What if the price of a better world was the loss of your dreams? That’s the question that Japanese author Sachiko Kashimoto asks in this week’s Translation Tuesday, translated by Yui Kajita. In this spare, subtly plotted short story, an unnamed narrator goes for a short walk to pick dandelions, only to retreat to their apartment after experiencing sudden drowsiness. There, in conversation with their neighbor, the true nature of the narrator’s condition is revealed: their unremembered dreams are the physical substance from which their idyllic world is made. As they begin, once more, to dream, they find themself in an unexpected place, their elusive vision drawing a faint but powerful connection between their utopia and the altogether more painful world of the audience. Read on!
Today I’ll pick a hundred dandelions, I decided and walked out to the riverbank.
The sun was shining bright, the surface of the water glimmering in the warm breeze. It might’ve been a good day for picnicking by the river, too, I thought fleetingly.
All over the bank, green was shooting up from the ground, piercing through the round rocks, and there they were, blazing yellow dandelions, so vivid they almost stung my eyes, thriving everywhere. I would’ve felt sorry to pick five or six from the same clump, so I set a rule that I’d leave at least half of each cluster untouched, then started picking the flowers while counting each one in my head.