Japanese fantasy vs. Japanese-inspired fantasy
What gets lost (and found) in the translation
Should we begin by agreeing that rules are made to be broken?
I like to maintain civilized guidelines governing my reading selections. Here are a few of my personal reading rules:
1. Read no more than two books at a time. Preferably one print and one audiobook.
2. Since I’m reading two books at the same time, read one fiction and one nonfiction; failing that, I balance a speculative fiction read with a mainstream or literary novel.
3. Never double up on themes or read two books on the same theme in a row. For instance, I postponed reading Remarkably Bright Creatures because I’d just finished The Mountain and the Sea. Both novels involve octopodes. If read back-to-back, the “octopus stories” may muddle in my mind when recalling them.
It’s this third reading rule I broke last week when I picked up Water Moon by Samantha Yotta Sambao. I had barely finished the last lines of Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Japanese coffeeshop fantasy, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, when I picked up Water Moon, a fantasy set in a Japanese pawnshop. Magic and mystery in small, family-owned Japanese shops? Total delight! But by reading them one after the other, don’t I risk blurring them into a blue-green watercolor wash, indistinguishable to my reading recall?
What I talk about when I talk about Japanese fantasy (*)
I first encountered Japanese fantasy while living in Turin, Italy, where our local newsstand sold manga series translated into Italian. From that unconventional Italian introduction to Japanophilia, I explored anime and role playing video games. Eventually, I found my way to Murakami in translation. For me, Murakami’s darkly beautiful, literary magical realism was love at first sight. Murakami stories churn in my subconsciousness, dreadful in an absolutely delightful way—not to mention, Murakami has a thing for cats.
Between candy-colored kawaii fantasy anime and the brilliantly broody Murakami, hovers a Japanese magical realism series I’ve been enjoying over the past year: Before the Coffee Gets Cold. Kawaguchi puts on a masterclass in how to construct a compelling story from nothing but a table and some chairs, a couple characters, and a well-structured set of magical rules (see my post). Reading Before the Coffee Gets Cold stirs the same feelings I had watching my favorite anime years ago. There’s a sense of stillness, the whole world holding its breath so we can share a magical moment with a protagonist who suddenly notices the wondrous beauty of their everyday world.
The moment the audiobook credits for Before the Coffee Gets Cold ended, Audible shoved another Japanese fantasy read at me. Despite the fact it was about cats, I slid it away and scoffed. No way was I going to read two Japanese magical realism fantasies back-to-back. I needed to let Kawaguchi’s little Japanese coffee shop settle in my mind. So, I dug into my to-be-read list and clicked on the first book that came up. It was Water Moon.
The same, yet different?
Yes, Before the Coffee Gets Cold took place in a little Japanese shop and Water Moon was also set in a little Japanese shop; both celebrated elements of Japanese culture; both played with magical realism; however, there was one huge difference between these reads: the language each was written in. Coffee was written in Japanese and translated to English. Water Moon was originally written in English.
How much difference could the original language possibly make? In this case, it turns out, quite a lot.
The stories we read are made out of words. The words spool one-by-one, each word linking to the next, forming first a delicate chain, then a bridge, then a platform for the thoughts of the author to coalesce in their readers’ minds. While the setting and the basis of the magic system in Water Moon are distinctly Japanese, its language, story structure, and storytelling style are distinctly anglophone.
Here’s how.
Journey and setting
In Coffee, the entire series takes place in a single room. For variety of setting, some scenes take place at the coffeehouse bar, where customers sip drinks and employees prepare drinks, and there is the coffeehouse table where the ghost sits. A bathroom and kitchen are mentioned, but we never see them. Likewise, other venues eventually appear, but only in flashback. The main action never leaves the single room of the coffeehouse.
In Water Moon, action begins in the curious old pawn shop hidden behind a popular ramen noodle place. However, we don’t stay there long. Our heroes jump through a puddle into a delightful B world, a fantastical reality alternate to our own rife with its own society, characters, and culture. Far from a single room, this B world involves varied towns and cities. Both the places our heroes journey to and their methods of getting there are different for every episode of the adventure, and they’re unique and imaginative. Settings change like shuffling hanafuda playing cards.
Stakes
In Coffee, the stakes are dialed down from the second rule dictated to customers before they’re allowed to travel back in time: you can’t change the past. I’m sure you, like most customers, ask: what is the point of going back in time if you can’t change anything? The answer to that question is the point of the series. It is a small, quiet question which, when contemplated like a Zen meditation, opens up our hearts.
In Water Moon, stakes are super high. Hana Ishikawa is in a life-or-death battle. Multiple family members she loves are in grave peril, and so is she. When help arrives in her pawnshop in the form of Keishin, Hana warns him away—Keishin has got a lot more to lose than he even knows exists. For instance, it wouldn’t be good if the Shiikuim got their hands on either Hana or Keishin. The Shiikuim are black hats extraordinaire. Think a cross between Dementors and geisha.
Plot structure
In Coffee, the novel is actually a collection of related short stories concerning customers who come to time travel in the coffeehouse. Through these stories, we follow multiple characters through a tiny passage of their lives. In order to give this small encounter meaning, each short story includes a passage where the character relives a life event providing background to make sense of the one quiet moment they’re about to spend in the past.
Water Moon takes the exact opposite approach. We follow Hana’s journey from start to finish. As she’s joined by others who help her, readers invest in those characters’ psyches and stories, too. Backstory is never ritually revealed before key interaction takes place. Instead, we learn about the histories of characters a little at a time, often at the messiest possible moment, when it’s already too late to undo any harm they may have inadvertently caused each other out of misunderstanding.
The same, but totally different
I’m so delighted I broke my reading rule and dove straight into Water Moon directly after finishing Before the Coffee Gets Cold, despite their similarity. Not only is Sambao’s story a total delight, but the juxtaposition of these two reads reads helps me see just how differently two authors, writing in two different languages, might approach a similar premise, theme, and cultural references in completely divergent ways. I have no worry Coffee’s bittersweet beauty and elevation of the mundane will muddle in my mind with the inventive world building of Water Moon. One story is a Japanese koan; the other a Japanese-inspired adventure.
(*) Sidenote: Murakami is also famous for his nonfiction: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, among others.
I'm a big fan of Murakami too! And have also attempted to read him in another language.(Vietnamese): he translates very well as his lexicon is very simple.