A story in the style of Murakami Haruki and his English translators

One late-autumn Sunday morning when I set out into the back garden wielding the hedge trimmers, I found the well was gone. It wasn’t that I’d particularly liked the well when it had been there—it hadn’t provided us with delicious ice-cold water in the summer months, or even simply glistened mysteriously down at its waterline and amused us with the occasional decorous plopping sound à la Bashō. It hadn’t because it was clogged with sludgy black algae all year round. The stone blocks encircling its mouth were not especially well placed, and a few were coming loose, like an old man’s dental work.

So it was not a romantic well by any stretch of the imagination. But still, it was a little disconcerting to look out past the unkempt hydrangea bushes and notice a blank field of moss where the well had been until yesterday.

Great, I thought. This didn’t bode well for the day.

To my mind, it’s harder to lose a well than, say, a pot, a cat or a person. As we learned in first-year quantum physics, all things are twinned with their opposite—an un-thing, if you will—that is their absence. If the big iron pot you got from your uncle as a wedding present isn’t in the cupboard when you go to make spaghetti, it can be annoying, but it isn’t going to upend your world. It’ll turn up soon enough, you think: my wife must have put it somewhere else. I shall make do with the saucepan. And even if you never see it again, it’s no great loss. If you squint hard enough, after a while you’ll see the un-pot fill the space where the pot had been, like a dully shiny shadow.

Or if one morning the cat (which turned up last winter and wouldn’t leave) isn’t yowling for his breakfast of sardines, you just shrug and chalk it up to happenchance. Even if the cat still hasn’t returned a week later, sure, you’ll be sad, maybe even start reminiscing about the time Nobuta Wata’ame—that was what we named the cat—brought fleas into the house and you scratched yourselves raw for a week. But eventually you’ll just accept the un-Nobuta that has slipped in on fuzzy un-paws to replace him.

Even a missing person isn’t as big a deal as a missing well. I mean, the set phrase ‘missing person’ says it all. It embodies a kind of expectation that people go missing from time to time. Sure, if it’s someone you care about, like a life partner or your kid, then you’ll probably go crazy for a while and spend your evenings driving around town looking for them on street corners, posting plaintive but concise appeals in the local paper, that sort of thing. You’ll also certainly have filed the missing-persons report with the police after a couple of days of hosting the un-person in your home, when you’ve had enough of watching them twiddling their un-thumbs and looking through you. But even if you never see the original person again, their absence is quite within the realms of possibility in this world of ours. In short, it’s simply a given that things and people go missing from time to time and are replaced by their un-counterparts.

But the problem with a well is that its absence inescapably means the presence of something else—and not just its un-well. After all, a well is essentially a vertical tunnel, a space in the rock through which fluids like water and air can pass freely. (Since I learned it in science class in seventh grade, I’ve always been amazed that air is classified as a fluid. To me, it just seems too floaty for that: almost as if air is the un-thumb-twiddling stand-in for water.)

Anyhow, to put it another way, a well is defined by the absence of what surrounds it. Take that absence away, and ipso facto the well itself disappears. (Now I’m sounding more like a lawyer than a scientist. I guess that’s the kind of phrase you pick up from a decade of copy editing for a small translation agency—just about everything has crossed my desk over the years, apart from documents relating to the removal of a well.)

I know what you’re thinking: hadn’t someone simply filled the well in while I’d been out—maybe a DIY neighbour with a grudge, a deranged construction worker on his day off, or someone drunk in charge of a cement mixer? More likely, had my wife got fed up with the gungy, stinky well and commissioned someone to seal it over once and for all? She’d never thought much of the backyard well, having wanted to ditch it along with the rotten wooden cladding and skew-tiled roof of the old house that had stood where our new place was.

But no—I sensed immediately that there wasn’t going to be such a mundane explanation as a well-filling. For a start, the moss of the garden now unbrokenly spanned the once-holey ground. It looked quite at home, as if it had sat there for as long as the average temple garden in Kyoto. Even if someone had capped some surreptitious well-removal (a.k.a. fill-in) work with perfectly aligned moss-encrusted topsoil, it would inevitably have looked different from the moss around it. At the very least, there would have been some sort of edge, be it square or circular, like the ringworm brand my hand had picked up from the cat in spring. But this moss was as smooth and unperturbed as a crystalline pool on a particularly calm day in the middle of some ancient forest known for its lack of wind. If I hadn’t known better, I would have assumed there had never been a well there in the first place.

I abandoned the hydrangeas and ran my hands over the mossy surface. It was spongy to the touch and still slightly damp from the late-afternoon showers the previous day. Its green was slightly mottled here and there, but overall the colour of a well-tended baseball field in the off season. This moss hadn’t been anywhere else recently, and wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.

I lay down on the mossy carpet and pressed my ear to the spot where the well had been. At first the only sound was the blood pumping through my ears and the slightly accusatory shuck-shucking of the dry branches around me that I was supposed to be pruning back. But after a few minutes of lying there, the gentle sunlight bathing my left cheek like a golden retriever’s tongue, I seemed to hear a piano playing under the ground. My neighbour was a Glenn Gould fanatic, it was true, but I knew that he was away at a conference in Newcastle (the UK, not Australia), so it couldn’t have been his stereo resounding. None of my other neighbours had the sonic firepower to penetrate the depths of the earth.

I was probably just hearing things, I told myself, but it didn’t alter the fact that our backyard well was definitively gone.

The querulous look in my wife’s eyes when I nonchalantly quizzed her about it on her return (she was a middle-ranking officer in the Tokyo municipality who had little time to devote to the un-well) was sufficient information for me to gauge that she had no knowledge of what had happened. She seemed mildly bemused as she expertly dissected her butter-fried smelt with chopsticks over dinner, but not concerned enough to go out and look. “Anyway, thank you for filling me in,” she murmured.

The following Tuesday, when, hedge clippers in hand again, I finally went out to deal with the desiccated hydrangeas, they had vanished, and the well was back. It was like it had never not been there—the gap-toothed stones gummed up in black algae.

And then the denizens of the well began to emerge from it.

The first girl I’d liked in high school but abruptly ditched—still wearing the same skimpy bra that exposed the sheep-shaped birthmark on her left breast and the unicorn-shaped birthmark on her right breast that had stolen the thunder from her nipples and sent me running from her bedroom—hoisted herself over the edge and sat there dazed for a moment before exiting the premises via the front door, her head held high. Nobuta the cat leapt up over the edge and immediately disappeared again into the azalea bushes. The antique pewter pencil sharpener that had been a present from my grandmother and that I’d dropped through a gap in the tatami in our family home in a fit of pique when I was twelve rolled itself up over the lip of the well and plopped among the surrounding moss, giving a slight wheeze. A poor aunt of mine who I’d made fun of when she hadn’t made it to last year’s big family wedding—here she was scrabbling out of the well and looking brassed off about it, too. The desiccated hydrangeas I’d neglected in favour of scouting out the un-well susurrated like a pair of maracas as they cleared the top of the well and flounced off.

Even my sense of self-worth was there: I’d lost it almost three years to the day after I’d started the copy-editing job when I’d been asked to compose romantic waka for Little Ladies’ Weekly on the side. It was invisible, of course, but I caught it wafting up over the wonky stone edge in a burst of the pine-scented confidence I’d briefly experienced in my mid-twenties.

Finally, a baby grand piano rose majestically from the well like a buoyant wooden dolphin and rolled away on its castors, leaving three parallel indentations in the moss. I recognized it immediately as the piano I’d practised on at home for a few brief months in junior high before renouncing the musical arts forever. The piano had been shipped away into obscurity soon after. Now Bach’s Prelude No. 1 played across its keys—that had been what I’d heard when I’d put my ear to the moss and plumbed the subterranean depths!

Just then it struck me—I was the un-me to them. All those people I’d rejected and put behind me for no good reason, all those things I’d lost: they had been building up in the un-well in our garden these past couple of days, and now they were parading past me as if I didn’t exist. Because from their perspective, I didn’t. It was the rejectees’ revenge, I suppose.

⁂

I’m not a translator, but I’ve associated with translators, and edited their prose. So over the years I’ve observed something basic about the act of translating—you either do it or you don’t. Let me explain. Say there’s a word or an idea in the original language that simply doesn’t exist in the other language. Let’s choose ‘sushi’. Sure, sushi exists in English now, but when Edward Seidensticker translated Tanizaki’s Makioka Sisters in the late 1950s, Americans didn’t know what sushi was. So he put an asterisk next to the word sushi and explained the meaning in a footnote. A few years later, people started translating sushi as sushi, italicising it to show that it was a foreign borrowing. And now no-one even bothers italicising sushi, because everyone knows what it means.

But sushi is still sushi. It wasn’t translated into another language. It’s left as an artifact of Japanese in other languages, like the fossil of a deep-sea fish found high up in a mountain millions of years after the ocean drained away. (I have no idea if deep-sea fish make good sushi, but I can guarantee this one would be hard on the teeth.)

Anyway, when you translate, you either keep the original term, which is un-translation, or you substitute another term. And if you substitute, you change. Translation is all about change. You may kid yourself that you’re being faithful to the original, but the only way to do that is to write down exactly the same words as the original in the same order. And I can guarantee you, the new publisher isn’t going to be moved by such fidelity: “I could’ve got a monkey to copy that,” he’d say, with some justification.

What I realised is that for my entire adult life, I’d been keeping all the original terms on the page. Nothing had changed. It was no wonder my rejectees had banded together in the un-well and then en masse rejected me.

The next day, I gave notice at the translation agency. The boss was mildly concerned, but wished me the best. I had no idea what I was going to do with myself next, but the one thing I did know is that it would be the real me turning up to do it.

By the way, my neighbour changed his musical tastes after Newcastle, too. It was out with Glenn Gould, and in with Herbie Hancock. Well, well.

Richard is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Letters at Kansai University, Osaka. He has a PhD in Literary Translation Studies from Victoria University of Wellington, and lectures on translation studies and English literature. His translation of Hayami Shun’s short story “Shinkun no kakejiku,” translated as “Ieyasu’s Scroll,” will be published by Kurodahan Press in 2019 in a contemporary anthology of samurai tales entitled Strokes of Brush and Blade. His book Translating Modern Japanese Literature was published in 2019 is about translation stylistics and consists of his translations and analyses of out-of-copyright Japanese literary works by major authors. Richard feels lucky to live in Kyoto with his wife Mika and daughter Milly.