Touring The Land of the Dead (冥土めぐり)

Maki Kashimada • Haydn Trowdell (translation) • Europa Editions • 144 pages

• Themes: Erosion of ego, family dynamics, disability, modern Tokyo,

• Read this if: You struggle through odd family dynamics

• Don’t read this if: You don’t want to be uncomfortable

• Links to purchase: Europa Editions, Amazon

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There are some unavoidable limitations when it comes to international publishing. The first is that an author’s writing remains closed off until a translator gets around to ‘faithfully’ transcribing the work into a reader’s language.  The second is that after reading a translated work, you’re left with the hauntingly unanswerable question of ‘what got lost in translation?’ Touring The Land of the Dead  is the first work by Maki Kashimada to be translated and published for the consumption of English-speaking readers. It comes a full nine years after its original award winning publication in Japan.

First thing someone should know about Kashimada’s publication is that it is actually two distinct novellas.  The first story is the eponymous Touring The Land of the Dead, the second is titled, Ninety-Nine Kisses. If there’s a theme that unites the two stories, I would say it is the eradication of the ego at the hand of the family.  In terms of tone, the two novella couldn’t be more apart. 

In Touring The Land of the Dead, the narrator, Natsuko has been worn away from service to other people. She is traumatised by a childhood in which she had to cater to the avarice of her widowed mother and her alcoholic brother, both of whom have delusions of grandeur.  Natsuko marries in a bid for freedom, only for her husband to be diagnosed with a degenerative seizure disorder, which leads her to becoming his primary caretaker.  Constantly caring for others, her sense of self has slipped away.  At the end of her rope, she organises a trip for her and her husband to visit a dilapidated seaside resort, which her mother used to summer at as a girl.  The visit is an opportunity for her to extricate the little that remains of herself, and truly consign the past to the past. Much like Natsuko pushing her husband’s wheelchair, the novella’s tone is muted, carefully steering the reader towards its conclusion.

“She decided to go to the hotel at the end of February, when tourists would be fewest in number. Until then, she imposed on herself a lifestyle of abstinence and cleanliness. It wasn’t as if she wanted for anything, but in her spirit of thrift, she polished the tableware until it sparkled, like a bird that maintains a tidy nest before taking off in flight. She was at peace, yet she felt as if her heart were overflowing with an unquenchable need to cry, consumed with a single thought- that she had nothing left to regret.”

Where Touring The Land of the Dead is muted, Ninety-nine Kisses is passionate. The novella follows a matriarchal family of four sisters and their mother told from the perspective of the youngest sister, Nanako.  In Nanako’s telling, her older sisters have each perfectly captured an aspect of femininity, leaving her sole self-declared purpose to love and appreciate each of them for their perfection.  Whereas Natsuko’s sense of self had been eradicated by the greed of her family, Nanako’s has offered her own up as a selfless tribute to her sisters.  If this sounds sweet, it’s not. The novella is eerie and Nanako’s love for her sisters doesn’t just toe the line of incestual, it routinely strides across the line.  The novella is highly uncomfortable, as it schizophrenically switches between endearing moments of sisterhood, and the incestuous thoughts of the narrator.  

I would imagine that most Japanese writers are tired of having their writing compared to that of  Haruki Murakami.  However, it remains a fact that he is probably the only Japanese literary author that many english-speakers have read/heard of (Remains of the Day author, Kazuo Ishiguro, is British). Therefore, Murakami remains a useful point of comparison.  The novellas which make up Touring the Land of the Dead are nothing like a Murakami novel in terms of style. There are no moments of magical realism in these pages, the war doesn’t loom large in either story, and the main characters aren’t adrift or insipid men.  If there’s any similarity, it’s the backdrop of pessimism about society, and the main character’s struggle to gain a sense of individual purpose which is present in both author’s work.