I started working with the educational arm team at Asymptote this past March, when COVID-19 was just declared a global pandemic. As I read through the spring issue, I also kept an eye on the news, watching the US government lurch from outright denial of the disease to a hodgepodge and feckless response—then I came across Alison Watts’s translation of an article based on Durian Sukegawa’s book, Cycling the Road to the Deep North. The piece is a series of vignettes about Sukegawa’s bike tour to Fukushima, in which he tells stories of the lingering destruction from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, the tsunami and earthquake, and the people carrying on their lives in its wake. Stories of the contaminated soil, of trees with toxic leaves. Stories of burned-out schools and shuddered businesses. And—the story still unfolding—of the Japanese government’s response: its ineptitude and indifference to the wishes of its citizens. The similarities to the current COVID-19 crisis were, at first, depressing, but as I reread Alison’s translation of Sukegawa’s words, I was heartened by them. Because though both crises remain dangerously unresolved, it was evidence that there remain people who are asking the necessary questions, telling the stories we need to hear.
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Kent Kosack (KK): When I was preparing a lesson plan for the Asymptote Spring 2020 Educator’s Guide, I chose the piece you translated—an excerpt from Durian Sukegawa’s Cycling the Narrow Road to the Deep North; it felt connected to what is happening now, to the COVID-19 crisis.
Alison Watts (AW): Yes, and next year is the tenth anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster. It’s a timely opportunity.
KK: In more ways than one.
AW: When I first read it in 2018, I knew I wanted to translate it, but I knew it’d be difficult to sell.
KK: How was it received in Japan?
AW: It did win the Japan Essayist Club Prize, but it’s not a huge bestseller or anything. It was published by a small publisher; it’s Fukushima literature. There’s this new genre that has evolved since the disaster in 2011, all kinds of poetry, music, and literature that resulted from Fukushima, and the tsunami and earthquake as well.
KK: I read your Words Without Borders essay about your own personal reaction to the crisis. It seems to have almost coincided with your transition to becoming a full-time literary translator.
AW: I became a full-time literary translator in 2016. In 2015, I was ill for a year and I couldn’t work. At the end of that, I decided that life’s too short. I’m going to do what I want to do, nothing else. Sweet Bean Paste—the novel of Durian’s that I translated—when I read it, I thought: I love this book, I have to translate it, I’m the only person who can translate it [laughs]. I did the synopsis and samples and gave it to the agent and said, please use this to sell the book. Eventually, I got the job to translate it. As it turned out, that was in the beginning of 2016, the year I had decided to devote myself to being a literary translator. It all worked out. Like the gods were sending signals.
KK: Fortuitous. And how difficult was it for you to transition to translating this work versus Sweet Bean Paste?
AW: Essentially, it’s the same style. Durian has a tight, minimalist style. It’s quite difficult to translate because it can come across as too simplistic in English.
KK: Is that from his background in journalism, that more pared-back style?
AW: There’s that, but he’s also a poet. When I asked him before I translated Sweat Bean Paste: “How would you describe your style?” He said, “I just line up the facts and add flashes of poetry.”
KK: Sweet Bean Paste incorporated research as well?
AW: Yeah, it’s based on fact. When I met Durian, he took me around the sanatorium and showed me the place where the museum was. There are people still living there, former Hansen’s patients. I got a real sense of how this is not just a story, it’s about real people with real lives. And he had it in mind for many years to write about that issue, because when the law was changed in 1996 and the patients were legally allowed to go outside their sanatoriums, it was in the media a lot, and he became aware of it. Then some former Hansen’s patients happened to go to one of his live performances and this meeting led him to do research, getting to know them, and ultimately write the novel.
KK: The performative element is fascinating too. Was that how you first met Durian? Seeing him perform?
AW: As a performance, Cycling the Narrow Road to the Deep North is very powerful. When you read the book, he lays out the facts. It’s written like a report. It’s a documentary, very cool and analytical. But the performance has all the power of song and music combined with the images as well. It affects you on a different level.
KK: The prose felt sparse but there are still moments where he’s questioning his own reasons for making the trip, whether he should be writing about it to further stigmatize the whole region. That reflection on the page keeps it from being pure, dry reportage. It was very affecting for that reason, and also because of the eerie overlap with the current situation. The candor at the end when he’s speaking with the TEPCO employee echoes a lot of what’s happening now, as far as government responses to COVID-19.
AW: It does. In the book, one of the key questions he had when he started on the journey was: can we trust the figures the government gives us? Can we trust the government? It’s a crucial question for a lot of people. In the article, he reflects that doubt, that dilemma. He highlights those little vignettes that are representative of those issues.
KK: Is that the structure of the book overall?
AW: Yes, it’s a diary day-by-day. He rides and stays with different people along the way that he knows or has been introduced to. He stays in peoples’ homes and hears about their lives.
KK: And the impetus for the trip was him translating Bashō and not feeling like he could translate it without getting a sense of the region and the steps Bashō had made. Then the trip becomes this larger thing. You’re sort of doing the same thing when you’re translating his work. There are a lot of layers of translation.
AW: Exactly. It’s even more interesting than that because Bashō took that journey in 1689 but he was also following in the footsteps of poets before him and going to places where they had gone; Durian is following in the footsteps of Bashō who followed the steps of earlier poets. But Durian’s work is translating it into modern Japanese. Bashō is quite difficult to understand for ordinary Japanese speakers, for Japanese students. That is why he thought he’d do it. But it’s also difficult for Durian because he did not like his classical Japanese classes at school. So he went back to study Bashō and he studied it through an English translation; Donald Keene’s translation of Bashō was Durian’s reference.
KK: There’s so much translation happening. Across time, place, languages. One of the questions I had was about the interesting choices you made as a translator—interesting turns of phrase. In the lesson plan I put together for your piece, a creative writing prompt that asks students to reflect on the current COVID-19 crisis in travelogue form to give their writing some thrust, give them a destination, I kept coming back to one image. Durian is looking at the contaminated dirt all bagged in plastic. And there is an ironic, bureaucratic message about for the scenery’s sake, we’ve decided to cover this dirt. It ends with this image of the bags continuing to mushroom. It made me think of invasive mold but also of the atom bomb.
AW: I’m glad you mentioned that one. There’s a lot of sarcasm loaded into those sentences. In direct translation it didn’t come across. I had to do a little manipulation to get to the essence of the sarcastic commentary.
KK: There’s some of that poetic flash there.
AW: That thing about the mushrooms, actually, it wasn’t conscious.
KK: Those are the best ones. The happy accidents. Were there other moments that were challenging for you or you had doubts about? Or did you feel you completely nailed it on one go?
AW: [laughs] No, no. It takes a lot of fine-tuning. The main challenge with Durian’s work is to maintain that simplicity but not oversimplify. All those vignettes.
KK: The vignettes help it move along. Little connected scenes just like on a trip as he’s riding.
AW: They’re about people’s lives. What makes everything interesting is the people. To highlight people’s lives.
KK: Right. And these are people who haven’t been heard in mainstream outlets.
AW: No. And two months after the accident, the government raised the level of acceptable background exposures radiation from one millisievert a year to twenty millisieverts a year. That’s a huge jump. On the basis of that, they do the decontamination scrape and declare that different regions are acceptable [to live in again] and people can move back there. Once they’ve done that, anyone who was living somewhere else was no longer entitled to their subsidies. They lose all kinds of benefits. It’s really an awful thing. Families don’t want to live in that kind of environment. They either have to live there, in an uncertain state, or move somewhere else. And that’s a huge financial and emotional burden and causes all sorts of stresses on families.
KK: By the end of the Sukegawa piece, it sounds like the vast majority of people in Japan don’t want reactors to be turned back on, and TEPCO employees are deaf to that. Is there trust in the institutions? Do people trust the state in Japan and the clean-up efforts?
AW: No. We do not trust them.
KK: Even now, is there still that lingering distrust?
AW: Absolutely. And I think Durian’s strength as a writer is that he’s always been on the side of the underdog—those people who don’t have anyone else to speak for them. That was the driving force of this book and behind Sweet Bean Paste as well. The people who have been shunted away, who nobody else will go to bat for, they’re the kind of people he’s interested in and wants to give a voice to. In that sense, I think he’s really an important writer.
KK: It’s a weird moment to read about this serious crisis of almost a decade ago and lack of faith people have in their governments and institutions to handle it and seeing similar issues in the current crisis.
AW: The tenth anniversary is coming up next year, and anniversaries are important to draw attention to things like this because it’s not going to go away for decades, hundreds of years. The land is still poisoned. People are still suffering. It hasn’t been resolved. It’s important to take the time to remember and learn from that. It’s important to keep telling the stories.
KK: Do you see that as your role as a translator?
AW: I do. This book is my way of doing something, doing what I can. There are so many things that make me angry. With the government. With TEPCO. With the system. With all sorts of things. There are so many things I think are wrong, but this is something I can do, and probably no one else can do, that will make, maybe, one tiny little iota of difference.
Alison Watts is an Australian resident of Japan who has written about the Fukushima disaster in Words Without Borders and translated Durian Sukegawa’s novel Sweet Bean Paste (Oneworld). She has also translated Spark by Naoki Matayoshi (Pushkin Press), The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda (Bitter Lemon Press) and the travel memoir TAO: On the Road and On the Run in Outlaw China (Portobello) by Aya Goda. She belongs to the translators collective Humans In Literary Translation (HILT), and blogs about sashiko on her website.
Kent Kosack is a writer living in Pittsburgh, PA. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh where he teaches composition and creative writing. He also serves as Assistant Director of the Educational Arm at Asymptote, designing lesson plans to promote world literature in the classroom. His work has been published in Tin House (Flash Fidelity), 3:AM Magazine, Hobart and elsewhere. See more at: www.kentkosack.com
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