A SINISTER SOUND
An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura; translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter
Columbia University PressMarch 2021Selected by Anthony Bird and Taylor Bradley
The I-novel is a unique and somewhat hard to define style of confessional or autobiographical literature with origins in Meiji, Japan. An I-Novel is Minae Mizumura’s kind-of-true story about growing up in America but resisting becoming Americanised, before moving back to her mother country to start a literary career in the Japanese language. The author describes the original Japanese work as a “bilingual novel” as it incorporates large chunks of untranslated English and is written from left to right instead of top to bottom like a normal Japanese novel. She also believed it was translatable into any language but English, since this would erase the bilingual nature of the novel. The translator, Juliet Winters Carpenter, attempts to work around this by presenting the translated Japanese text and the original English text in different fonts. – Anthony Bird and Taylor Bradley
Friday, December 13, 198X
Twenty years since our…
“Our exile”? No. That sounds too ordinary. How about “the Exile”? No... “the Exodus”? Oh yes, “the Exodus”! Yes, let the word be “Exodus”.
Twenty years since the Exodus.
And what if I start with “Alas!”?
Alas! Twenty years since the Exodus.
And another exclamation mark at the end.
Alas! Twenty years since the Exodus!
How about three exclamation marks to really mark that pang I felt.
Alas! Twenty years since the Exodus!!!
No. That looks too vulgar. Take out the last two. Delete and delete and, wait, do I hear a siren? Yes, I hear a siren – Yes, definitely, I hear a siren in the distance…
The faint sound came closer, threading through the darkness. A sound to rouse the loneliness of the dark winter night – somehow resembling and yet so very remote from the siren I used to know as a child. Not the long wail of an animal howling, but an electronic ee-aw alternating from high to low, no way to tell whether it was the police or an ambulance. A sinister sound, bone-chilling. Somebody’s been killed… shot, maybe. A student? A prostitute again? No. It’s the snow.
Snow.
The snowstorm was fierce. The first snowfall of this winter † had begun in the afternoon and gradually picked up in intensity until now, late at night, the snow was coming down hard, blanketing everything.
Must be a car accident.
I got up from the computer and ran to the bay window. I hadn’t been outdoors all day, and not only today, yesterday and the day before, too. I hadn’t set foot outside, hadn’t so much as opened a window. The sudden movement made the stagnation of the room feel heavy, thick with heat and dust. The siren kept coming closer and closer but then, instead of turning onto my street, continued straight down the main avenue toward the centre of the college town.
Goodbye. Farewell, ma belle sirène.
I remained at the window.
Below, circling the streetlamp, infinitesimal snowflakes danced, shimmering in the cold. The double-paned window rattled in the wind.
How deep was the snow now?
| Tarō o nemurase | Snow piles deep on Tarō’s roof |
| Tarō no yane ni yuki furitsumu | putting Tarō to sleep. |
| Jirō o nemurase | Snow piles deep on Jirō’s roof |
| Jirō no yane ni yuki furitsumu | putting Jirō to sleep. |
And this was the only poem he could recite by heart.
One night Tono had stood here at this window, looking down like this at the falling snow, and recited those words, rather shyly. And how I wished and wished I had that snowy scene in front of me
Snow… snow falling heavily… heavily and silently, piling ever deeper. Not these dry snowflakes flying in the wind like desert sand, but 캔덮汽 botan yuki, “peony snow”, flakes full of moisture, falling like heavy round flowers. I still remembered the chill of them landing on the palm of my hand – so I think, at least. Or is my memory only an illusion of a memory? And as I remembered or tried to remember that chill, amid the hush of large flower-flakes falling heavily I could make out a line of snow-covered thatched roofs stretching back and back and back, blending into distant white mountains that merged in turn into a sky lit white by the snow. Such a rustic winter scene might now be forever lost, existing only in folklore or on travel posters of the national railroad company, and certainly I myself had never seen anything like it; yet as I imagined the scene spread out before me, snowy mountains in the distance, my chest tightened with nostalgia. ◉
† In Japanese, the word hatsuyuki directly translates as the first snowfall of winter.