THE ROCK SPRING COLLECTION OF JAPANESE LITERATURE
eVENING cLOUDS
Junzō Shōno
Translated from the Japanese
by Wayne P. Lammers
Stone Bridge Press • Berkeley, California
Published by
Stone Bridge Press, P. O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707
tel 510-524-8732 • [email protected] • www.stonebridge.com
This translation was supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Originally published in Japanese in 1964–65 as Yūbe no Kumo.
Japanese edition © 1964, 1965 Junzō Shōno.
English text and translation © 2000 Wayne P. Lammers.
“The Coyote’s Lament.”
Music by George Bruns.
Lyrics by Charles Nichols.
© 1960 Walt Disney Music Company.
All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Cover artwork from a painting by Grace Yam Tsukiyama.
Cover and book design by Peter Goodman.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.
ISBN 1-880656-48-5
INTRODUCTION
WHEN EVENING CLOUDS BY Japanese author Junzō Shōno (1921–) first appeared as Yūbe no Kumo in 1964–65, it created quite a stir in Japanese literary circles, and one critic later noted that the ensuing literary discussions had redrawn the map of postwar literature. As occurs with almost every such literary work, the novel has receded more into the background over the intervening decades as critics have turned to the new sensations of each new era. But Evening Clouds remains a quiet masterpiece, destined, I believe, to outlive numerous other works that have gained more attention in recent years.
Those who have read my earlier translation of selected short works by Shōno, Still Life and Other Stories (Stone Bridge Press, 1992), will find a great deal that is familiar here. There is, for example, the elegant simplicity of Shōno’s trademark style, as well as the makeup of the family Shōno portrays—father, mother, daughter, and two sons—and the constant interplay between the events of the present and the father’s memories, observations, and musings about events from the past. But the novel-length Evening Clouds is on a scale that makes possible the development of more complex and intricately connected themes, and while Shōno still focuses on small fragments, or “snapshots,” of everyday life, each of the fragments in Evening Clouds is more sustained and is closely integrated with the others to form a unified whole.
Despite this greater unity, the story Shōno tells in Evening Clouds is not laid out in a conventional plot involving conflict, development, and climactic resolution; it is not a story in which the author leads the reader by the hand, playing on his or her emotions to create suspense and a headlong rush to the finish. The story emerges instead from the interplay between the events of the present and the often meandering ruminations of the main character, Ōura, as he observes those events or takes part in them, and it very much requires the participation of the reader in piecing the story together out of suggestion, metaphor, and a succession of episodes that carry the force of parables.
Such techniques are of course included in the bag of tricks of most any writer, but with Shōno they are everything, and this means that the simplicity of his prose is quite deceptive. For best results, as they say, I do not recommend trying to read this book when you are feeling harried and rushed—unless the purpose is for the book to help you slow down and restore an inner calm—nor do I recommend reading it through in a single sitting. The first readers of the story, in fact, were forced to wait a full day between each brief episode as it appeared in one of Japan’s national dailies (with only a couple of exceptions, the episode breaks have been preserved in this text). Though it would be extreme to urge the same regimen on readers of this book, there is something to be said for proceeding at such a pace. Shōno’s story is one that repays a leisurely reading, with many pauses and breaks to reflect not only on the past and present events described in the narrative but on one’s own experiences, and also to ponder the deeper significances Shōno is constantly hinting at beneath the surface of his narrative.
Let me offer some examples of what I mean here. Figuring most prominently in Ōura’s reflections is the family’s move to a new house perched atop a ridge on the far southwestern outskirts of Tokyo a little more than three years before. It is a move not unlike that of American pioneers moving west in search of more elbowroom—though of course with none of the Wild West trappings.
When Ōura focuses early in the story on planting trees and shrubs in the yard of the family’s new home, Shōno is not merely having his alter ego recount a series of gardening decisions that needed to be made; to read it as such and skip ahead looking for where the “real story” starts would in fact be to miss the story altogether.
Rather, Shōno is using the metaphor of transplanted trees and shrubs to probe the nature of the family’s own transplantation: the disruption involved in picking up roots, the loss of countless ties that had helped sustain the family in its former community, the unanticipated surprises of the new locale, the feelings of vulnerability that reign so powerfully during the period of uprootedness, the instinctive drive to create a safe haven for oneself and one’s own, the difficulties of putting down new roots in alien ground, the secondary place of ornamental concerns, how the family both shapes and is reshaped by its new surroundings, and so forth. At the same time, he addresses a variety of more universal themes, such as humankind’s constant battle against as well as affinity to nature, and the role of time as both ravager and healer.
These themes are then reprised and expanded or gently echoed and reiterated in countless different images and events as the narrative proceeds, and new themes are added as well. An account of the family’s TV habits and, more particularly, of watching a Disney feature entitled “The Coyote’s Lament” may at first seem merely to detail more of the family’s day-to-day activities, but the coyotes’ story turns out to be a mirror image of what is happening to the Ōuras and their surroundings. Besides offering new dimension to the earlier themes, it brings to the fore another overarching focus of Shōno’s narrative: the powerful, unstoppable forces of change that constantly reshape the landscape around us whether we are prepared for change or not.
An account of how a great saké vat came to reside in the Ōura household becomes Shōno’s opportunity to probe chains of cause and effect, along with the role that accident or fate may play in events that we normally see as being under human control—themes that are subsequently reprised, among others, in the folktale about Sawayomudon catching a giant eel and the events that brought it to Ōura’s mind.
Still later, memories of the flower Ōura dug up behind the family home in Osaka as his mother lay dying amplify the theme of transplantation and extend the metaphor to the nature of family, linking it to other motifs in the story that evoke the ties that bind us to our loved ones and to the past—including the means by which we try to maintain those ties as well as the inevitable loss of them.
I have of course barely scratched the surface of the countless associations Shōno interweaves between the events that make up the present time frame of the story and Ōura’s reflections inspired by them. Although matters relating to the family’s move represent the most prominent thread in the narrative, when all is taken together, the story that emerges is not merely of one family, but of all humankind. It is a timeless, archetypal story of how we find a place in this world; of how we not only shape that place but are shaped by it as we try to make it our own; of how, in any event,