Before what we know as manga, there was kamishibai.
Literally translated as “paper play” (紙芝居) kamishibai was a
popular form of entertainment in Japan which is virtually unknown in the West.
Luckily, Eric Nash has compiled one of the most comprehensible English-language
books about this unique form of Japanese storytelling in Manga Kamishibai:
The Art of Japanese Paper Theater.
Editor’s note: Here in Singapore, public conversation has in recent weeks revolved around the fate of the island’s forests – sanctuaries of diversity within a crowded city-state. This month’s guest post by Leonard Yip, excerpted from his recently-completed MPhil dissertation, explores the trajectories of place- and nature-writing in Singapore poetry, and draws our attention to how the ‘twin languages of grief and hope’ cast a familiar terrain in new light.
***
In his poem ‘Clementi’ (2019), Singaporean poet Alvin Pang describes the titular neighbourhood as
a riverrimmed reefknot of […] woods, mosques, stadium, pool, defunct purposebuilt buffet edifice, bioswales. Park connectors haunted by the Great White God of the waterway (photoevidence on request) (saidtobe komodo dragon wor, sureornot), a maw bigger than the monitors that monitor the stream and get picked on by otter gangs. Greyheads and whitebellied lurkers, raptorial and sometimes rapturous, hauling telelens on extended tripods. Wings bluelasering the wavers while the abacusclacker of massrail passings encount indifferent intervals.
Pang’s work does not pretend towards neat, organised overview of place. A riotous composition of poetic sensitivity to rhythm and prosaic attention to detail, ‘Clementi’ formally embodies the area it describes: a chaotic compress of countless lives, seething together . The terrain of poem and place defy categorisation – religious, recreational and natural structures of ‘woods, mosques, stadium’ build together undifferentiated, vowels and consonants accelerating together with restless rhythm.
Set loose from containment, things collide and intermingle freely. The vernacular of Clementi’s residents mixes with hushed myth: a lizard water-god, ‘saidtobe komodo dragon wor’, the suffix a Singlish invocation of emphasis, and the incredulous response ‘sureornot’. Genres as well as languages smash into each other, the great lizard’s high mystery fraying into gangland turf war as smooth-coated otters vie with monitors for territory. Language turns loose; ‘Greyheads and whitebellied lurkers’ describes both middle-aged, enraptured birdwatchers and the watched raptors themselves, melding human observer and animal subject. Words come together in onomatopoetic portmanteaus, birthing a new soundscape for this strange place, where urban and natural generate new forms: the ‘abacusclacker’ of a passing train, consonants clattering against the skimming, sheeting ‘bluelasering’ of wings slicing the water’s edge. This place is an interface of lives morphing into one another, a land animated by accommodations and adaptations.
Pang’s lands are my lands. I know this ‘riverrimmed reefknot’ for myself, these taut words suggesting the landscape’s own denseness. I grew up in it, tracing my way through park connectors and bioswales to canal edges, where linen-scented laundry outflow washes into loach shoals glittering in the water grasses. A landscape such as this can be frustrating to read. Theories and poetics of either urban architecture or sublime, untouched wildness fall flat, insufficient for making sense of a space as mixed between the two as this. They are lands at each other’s fringes, neither fully wild nor urban – edgelands.
This term was first coined by the British writer and activist Marion Shoard in 2000, to describe the land ‘betwixt urban and rural’, which was ‘a kind of landscape quite different from either’. It describes many of Singapore’s terrains which do not fit cleanly into urban or natural categories, where human infrastructure marries itself to the wildness of nature, springing new ecologies into life. These terrains, however, also exceed the term’s original, Anglocentric definitions. Where Shoard understood the edgelands as a transitional zone between city and countryside, Singapore’s small landmass and extensive development mean that the countryside is city. The edgelands detonate out of the compression between our dense neighbourhoods and teeming biodiversity – both products and victims of our land-altering and devastating. Great metal machines up-end the forest, laying down concrete drains where macaques sneak into backyards and morning glories bloom over fences. These go in time, too, as bulldozers churn the earth again to prepare new superstructures of metal and glass. The edgelands are terrains of the Anthropocene, disappearing as fast as they form.
The violence which creates and destroys the edgelands extends not just across the earth, but into it as well. Redeveloping land erases and builds over past traces of life, razing ecologies, histories and memories. Because of this, the cultural activity which articulates our relationship to the edgelands often does so through a language of grief and memory. Chitra Ramesh’s poem ‘Merlion’ (2019) evokes the history of Singapore’s modernisation, where swamps were drained and zinc-roofed villages razed to make way for public housing:
if you dig the marshy wet soil
you might find the roofs of my kampong house
roosters might mumble under those roofs
fish may be still gasping through their gills
among the flowers in my garden
[…]
Under the expressways
our thatched houses lie buried.
Ramesh’s imagination figures national and personal history as fantastic revenants haunting the city’s underworld: disquiet roosters in the soil, and fish clinging on to amphibious half-life. Childhood memories persist uncomfortably in the earth like stubborn residue, the ‘gasping’ of fish suggesting a suffocating struggle for survival. Wistful, yet resolute, Ramesh’s landscape is an edgeland of chronology as well as ecology, containing and conjuring memories back to ward off their forgetting. This language of grief and ghosts is critical for surviving in the Anthropocene, because it refuses the geographic amnesia of what ecologists call ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ – when our landscapes become so altered that we forget what was there before. Ramesh’s edgeland poetry is held hostage by its summoned spectres, and this holds us in turn accountable – to remember the stratified layers of meaning and home-making beneath our feet.
The edgelands, however, can also be read with a language of hope as much as grief. The same sensitivity which allows us to mourn what is lost enables us to imagine what might still be possible, between the human and more-than-human presences that compose these places. Observing smooth-coated otters returning to Singapore’s city-centre reservoirs and waterways, Cyril Wong’s ‘Otter City’ (2019) both wrestles with and affirms the tentative relationships forming within the edgelands’ compress:
how long have we been watching
with love and envy -
leaving us lovers and doubtful
urbanites to lumber back to the m.r.t.,
noting sporadically trees
we cannot name – tembusu
or angsana, we wished we knew –
and that sudden, darting shrew
skirting us between office buildings.
those otters still
whirling through our minds –
our date complete; not just
with each other
but with a whole republic
of life thrumming beneath our feet.
Wong’s verse initially charts estrangement and frustration. Ocular connection between otter and observer produces only a reminder of how alien each one seems to the other. The watchers appear to be drawn apart from the wild rather than reconciled to it, so detached they cannot even name the trees.
Yet something wonderful happens in the poem: the otters stay ‘whirling through [their] minds’, extracting the transfixed watchers from the self-obsession of their date, and extending the occasion’s opportunity for intimacy to ‘a whole republic of life’. The phrase unites our manmade polity with the creatures slinking back through this city, becoming as much a part of it as the watchers. Wong’s poem finds its way ultimately to a kind of entrancement – human and animal test the waters, learning to shape the colliding spheres of their existence. The path blazed by Wong’s work illuminates how the twin languages of grief and hope might help us to read these complicated, threatened terrains: tracing a route from what we are not, into the possibility of what we could be; one entire ‘republic of life’, living, nourishing, and benefiting each other within the edgelands’ interface.
***
Leonard Yip is a writer of landscape, people, nature and faith, and the places where these intersect. He recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature from the University of Cambridge, where he wrote his dissertation on multimedia representations of the edgelands of Singapore. His writing has been featured in Moxy Magazine, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, and Nature Watch, the quarterly publication of the Nature Society (Singapore). He lives in Singapore, where he is currently furthering his work on the edgelands and other terrains of the Anthropocene. More of his work can be found at leonardywy.wordpress.com.
Note: Alvin Pang's and Chitra Ramesh's poems can be found in 'Contour: A Lyric Cartography of Singapore', ed. Leonard Ng, Azhar Ibrahim, Chow Teck Seng, Kanagalatha Krishnasamy, Tan Chee Lay (Singapore: Poetry Festival Singapore, 2019). Cyril Wong's poem is published in 'The Nature of Poetry', ed. Edwin Thumboo and Eric Tinsay Valles (Singapore: National Parks Board, 2019).
Happy Chinese New Year! I’m indie WWII historical fiction author Alexa Kang, and it is my honor to begin the Year of the Ox as the Asian Books Blog's new Indie Spotlight Editor. You might have read my previous guest posts here and here. Going forward, I hope to bring you your next great reads.
Indie publishing has come a long way since Amazon opened the door in 2010 for authors to bring their stories directly to readers. The market of indie-publishing has matured since then. While writers can now release their books through online retailers, that alone is not enough for the books to reach and gain an audience. Successful indie writers today not only must offer quality books that can match and compete with traditionally published books, they must also be savvy in branding, marketing, and e-commerce.
My foray into indie writing was serendipitous. It began in 2016. I never aspired to be a fiction author. I was writing fan fiction for fun within the global fandom of the Japanese manga series, Candy Candy. My fanfic was very well-received, and was fan-translated into multiple languages. After my fanfic, I started writing a spin-off story from Candy Candy, with characters entirely of my own creation who I imagined to be children of the cast of Candy Candy. That spin-off story would ultimately become my debut WWII series Rose of Anzio.
I wrote Rose of Anzio over the course of a year. Each week, I would post a new chapter on a Candy Candy fan forum. I still remember fondly the days when Candy Candy fans who followed my story would eagerly devour each new chapter I uploaded. I realized then that Rose of Anzio had the potential to be read by a much wider audience. I started looking into publication options. Immediately, I learned two things. First, by posting the chapters on a public forum online, Rose of Anzio was considered already published, and no traditional publisher would accept a manuscript that had lost its “first publishing right”. Secondly, I can publish the story myself on Amazon.
Choosing to publish the story myself was thus a no-brainer. I had another career and wasn't aspiring to be a writer; endorsement from traditional publishers and literary prizes were far from my thoughts. My only wish was to get my story to readers, because it was fun!
I set about to learn all the ins and outs of publishing books on Amazon. By then, the indie writing market was already changing into a sophisticated industry. It was overwhelming to learn about cover design, formatting, promotion, sales and marketing strategies, and gaining readers. Luckily, the indie-writing community is very supportive. Experienced authors are forthcoming in sharing information with those who are just starting out. One consistent piece of advice they gave was that our books must be professionally produced. If not, the books will languish and never attract readers.
Following their advice, I found an editor, proofreaders, and a cover artist. I also retained a fellow British author to review my British-born female main character's dialogues to make sure she spoke accurate Queen’s English (I’m an American writer myself). My story had numerous battle scenes. I went online in search of expert advice. A military historian generously offered to be my consultant and helped me create and reviewed my battle scenes. Before my books went to print, I retained a second editor, a U.S. infantry veteran, to review my military and battle scenes to make sure the characters' actions, behaviors, dialogues, and the way the battles were written, were authentic and believable.
Next, I devised a marketing plan. I implemented strategies I learned from the indie-pub community to build momentum for my book release, and to build and retain a fan base. I also had a bit of luck. My Candy Candy fanfic readers, who had been reading Rose of Anzio chapters online when I was writing the story, were eagerly waiting to have the print version in their hands. When the first book in the series came out, they not only bought copies, thus giving my book an initial boost, but also left glowing reviews of why they liked the book.
In retrospect, releasing my books on my own was the best thing I could have done. It turns out, many of my readers had lived through the war era. I had no idea this was the case when I first published. I assumed most of my readers would be in my own age group. The first time I received an email from a reader, it was from Marci, a lady who wanted to know when the second book in the Rose of Anzio series would be released. Marci said she and her best friend worked in Chicago in 1940. Rose of Anzio-Book One was set in 1940 Chicago. She told me she bought the eBook for herself, and a print copy for her best friend.
My jaws dropped when I read Marci's email. I had to read it several times to confirm I was reading it right. Did she say she worked in Chicago in 1940? My book was released in 2016. I was shocked to learn that my novel resonated with readers who knew life in 1940s Chicago first-hand. I learned then that all my hard work and research had paid off.
Over time, I discovered that my books were bringing back memories to a generation of readers nostalgic for a world they once knew. In a Facebook group for WWII fiction readers and writers, a reader, Bonnie, once posted and recommended Rose of Anzio. I never interacted with Bonnie except to thank her for a post recommending my books to the group. When Bonnie finished reading my novel Eternal Flame, a Rose of Anzio spin-off, she left a one-sentence, positive review on Amazon. Three days later, a fellow group member told us Bonnie had passed away. I did not know until then that Bonnie had been terminally ill. The news filled me with emotions as I realized she had spent her last hours reading my book. She even left me a gift of a review. I could not tell her how grateful I was. I could only hope that my story gave her a little bit of comfort before she left.
This would not be the last time I had to bid farewell to a reader. Another reader who reached out to me was Betty Martin. Ms. Martin lived through the war era, and her husband was part of the Flying Tigers, the U.S. air force unit that fought in West China. Ms. Martin and kept in touch for two years, until her friend alerted me to her passing and told me Betty had been waiting for my next release. I was very saddened to hear the news, and I dedicated my next book to her.
When I think of my readers from the Greatest Generation, I’m glad that I had inadvertently fallen into self-publishing. If I had taken the traditional publishing route, I might have missed the chance to bring my stories with these readers. Even if an agent and a publisher had picked up my books, it would take on average two years for each book to be published. If I am able to give a few hours of comfort and escape to readers like Marci, Bonnie, and Betty, that would be reason enough for me to continue this course.
Being an indie author also gives me the freedom to write books without a proven sales record in the market. Currently, the WWII fiction genre is sorely lacking in novels with Asian main characters, and novels set in the Pacific. Traditional publishers are often averse to taking on books without data assuring sales. Unconstrained by such concerns, I wrote my series, Shanghai Story, to chronicle China's descent into WWII. The story features a Chinese male character. Novels with an Asian male lead is still a rarity today. I took the risk that traditional publishers are less willing to take, and am happy to discover that there is indeed a market demand.
For my current series, I am continuing to walk the path less traveled. In the WWII fiction genre, there are woefully few novels about Nisei (second-generation Japanese-Americans). Of the ones currently sold, the focus is on internment camps. I want to explore the Nisei experience beyond the confine of the camps. My new release, Last Night with Tokyo Rose, follows the journey of Tom Sakai, a Nisei growing up in an America increasingly hostile to those of Japanese ancestry. When he is stranded in Manila after Pearl Harbor, he would have to navigate the treacherous terrain of a world in which Japan and America are at war, and decide where his allegiance lies.
In the coming year, I plan to introduce to you books by some of the best indie authors in today’s publishing world. We will learn the interesting stories of how they came onto the path of indie-publishing, and their works which you would not want to miss.
I invite you all to visit my website at https://alexakang.com. You can also sign up for my newsletter at https://alexakang.com/newsletter
STOP PRESS: FOR PAPER REPUBLIC'S EXCLUSIVE PODCAST WITH JULIA LOVELL TALKING ABOUT HER TRANSLATION, CLICK HERE
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Monkey King: Nicky Harman on a new translation of an old favourite.
Of all the posts I’ve written for Asian Books Blog, this one has
to have been the most fun to write. Working out why a translation that’s really
funny is funny… what’s not to like? To be truthful, I would have found it hard
to write a more conventional review of Journey
to the West. I have never read the original and although I acquired the
three-volume translation by WJF Jenner many years ago, my second volume is
suspiciously clean and I clearly never opened the third at all. But in any case,
translator Julia Lovell, in her introduction, has done a much better job than I
could ever do, in explaining where this epic novel came from, and how, over the
centuries, it has been many things to many people.
Journey to the West was written (allegedly) by Wu Cheng’en in the sixteenth century and its hero, the sometimes eponymous Monkey, has enjoyed enduring popularity ever since. In addition to the stories in the Journey to the West, Monkey and his friends have featured in spin-off stories, cartoons, cartoon films, ballets, shadow plays, video games and much more, as you can see in the illustration above.
Tripitaka,
a pious Chinese monk, sets off to India in search of
precious Buddhist sutras, in the company of bodyguards Monkey, Sandy and Pigsy.
A brief extract from Lovell’s introduction gives a flavour of what is in
store:
In
the course of their travels, they encounter murderous Buddhists, perfidious
Taoists, expanses of rotten persimmons, and
monsters of all shapes and sizes (femmes fatales, rhinoceroses, iguanas,
scorpions). They are serially captured, tied up, lacquered, sautéed, steamed,
and impregnated, and come very close to being diced, boiled, liquidized,
pickled, cured, and seduced by various
fiends. Eventually, after eighty-one such calamities, the pilgrims reach
Thunderclap Monastery, the stronghold of the Buddha in India, and are rewarded
with armfuls of sutras and posts in the Buddha’s government of immortals.
Phew!
It doesn't seem much of a reward for all their travails.
Julia
Lovell’s new translation is about a quarter of the length of the original, including
all the chapters that bookend it, and selected chapters in between. ‘The novel zings with physical and verbal humor,’ she writes,
and the translation certainly does. Reading it made me wonder which of
the comedic effects can be matched to the original text, and which arise from
the translator’s creative use of English. Here is
what Lovell says about the translation process:
Literary translators have two responsibilities: to the original text and to readers of the target language. Whichever languages translators work between, satisfying both constituencies can be difficult, but when working between two literary cultures as remote chronologically and geographically as sixteenth-century China and the twenty-first-century Anglophone world, the challenges are redoubtable. Sometimes, a translator has to sacrifice technical, linguistic fidelity to be true to the overall tone of a text.
There is an abundance of humour in the original. Journey to the West is a fantasy novel,
but the monsters and demons live in a recognisably bureaucratic society: Buddha
has a government, sinecures are offered to Monkey, the demon king has ministers
and flunkeys. In this exchange from the beginning of the novel, Monkey’s future
is being decided (or so his divine superiors fondly imagine):
‘Majesty,’ the Spirit of Longevity from Venus ventured, ‘given that this monkey is a child of heaven and earth, of the sun and the moon, that he walks on two feet and has attained immortality, I propose that we treat him as we would a human. I humbly suggest you offer him an amnesty, summon him to Heaven and give him a government job. Once he’s inside the system he’ll have to behave. If he accepts, we can bamboozle him with sinecures; if he refuses, we can apprehend him. In any case, such a strategy will save us a military campaign and bring an unruly immortal to heel.’
(It has to be said that Lovell has reduced this paragraph with an unapologetic panache that Monkey would have applauded. 105 words, as against Jenner’s 160 words for the same paragraph. But, hey, ‘bamboozle him with sinecures’ says it all! Here is the Chinese, for anyone who wants to have a go at it.
太白长庚星俯伏启奏道：’上圣三界中，凡有九窍 者，皆可修仙。奈此猴乃天地育成之体，日月孕就之身，他也顶天履地，服露餐霞； 今既修成仙道，有降龙伏虎之能，与人何以异哉?臣启陛下，可念生化之慈恩，降 一道招安圣旨，把他宣来上界，授他一个大小官职，与他籍名在箓，拘束此间；若 受天命，后再升赏；若违天命，就此擒拿。一则不动众劳师，二则收仙有道也。’ )
And more divine bureaucracy: ‘Monkey told them what had happened in his dream and how he had persuaded the kings of the underworld to cross all their names off the ledger of death, at which news his subjects kowtowed with ecstatic gratitude. And from that point on, most mountain monkeys never got old, for the Underworld no longer had their names and addresses. …
Precisely what is in the Chinese (自此，山猴多有不老者，以阴司无名故也), just with ‘and addresses’ added.
Journey to the
West
uses a judicious mixture of register (and bathos), both in the original and in
the translation. Here is Monkey being (unusually for him) respectful and formal
– and the Patriarch cutting to the chase:
‘Monkey was overcome with regret. ‘I have been away from home for twenty years. Though I yearn to see my former subjects again, I hate to leave you before I have repaid your kindness to me.’ ‘Forget it,’ said the Patriarch. ‘Just don’t drag me into any of your messes.’
Which happens to be exactly what the original says: ‘ 祖师道：’…你只是不惹祸不牵带我就罢了！’
On the other hand, quite a lot of the comedy in Lovell’s translation exploits the comic potential of English, rather than that of the Chinese. Monkey muses and fulminates. Tripitaka needles and wheedles, when he’s not blubbing in terror. The monkeys shriek and chatter. There are delicious dashes of alliteration. In chapter 15, Monkey calls the horse-eating dragon a ‘Lawless loach!’ Alliteration does not work in the same way in Chinese, so this is the translator’s voice, but entirely in the spirit of the original.
I was particularly taken with the anachronisms[1]. They are superlatively funny. I was hard-put to choose from so many examples but here is a sample:
‘Lucky Monkey!’ The crowd of disciples giggled. ‘If you master
this, you can get a job as an express courier. You’ll always be able to make a
living.’ (This is actually only a small departure from the original, which has
the job as an army or government messenger).
‘Once Monkey had explained his latest marvel, the crowd of monkeys
spent the rest of the day playing with their new toys.’
‘Heaven runs a cashless economy.’ And so on…
Sometimes, the Dragon and Monkey sound like Jeeves and Wooster --
not entirely contemporary but instantly recognisable:
‘Now that I’ve adopted this magic staff, I feel rather under-dressed. If you could rustle up some armor to go with it, I’d be much obliged.’
‘I’m most dreadfully sorry, but I don’t have anything suitable.’
‘I don’t want to be a bother to someone else. I’ll sit it out here till you come up with the goods.’
‘I suggest you try another ocean. You might have more luck there.’
Elsewhere, the dialogue is bang up-to-date:
‘Are you
forgetting who rescued you from that stone casket beneath the Mountain of Two
Frontiers? You owe me, Monkey! Get me something to eat before this pestilential
mountain finishes me off.’
And here are Monkey and Pigsy as the sparring duo:
Witnessing this at a distance, Tripitaka was speechless with horror.
‘Oh, well-played, Monkey!’ chortled Pigsy. ‘Three murders and it’s not even
lunchtime.’
Julia Lovell’s translation is a delight and a tour de force. I hope that in taking a translator’s tweezers to it, I have managed to convey some of my admiration for its creativity and joie de vivre.
If you want to read around the subject, here are some more links
to entertain you:
Minjie
Chen in Monkey Craze! examines iterations of Monkey in the
modern period.
A Certain Je Ne
Sais Quoi, by Sean Bye looks at the art of changing connotations and
registers in translation
And on the journey by the real Xuanzang/Tripitaka, Chasing The Monk's Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang, by Mishi Saran, reviewed on Asian Books Blog here
The Silent Dead is a Japanese crime novel by Tetsuya Honda and the first installment of the Reiko Himekawa series. It offers a glimpse into Japanese law enforcement, which is a huge blind spot to many Westerners. It also shines a light on corruption, sexism, and perversion that festers underneath the surface of Japanese culture, which is a blind spot to many Japanese themselves.
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| Photo Credit: Praveen Ahuja |
Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, book critic, and the host of the Desi Books podcast. Her debut story collection, Each of Us Killers, was out Sep 2020 with 7.13 Books. Her literary translation, Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu, was out Oct 2020 with HarperCollins India. She lives in the Dallas, Texas area and teaches fiction at Writing Workshops Dallas.
Synopsis:
Stories woven at the intersection of labor and our emotional lives. Set in the American Midwest, England, and India, the stories in Each of Us Killers are about people trying to realize their dreams and aspirations through their professions. Whether they are chasing money, power, recognition, love, or simply trying to make a decent living, their hunger is as intense as any grand love affair. Straddling the fault lines of class, caste, gender, nationality, globalization, and more, they go against sociocultural norms despite challenges and indignities until singular moments of quiet devastation turn the worlds of these characters—auto-wallah, housemaid, street vendor, journalist, architect, baker, engineer, saree shop employee, professor, yoga instructor, bartender, and more—upside down.
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| Cover design: Harshad Marathe |
Every literary community depends on a constellation of magazines, blogs, journals and reviews that help bring writers closer to their readers. Beyond providing unpublished authors with feedback and recognition, they spark conversations about and around books, fostering thoughtful engagement with writers and their work. In recent years, we’ve welcomed a plethora of outlets that publish and engage with new voices from across the wider ‘Asian’ community. What better way to start 2021 than with a quick survey of these up-and-coming platforms?
With some exceptions, I’ll be focusing on publications that have
launched within the last five years, and publish new poetry – though almost
all of them also publish fantastic work in other genres. Of course, we shouldn’t
forget stalwarts like the Hong Kong-based Cha, which just last year published
a powerful retrospective on ‘Tiananmen Thirty Years On’; or Vancouver-based
Ricepaper, which began
in 1994 as a newsletter at the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop. The following
titles simply represent the latest sampling of new publishing initiatives that
deserve a wider audience.
