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JAT Bulletin 182, May 2000
A masterpiece of quiet lyricism set against a
backdrop of change and renewal
Evening Clouds
A Novel by JUNZO SHONO
Translated by WAYNE P. LAMMERS
208 pp, 5.5x 8.5", paper
ISBN 1-880656-48-5, $12.95
A family moves into a new home on a windswept hilltop in
suburban Tokyo. Around them is the sky, forests, farms. But
the developers are coming, and the children are growing up.
There are meals, quandaries, conversations. . . . Junzo
Shono's portrait of this family's daily life has the resonant
power of fine photography, where the most minute details
suggest a changing, unforgiving universe. Shono is the
absolute master of this "snapshot" genre,
and this is his most celebrated work. A quiet yet sumptuous
book for readers weary of action and attitude.
JUNZO SHONO （庄野潤三） has won numerous literary awards,
including the Yomiuri Prize for Evening
Clouds（（原題：夕べの雲 ）.
WAYNE P. LAMMERS lives in Portland, Oregon; his translation
of Shono's Still Life （原題：静物) won the PEN
West Literary Award for Translation.
(The book is available immediately from Stone Bridge Press. As of May 10, SBP says the book has been released to the distributor, and should be available in stores and on-line within the next couple of weeks.)
Translator's Remarks
Shono's short stories and novels are always hard to describe in a few words because there's a lot more going on in them than immediately meets the eye. In fact, his style is exactly the kind that makes many readers complain that "nothing happens." But as I point out in the introduction to Evening Clouds, in this case, if readers get impatient when the narrator seems overly concerned with planting trees and shrubs in the yard of his new hilltop home in the first chapter and start scanning ahead looking for "the story" to start, they'll wind up missing the real story altogether.
On the face of it, Shono's story is about events surrounding his family's move in 1961 from Nerima-ku, where the once quiet country road that ran in front of their house had been transformed into a noisy and crowded major thoroughfare, to a wooded ridge-top in the Tama hills in Kawasaki, and about the subsequent encroachment of the developers at their remote new home as well. In recalling the disruptions that the move brought, the long process of setting down new roots and making the new house a home, as well as the changes that have occurred since then, Shono creates what amounts to a meditation on how we find a place in this world, how we both shape that place and are shaped by it as we try to make it our own, and how in any event, the world around us keeps on changing in ways none of us can anticipate.
And all along the way the story is filled with quiet, heartwarming, amusing, and sometimes exciting or alarming, details that paint a vivid picture of daily life in Japan--one small slice of it, anyway--in the early sixties and before. Since I grew up in Japan during that period (I'm the same age as Shono's older son), the story brought back all kinds of memories as I worked on it. The TV shows Oura (Shono's alter ego in the story) watches with his kids were the ones I watched as a boy; the kids' adventures in the woods around their new home are very much like my own in northeastern Hokkaido; the kind of community and relationships Shono portrays are the kind I remember from my childhood--back before the economic miracle (or when it was just getting started), and long before high-tech and seemingly unlimited affluence changed the face of Japan.
It's been nearly twenty years now since I last lived in Japan for an extended period, and my brief visits have shown that in many ways the Japan I remember no longer exists. But I still keep in touch with a number of friends who, in thei r work and in the way they live and take part in their communities, continue to remind me that some things never change. Or at least they take a whole lot longer to change than material and popular culture do. That's one of the strongest reasons why I wanted to translate this book even after all this time had passed since its original publication. I think it does succeed in portraying something enduring about Japan.
In other ways, though, the story is also timeless and placeless, and this, I think, owes to Shono's genius in choice of detail. There are of course telling items here and there, such as mounds of fruit costing only ¥30-¥50, that clearly date the story, and there are Japanese word plays, among other things, that place the story firmly in Japan. And yet most of the details are of a more universal kind--the sort of thing that could occur or be found in any modern society, whether in the 1960s or today--that can resonate with readers the world over in any era. It is an archetypal story that has repeated itself countless times before and after in the course of human events, and will no doubt continue to do so until the end of time. Yet, in Shono's telling, the story is fresh, and it remains as fresh today as when it was first written.
Although he also has a variety of other writings, the hallmark of Shono's work is a continuing autobiographical series of stories detailing events in the life of his own family. Each story stands on its own, but also fits into a monumental family chronicle that continues to this very day. Most of the stories in the Still Life and Other Stories volume I translated and brought to publication in 1992 belong to this autobiographical series, covering from when the children are very small to a short time after the eldest daughter gets married and a new generation is born. For those who are familiar with that volume, Evening Clouds fits chronologically into the middle of the stories included in the collection, with the narrative present set at when the daughter is still in high school.
The translation was a long time in the making. I think it was in early 1993 that I decided I wanted to do the book, shortly after the Still Life collection was recognized by PEN West, and I remember telling Shono something to the effect that I thought it would be done by the end of 1995 at the latest. Hah! Since it wasn't a paying proposition, work proceeded only in fits and starts between other translation work, and eventually got shunted completely aside. If it weren't for a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) translation grant that finally let me (made me) set time aside for it in 1998-99, the manuscript would probably still be gathering virtual dust.
Shono writes in a very simple style in Japanese, but from a translator's perspective the simplicity turns out to be highly deceptive. He may not use long, florid sentences that tie you in knots, but he does like to play with words or simply talk about them in untranslatable ways--which of course you still have to translate somehow. The book is also filled with references to flora and fauna, and early on I received some good help on these from members of the honyaku list. One complicating factor with these was that in a work of literature you can't just settle for a Latin name and be done with it; you have to find--or make up--an English name that would actually come out of the mouth of a layman, or even a child, and that also works with everything else said about it in the narrative. Dealing with such things was often time consuming, but also a lot of fun--especially when you finally hit upon something that worked.
There's also an element in Shono's writing akin to Shiga Naoya's, who has been called shosetsu no kamisama （志賀直哉：小説の神様）. The problem is, as one of Shiga's translators once lamented, his style is so simple that translations into English fall flat and leave readers completely mystified how anyone could call him the "god of fiction." Fortunately, I do not have to justify a divine title for Shono, but rendering his simple prose into similarly simple English without letting it fall completely flat has certainly been one of the challenges of translating his works. Given the recognition Still Life received, I suppose I must have succeeded reasonably well in that case, and I can only hope I have succeeded again.
There is one particular lesson I learned from this project that I'd like to share with my fellow translators. If you ever come across Disney content in any of the Japanese materials you translate, you'll want to think twice about going to the source to make it authentic. At one point in his story, Shono quotes the lyrics to the theme song of a Walt Disney Presents cartoon. I had fun tracking down the show on the Disney Channel, transcribing the lyrics (all of eight lines), and, with Shono's permission, even making a couple of minor corrections to his description of the show in the text, but in the end Disney made Stone Bridge Press and me pay for it. The passage is probably better for being authentic, which is why we agreed to pay, but in many ways I would have been better off to focus my efforts on rendering the most effective back-translation I could from Shono's text.
Though somewhat slowed by the effects of a stroke in the
1980s, Shono remains active as a writer today at the age of
79, adding a new volume to his family chronicle each year. He
and his wife Chizuko still live in the house that became the
model for the Oura's new home in Evening
Clouds.