanese announcement begins with a lengthy apology," It's an observation one can make (a) only if you speak Japanese and (b) are sensitive to the implications. Because while the polite apologies fall like spring rain, the "politeness is a steel net hauling us into the country where nothing means what it says."

I thought I knew something about Japan and its culture, but in every chapter Mori told me something new or articulated something I knew but had never put into words or both. For example: "In Japan, there is no such thing as a purely personal choice. Everything you do (or decide not to do) is a symbolic message directed at the world, a manifesto of a philosophical cause you support. Even your rebellion, then, will be interpreted as a sign of your belonging to another group. . . ."

In her essay on Tears she writes that no one in Japan "expects a cab driver to show—or even experience—any emotions in the presence of his customers. That is part of the paradox about emotions in Japan. We are caught to refrain from expressing our feelings in public because to do so is rude, intrusive, and selfish, and yet it is all right for six hundred people to cry together at a funeral, or for an important company official to break down in public in the middle of delivering a eulogy. . . ."

That leads naturally to an essay about Lies, which are "fascinating because there are so many possibilities for invention and embellishment. In a liar's mouth, facts are no longer boring and predictable, but interesting and surprising . . .  My Japanese friends and I were not brought up to lie on all occasions. What we received was a very mixed message: lying is all right under some circumstances, and yet honesty is also very important . . . "

I have been interested to talk to businessmen and America tourists returning from Japan who report that "Tokyo is just like New York" or that "The Japanese are so polite." Polite Lies conveys a much more complex, much richer, much more interesting reality, one that Mori describes as both an insider and outsider. She is also an individual with a unique history and perspective. So while I do not question her generalities, I also suspect there may be individual variations.

More seriously, I wonder how many of her twenty-year-old observations hold up. What effect, if any, do the recession and general economic malaise, the rise of China next door, the spread of the internet and cell phones, the Fukushima disaster, the aging population, the less-than-replacement birth rate, climate change and more have on the culture? I suspect not much, but it would be nice to know. In the meantime, Polite Lies is a fascinating introduction to Japanese culture and society.

Why can't you just say what you mean?

Recently my Japanese conversation partner and I were talking about Japanese culture as reflected in the language itself. In the story I'm currently translating, I had come across anmoku no ryokai (暗黙の了解) which means "a tacit or a silent understanding." 

That led her to teach me the word inginburei (慇懃無礼) which according to my electronic dictionary means:

—insolent under one's civility

—rude under a veneer/mask of politeness

—rude under the surface

—politely insolent

—rude while preserving the outward forms

—studied insolence.

In other words, someone may appear polite, but beneath they are seething. That's when you'll need some tacit understanding.

An all-fired cat lover and his cat's observations

Hiro Arikawa's The Traveling Cat Chronicles (旅猫リポート) is an delightful novel on a couple levels. First, it has an interesting structure. Second, Philip Gabriel has done an impressive job of rendering Arikawa's Japanese into English. (Gabriel has also translated Kenzaburo Oe's Somersault and four Haruki Murakami novels including Kafka on the Shore, so he's got some chops.) Third, as a small book—about 5.5" x 7.5"—it is a pleasure to hold.

The novel begins "I am a cat. As yet I have no name," which is the opening sentence of Natsume Soseki's 1906 novel I Am a Cat. Soseki's novel is a satire on Meiji upper-middle-class society. The Traveling Cat Chronicles is a very different animal. The cat who narrates much of the novel is a stray who is adopted by a young man, Satoru, after the cat is hit by a car. By the time of the accident, the cat and Satoru had established a relationship of sorts because Satoru allowed the cat to sleep on his van's hood and has been feeding him.

Once he adopts the cat, Satoru names him "Nana" because, from the top, his tail "looks like nana—the number seven." Because the character for nana is 七, I have trouble visualizing this, particularly because Satoru's earlier cat had two marks on its face that resembled the character eight—八—and was therefore named Hachi—8. Maybe the tail is the Arabic 7. In any case Nana it is.

Satoru's landlord does not allow pets, so "Satoru moved with me to a new place in the same town. Going to all that trouble to move just for the sake of one cat—well, maybe I shouldn't say this, being a cat myself, but that was one fired-up cat lover."

After five idyllic years, Satoru hits the road in the silver van to find one of his friends who will take Nana. It's not clear until late in the novel why Satoru wants to give Nana up. But after Nana narrates the first chapter describing how he and Satoru connected, Arikawa shifts to a third person point of view to tell the story of Kosuke Sawada, a school chum of Satoru's, who is trying to make it as a photographer and who is separated from his wife. Satoru and Nana visit, we learn about the boys' childhood adventures, about Satoru's devotion to Hachi, and, in first-person POV, Nana's take on the relationship and its history.  Kosuke cannot adopt Nana, so Satoru and Nana travel on to the farm of Daigo Yoshimine.

Similar structure. Third person POV to convey information Nana cannot know: "About three days after Yoshimine had arrived home, both his parents, surprisingly came home from work early. His mother cooked them dinner, a rare thing, and the three of them sat down together to eat." It's hardly a spoiler to reveal that his parents are getting divorced. This material is interspersed with Nana's first-person observations. And although a cat is a good animal to have on a farm, Satoru again takes off with Nana.

The third stop with a similar structure is with Shusuke Sugi and his wife Chikako who run a bed and breakfast that accepts pets. They too have a history with their high school friend Satoru and we learn more about him and the relationship between the three of them. (Satoru was sweet on Chikako.) They, however, already have an elderly cat and a young rambunctious dog. Here's Nana's first encounter with the dog: "Every single hair on my body was now standing on end. If you're going to pick a fight with Satoru, then I—a cat with a strong sense of pride—am not going to just sit here and take it! If you don't want that nose of yours cut to shreds, then apologize right this instant, you mangy mutt!" Satoru again cannot bear to part with Nana, however, and they end up in Hokkaido with Satoru's aunt and where the book comes to it's moving conclusion.

I mentioned Gabriel's translation, which manages to give Nana a recognizable cat-like attitude. For example, here's Satoru at the beginning greeting Nana who has been sleeping on his van:

"Do you always sleep there?" he asked
I suppose so. Do you have a problem with that?
"You're really cute, do you know that?"
So they tell me.
"Is it okay if I stroke you?"
No thanks. I batted one front paw at him in what I hoped to be a gently threatening way.

The Traveling Cat Chronicles will be catnip for readers who are interested in Japanese fiction, or who like cats, or who want to know more about contemporary Japanese society, or all three.

What you get when three people translate the same poem

Translating simple prose—a news article, an instruction manual, a contract—can be difficult. Translating literary prose ups the ante. And translating poetry is fraught.

(Just to see what would happen, I ran my second sentence above through Google Translate which  came up with, "Tradurre la prosa letteraria aumenta la posta." Back translate that and you get, "Translating literary prose increases the mail." In Japanese the sentence becomes, "文学的な散文を翻訳することは、分かります." Back translate that and you get, "I understand translating literary proses.")

Martha Collins, in her Introduction to Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, writes that seeing "what different translators have done with the same poem immediately eliminates easy assumptions that beginning translators often make: that there is a single way, a most correct way, or a best way to translate a poem."

To disabuse beginning translators (and anyone interested in translation or in poetry or both) Collins and her co-editor Kevin Prufer have produced a fascinating book. It contains twenty-five commentaries on as many poems. The poems all appear in the original language and these include ancient Greek, Latin, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, French, modern Greek, German, Turkish, Russian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Hebrew, Arabic, Swedish, Romanian, and Haitian Creole. The poets include Sappho, Virgil, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Cavafy, Rilke, Akamatova, Pasternak, Vallejo, Garcia Lorca, Celan, Szymborska, Amichai. Tranströmer.

What makes Into English unique is that there are three translations (and sometimes more) of each poem and commentary by a fourth scholar/translator/poet. These give background on the poet and the poem, an indication of the translator's challenge, and a discussion of the different translations.

"A translation may go smoothly for a while," Collins writes, "and then come upon a section or a line that, for any number of reasons (semantic, syntactic, stylistic, cultural), runs into trouble. The trouble spots are the places where multiple translations are most apt to differ. Looking at them carefully can take us more deeply into the nuances of both the original language and English—and, more generally, challenge our assumptions about how language works." That last point alone is worth the price of the book.

I was particularly interested in a 1680 Basho haiku: 枯枝に烏のとまりたるや.秋の暮　(Kare'eda ni karasu no tomaritaru ya aki no kure).

Here's the 1902 translation by Basil Hall Chamberlain:

The end of autumn, and some rooks
Are perched on a withered branch.

 Here's Harold G. Henderson's 1925 translation:

     On a leafless bough
A crow is sitting — autumn,
     Darkening now —

And finally Nobuyuki Yuasa's 1966 translation:

A black crow
Has settled himself
On a leafless tree
Fall on an autumn day.

Three versions of the poem's four nouns and one verb—all valid. Hiroaki Sato's commentary points out the translator's immediate challenge is that most Japanese nouns don't distinguish between countable and uncountable, so one crow or many. Also, aki no kure means either "an autumn evening" or "late autumn" or both. So, as in many haiku, the meaning shimmers.

I am not a poet, and I do not translate poetry. Into English however is wonderfully stimulating with fascinating discussions of the poets, the poems, and the different attempts (always attempts, never final realizations) to render them in English.

Cheryl Pallant gets oriented in South Korea

In 2007 Cheryl Pallant accepted an offer as Visiting Lecturer at Keimyung University in Daegu, South Korea. She had "no images of its landscape and architecture, no familiarity with its language, people, history, or culture" other than that American soldiers fought against communism there in the 1950s. Pallant, in the middle of a divorce after a 15-year marriage, was moving from Richmond, Virginia, population 223,000 to Daegu, a city of 2.5 million people in south-central Korea. Ginseng Tango is a memoir of her year there.

It joins a tradition of naif Americans who go to a country they know nothing about to teach and write a book to explain the culture, customs, and people to the folks back home. (Learning to Bow: An American Teacher in a Japanese School by Bruce S. Feiler explained Japan.) Because Pallant is such a good writer—she currently teaches writing at the University of Richmond—and because she was a mature woman when she went to Daegu—the book's internal evidence puts her in her late 30s—Ginseng Tango is a superior example of the genre.

That she is in the middle of a divorce, that she comes to Korea with a background of Zen meditation, Buddhist practice, and dance, and that she is open (relatively) about her fears and flaws makes the book more than a simple report of what it's like to spend a year teaching in a Korean university. The title comes from ginseng—"a major ingredient in many a medicinal cocktail. Korean ginseng is known for its potency in treating ailments like high blood pressure, allergies, diabetes, sexual dysfunction, and fatigue"—and her involvement with tango and the people with whom she becomes friendly at tango club.

One of these is a doctor who invites her to his clinic and who tells her "My soul knows yours." He treats her with acupuncture and chiropractics, and says, "Curve spine I straighten." No western doctor "ever offered me a chance of removing the curve, only preventing it from getting worse. Is this the eastward pull I felt from the States, my body somehow clued that the idiopathic conditions contributing to my curvature might be alleviated?" She begins to visit the doctor's clinic regularly and they become friends.

Unfortunately, the doctor is married to a paranoid woman to whom Pallant is an insult and a threat. When the wife calls Pallant's university, the chair of the department, agrees the woman is crazy. However she tells Pallant, "In our culture, regardless of the facts, a woman such as yourself is guilty. You're a foreigner. Rumors and scandals cannot be tolerated at our school. If you don't stop visiting his clinic, we may have to let you go." Pallant's friendship with the doctor, his wife/s attacks run as a thread through the book making it more than a collection of set pieces.

The set pieces include Pallant's initial struggle with a Korean washing machine, a rock-climbing experience, a visit to a public bath, a day with a shaman that includes fascinating background on Korean shamanism, tango lessons, drinking with the ex-pat colleagues from the university, student interactions, Children's Day adventures, and more. She is aware from day one that this is another country. "Already I've sliced up a small orange sphere, thinking it a type of tomato. I added it to my salad sprinkled with soy sauce, not my preferred dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, items which, if available, I have yet to locate. The tomato greatly disappointed, given its true identity as a persimmon, a sweet untomatoey fruit that never passed my lips before."

She comes to realize that she is not, and probably never can be entirely welcome. A colleague who has lived in Korea for seven yers tells her he has yet to make a Korean friend. "Every foreigner I speak with says the same thing. We're treated with civility in the classroom, office, or during mandatory after work drinking parties, but sincere lasting friendship is rare. Koreans welcome us foreigners, but only to a point."

At one point, the doctor introduces her to a group of his (male) friends. A woman schooled in dance, poetry and the arts; able to talk on a wide range of topics; considerate of local etiquette she could almost be a modern gisaeng, Korea's equivalent of geisha. Pallant writes, "A poor fit among my western colleagues and a novelty to the doctor's friends, I don't know where I belong nor what, given the choice, I want. Identities that once held sway in Richmond don't carry the same traction her. Here I exist on the margins, a foreigner in a culture that prizes homogeneity and ancestral purity." At the end of the book, she has returned to the States and is settling into a new home—alone.

Ginseng Tango is an engaging introduction to the culture and society of a country that is in the news regularly but one few of us know much about and Cheryl Pallant is an appealing guide.